Global Warming Prediction Project
Global Warming Prediction Project
How forestry can help address global climate change
Jun 27, 2015
In their recent paper “How Forestry in the Southern Hemisphere Can Help Address Desertification and Global Climate Change”, García-Chevesich, Pizarro, and Valdes remind us to focus on the natural, ecologically and econimically most efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of consuming CO2: Reforestation. Using CO2 as nutrient to grow plants and to produce atmospheric Oxygen as the basis of life on earth should be our first - and certainly only - way to “geoengineer” the earth.
Paper summary: As we continue burning fossil fuels and releasing CO2 into our atmosphere, trees help us capturing tremendous amounts of the greenhouse gas through photosynthesis every year. Actually, in a given year, northern hemisphere forests are perfectly capable of removing the world's atmospheric CO2 between May and October (see Keeling Curve), when the mass of forests in the northern hemisphere are in growing period. However, between October and May of the following year, when northern hemisphere forests are dormant, global atmospheric CO2 concentrations rise again. After evaluating global deforestation rates, we realized that global lost of forests have occurred mostly in the southern hemisphere during the last few decades, at alarming rate. Such localized loss of global photosynthetic potential suggests that global warming might be occurring not so much because of the releasing of CO2, but rather because of the loss of southern hemisphere's forests. We suggest immediate mass reforestation plans in the southern hemisphere, to recover the lost Earth lung and, consequentially, cool down our planet in a few years.
The Keeling Curve
(see also: Prediction of CO2 Concentration till 2030)
For a full copy of the paper contact Pablo García-Chevesich, University of Arizona/Forest Institute of Chile (INFOR).