Global Warming Solved! Scientists Find Reforestation Can Cool The Surface By 2-6°C Relative To Grassland Area

Reforestation removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Reforestation substantially cools the Earth’s land surfaces. Therefore, reforestation offers a “meaningful opportunity for local climate mitigation and adaptation”. So why are we focused on CO2 mitigation via reduction in fossil fuel use?

Cooling the surface via reforestation

A few months ago NoTricksZone featured a new study that determined global warming can be reversed via land cover changes. Forest losses can warm local temperatures by as much as 1°C within 10 years (Alkama and Cescatti, 2016).

Huang et al., 2020 found the opposite can occur too. When a region returns to forest and tree cover, cooling ensues.

And with a growing percentage of European forested areas returning, a “predominant regional biophysical cooling” with “an average temperature change of −0.12 ± 0.20 °C, with widespread cooling (up to −1.0 °C) in western and central Europe in summer and spring” has swept across Europe due to land cover changes in recent decades.

Image Source: Huang et al., 2020

Another new study finds reforestation may cool the local surface climate by up to 6°C

Now, results from another new study (Novick et al., 2020) suggest reforestation can mitigate “deleterious effects of climate warming” as it dramatically cools surface temperatures. Cooling from reforestation can reach magnitudes of 2-3°C for the air above the surface and 4-6°C for surface climate.

Further, as has been reported here recently, forest expansion substantially expands the Earth carbon sink and removes CO2 from the atmosphere such that future forest expansion, or greening, could offset 17 years of equivalent human CO2 emissions by 2100.

This easily supersedes the effect of Paris Agreement CO2 mitigation policies and suggests that global warming and CO2 emissions mitigation could far more easily and inexpensively be achieved by focusing on reforestation rather than fossil fuel reduction policies.

Image: Novick et al., 2020

11 responses to “Global Warming Solved! Scientists Find Reforestation Can Cool The Surface By 2-6°C Relative To Grassland Area”

  1. Global Warming Solved! Scientists Find Reforestation Can Cool The Surface By 2-6°C Relative To Grassland Area — NoTricksZone | Climate- Science.press

    […] über Global Warming Solved! Scientists Find Reforestation Can Cool The Surface By 2-6°C Relative To Gras… […]

  2. Petit_Barde

    Weird.

    Are we supposed to do when we will leave the Holocene ?
    Deforestation ?

    Anyway, planting trees is less dumb than sitting at a friday for future clown show.

    1. Petit_Barde

      What are we supposed …

  3. Cees

    CO2 is the problem. CO2 is not the problem. Now CO2 is the problem again.
    Global warming. No global warming. Global cooling. Global warming again.
    Do we have to golf between the trees now? And learn the cows to eat leaves?
    The world was a lot simpler without all those scientists and weird ideas.

  4. Phil Salmon

    This points to a negative feedback against O2 warming. More CO2 in air tips the balance of ecosystems from grassland to forest. As shown by Bond 2003:

    https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2486.2003.00577.x

    Thus more CO2 leads to more trees and a cooling effect.

  5. pochas94

    If you really want to cool things down, grow food crops and irrigate them. The US mid-west really hasn’t been warming at all.

  6. RoHa

    But we need to cut down the trees to feed the wood-fired power stations so that we can have sustainable power without Global Warming because the CO2 produced will be taken up by the trees that haven’t been cut down.

    https://notrickszone.com/2020/05/02/in-the-name-of-climate-protection-deforesting-the-us-to-make-europe-greener/

  7. drumphish

    What cannot be ignored nor denied is the skies are devoid of airplanes. What it all looked like before jet engines got legs. Nothing like I have ever seen since the 1950’s. Vapor trails have vanished. lol

    Unreal, unbelievable. The clouds look far different. It really is amazing.

  8. cementafriend

    CO2 does not cause warming of the atmosphere and the reverse removing CO2 can not cause cooling. Additionally, CO2 plus water vapour in the atmosphere can cause plants to grow and cause greening of the globe. It has been shown that having trees can change the rainfall pattern to have more rainfall. Clouds and rainfall will cause lower near surface atmospheric temperatures. It is the hydrological cycle that controls temperatures not changes in trace CO2 which anyway lags changes in temperature. So called “climate scientists” of all stripes have no idea about heat transfer. All models that include CO2 as a parameter are wrong.

  9. aryne

    Very useful and interesting. Thank you

  10. lifeisthermal

    So, the observed warming of the last 100 years could be caused by deforestation. Seems reasonable.

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