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Deck the halls with boughs of holly – before it dies out
Robin McKie, The Observer
One of the crowning glories of the festive season – holly trees groaning with clusters of crimson berries – is being destroyed by a combined assault from car exhausts and global warming.
Researchers have found that high levels of ozone during Britain’s increasingly hot summers are causing holly trees to lose their leaves in winter and suffer stunted growth. The twin assault is also weakening their ability to withstand cold.
(24 Dec 2006)
Experts argue about usefulness of redwoods in carbon dioxide reduction
Ian Hoffman, Inside Bay Area
… But in this burgeoning marketplace of carbon atonement, trees are more than tres chic. They’re hot. And that’s part of the problem.
Seen from space, forests on Earth are dark-green absorbers of sunlight, scientists say. Trees draw more solar energy to the planet’s surface to be trapped as heat than grasslands or bare ground, especially if covered in snow. Those land coverings are as many as three times more reflective than trees and bounce solar energy back into space.
Trees do absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and release water vapor that doubly cools the immediate forest and gathers overhead as clouds, providing a cooling shadow.
But for five years, multiple studies by leading centers for climate modeling – the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the Hadley Center in the United Kingdom and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – suggest that while forests have strong cooling effects in the tropics, they have an equally strong warming effect at high latitudes.
Last week atmospheric scientist Ken Caldiera, of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco that the cooling and warming effects of forests largely balance out in the middle latitudes where the lower 48 states and most developed nations are located.
“The effects pretty much cancel each other out,” said Govindasamy Bala, a Livermore Lab scientist who led the latest study. “If you put it bluntly, there’s really no planet benefit.”
… Terrapass CEO Tom Arnold said his company doesn’t buy forest offsets because of the scientific uncertainty and because his customers want an impact on global warming more direct than symbolic.
“You can’t fix global warming by planting trees,” he said. “You can help address it, but unless we radically change our energy infrastructure, global warming is not going away.”
(25 Dec 2006)
Team ready to keep toxic gas underground
Margaret Munro, Victoria Times Colonist via Canada.com
An international research team is heading to the southeast corner of Saskatchewan to check on millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide buried beneath the frozen fields. They want to ensure the notorious greenhouse gas stays more than a kilometre underground in perpetuity and doesn’t leak out of oil wells that have turned the Canadian prairies into a geological pincushion.
“We hope to be going full bore by the end of January,” Brian Kristoff, acting executive director of the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, says of the $40-million final phase of the Weyburn CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project.
The project, supported by the International Energy Agency and the Canadian and U.S. governments, is one of the most ambitious efforts in the world to assess what happens when CO2 is pumped below ground.
(26 Dec 2006)
