Quote:
Originally Posted by nemesis9
My hypothesis would be that deforestation hurts. Then, I would then try to estimate the forest area just prior to the industrial revolution and use that as a loose baseline. Now, that baseline wouldn't take into account the increase in population since then nor a few other changes either, but there would seem to be a way to use this baseline to restore forested area, and then try to reduce human CO2 emissions as much as practically possible.
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Well, most people play russian roullete with a revolver. There really aren't any repeat players that start out with an autoloader.
You're not even doing what you need to do to ascertain what the effects might be. Lets take the ultimate reforestation project of the sahara and assume that man is actually capable of reforesting it. First off, what is the albedo of that area? Sand is very high so far as surface area goes, much higher than forests of all types. Second, you need to find out what the albedo of your new forest would be. Third, you'll need to determine the water evaporation and content for the desert area and what the effects of installing a forest would be. This includes what the current cloud covering happens to be and estimates would have to be made concerning what the final expected cloud cover would be and fourth, what effect on albedo that the additional clouds happen to be. Fifth, you'd need to ascertain what effects of putting in a forest there would be on the dust content of the atmosphere and what effects that might have on warming or cooling and what effects that might have on the creation of tropical storms out past the canary islands - the ones that often turn into hurricanes. Sixth, you'll need to determine just what sort of demand increase there could be on plant life usage of co2. What if this stresses the system even with mankind's usage of co2 causing technologies? Finding out why the sahara's forests died out originally might be good and it might indicate they stressed out due to a lack of co2 concentration. It would also be good to be absolutely sure over the value of the solar constant back then before proceding as well. AFter all, we were just getting out of the little ice then so temperatures were naturally somewhat colder - hence the discoveries of lost mines, the abandoned colonization efforts of greenland by the vikings etc.
Depending on the outcome from these and numerous other anaylisis efforts needed, your hypothesis could very well be quite wrong and result in exacerbating the problem it is intended to solve. In fact, your very belief that we are indeed warming is actually very much in question. It would seem that may be answered by what the sun decides to do - such as have long feeble sunspot cycles as occurred during the LIA and Maunder minimum or short very strong cycles. Although quite premature, there is already some dicussion over in print of whether we may have a Maunder minimum headed our way starting sometime around the next two solar cycle time frames - assuming it hasn't started already.