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Earth

Scientists Show Reforestation Helps Cool the Planet Even More Than Thought (msn.com) 59

Posted by EditorDavid from the tree's-company dept.
"Replanting forests can help cool the planet even more than some scientists once believed, especially in the tropics," according to a recent announcement from the University of California, Riverside. In a new modeling study published in Communications Earth & Environment, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, showed that restoring forests to their preindustrial extent could lower global average temperatures by 0.34 degrees Celsius. That is roughly one-quarter of the warming the Earth has already experienced. The study is based on an increase in tree area of about 12 million square kilometers, which is 135% of the area of the United States, and similar to estimates of the global tree restoration potential of 1 trillion trees. It is believed the planet has lost nearly half of its trees (about 3 trillion) since the onset of industrialized society.
The Washington Post noted that the researchers factored in how tree emissions interacted with molecules in the atmosphere, "encouraging cloud production, reflecting sunlight and cooling Earth's surface." In a news release, the researchers acknowledge that full reforestation is not feasible... "Reforestation is not a silver bullet," Bob Allen, a professor of climatology at the University of California at Riverside and the paper's lead author, said in a news release. "It's a powerful strategy, but it has to be paired with serious emissions reductions."

Scientists Show Reforestation Helps Cool the Planet Even More Than Thought More | Reply

Scientists Show Reforestation Helps Cool the Planet Even More Than Thought

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  • I didn't know (Score:5, Funny)

    by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @01:47AM (#65436861) Journal

    Thought could cool anything, let alone a planet.

    • I also noticed that ambiguity, but if thought does nothing, then reforestation would still do more. Which means "thought" could be replaced by any number of other ineffective nouns or verbs.

    • Thought could cool anything, let alone a planet.

      Username checks out. I'm not surprised you don't know about cooling given you dedication to heating XD

  • Sounds good (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 09, 2025 @02:05AM (#65436869)

    Replace all of the fields currently being used for corn-to-ethanol (often heavily subsidized) with forests.

    And maybe replace Capitol Hill with enough trees to hang the lot.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      Corn-to-ethanol is dumb but ethanol is not dumb. I actually never knew a farmer who grew corn to make ethanol, they would make ethanol from the husks and parts of the plant which aren't edible and most farmers don't grow sweet corn that a human would eat in any case... they grow feed corn for livestock.

      Grow feed grain [not corn], grow fowl [quail are more efficient than chickens but whatever], most of the feed is now tainted by bird poop, rinse the poop away and use it for fertilizer to grow feed... use the

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Notice the size difference between your bog standard chicken and the bog standard quail egg. You'd need to raise a LOT of quail to get enough of the little eggses to supply a family. Of course you could go all full Ag-Dept whose Moron-in-Chief was encouraging people to grow their own chickens if they wanted cheap eggs. Also, quail migrate. Good luck keeping them over the winter, but do not let that stop you. Maybe you could go with them?

        • You'd need to raise a LOT of quail to get enough of the little eggses to supply a family.

          Technically, the plural of "egg" is eyren [wikipedia.org]. (At least, on the Kent side of the Thames in 1490.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          Migrate? You don't free range quail, optimally you keep at least 3 per square foot in a pen. Because they are flighted and very small keeping the cages short stops them from hurting themselves. Quails stop laying if stressed so we know they are happy this way and as long as the waste falls out the bottom of the cage they are healthy as well. That means you can stack quail cages vertically. If you use a brood box for the bottom layer and offset it to function as a step you can comfortably have a brood box an

      • in this case vegan quail and quail eggs

        "vegan" quail and quail eggs LOL !

        Clearly you don't know what "vegan" means.

      • Man can't live on bread or corn alone, but grains (mostly in the form of bread) did make civilization possible, so stop being so hard on them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          And they are still making civilization possible in this scenario, we are giving them to an animal which was meant to eat them and turn them into human food.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          If all 83 million acres of U.S. soybean farmland were converted to this closed-loop quail farming model[outlined here https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] , it could theoretically feed:

          ~5.08 billion people per month
          That includes:

          Clean meat protein (quail)

          Daily egg supply

          Fully offset fuel costs

          Self-fertilized feed production with surplus fertilizer to sell

          With efficient methane capture and recycling, the quail farming system scaled to all U.S. soybean acreage (83 million acres) would generate:

          ~6.5 billion kWh o

      • Ethanol is a dumb general purpose motor fuel because of the low energy density and the hygroscopicity. You could make butanol with the same feedstocks. It would keep longer and not draw as much water into the fuel system. And even better you could make it from agricultural waste or from algae instead of growing crops for it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          "even better you could make it from agricultural waste"

          That's exactly what I'm proposing here. I don't know any farmers who grow crops to produce ethanol, they grow the crops for other purposes and use the waste like waste like stalks/hulls/etc to make ethanol and use it around the farm. But if you raise quail instead of the more obvious chicken you get a far more efficient produce that is more filling and actually contains enough fat for our nutrition requirements with much higher density and if you've eve

    • Wouldn't it make more sense to plant trees where they were growing, and not on the grasslands where they weren't? Corn, a grass, is grown in places where grass grows best, and those aren't forests.

      • What you want for cooling is to increase forest extent. By definition that means planting trees where they are not already.

        • Ah, fair point, but I'd put, "where we know trees happily grew not that long ago", much higher in the list of places to plant them. Why aren't the plains covered in trees already? Because they're grassy plains.

    • I see why you posted anonymously:

      Replace all of the fields currently being used for corn-to-ethanol (often heavily subsidized) with forests.

      The vast majority of those areas never had forests to begin with. The soil and weather patterns were insufficient to support trees. They were called "The Great Plains", not "The Great Forests".

      So essentially, you are saying to kill off cash crops and plant trees that will die.

      I get it, I really do. Cash is not more important than life... but, you can't let that blind you.

  • .. speaking as an ape man.

    I'm an apeman, I'm an ape, apeman, oh I'm an apeman
    I'm a King Kong man, I'm a voodoo man, oh I'm an apeman
    'Cause compared to the sun that sits in the sky
    Compared to the clouds as they roll by
    Compared to the bugs and the spiders and flies I am an apeman

    (The Kinks)

  • Wind turbines and nuclear powerplants only take a very small area from agriculture, forests or wild nature, but solar does. And don't eat 'organic' grown food: by nor using fertiliser and pesticides, it takes a lot more area to grow the same amount of food, area which could have been forest.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      Why do you think that Solar does take away area from agriculture?

      If you cover about 10% of the roofs of an average city, Solar can generate enough electricity on average to cover the energy needs of that city. And it does not take away any areas from agriculture. Imagine covering 10% of a city with nuclear power plants!

      • If you cover about 10% of the roofs of an average city, Solar can generate enough electricity on average to cover the energy needs of that city.

        It depends very much on where that city is. Where I live, which has cloud cover for about 50% of the year, and snow cover for another 25%, it absolutely would not cover our energy needs, especially when heat is needed in the winter.

        • Yeah, you would have to cover 20 or 30%. Oh noes.

          • More (Score:2)

            by JBMcB ( 73720 )
            It doesn't matter how many more solar panels you have when they are covered in snow.

            • At latitudes where snow is a problem, you can have heated panels that shed snow in the morning, as the angle is sufficiently steep. Once clear they tend to stay that way unless there is so very much snow that they will not generate anyway. You need more panel and more battery, but solar still works.

      • Because is a lot of places, solar farms are replacing actual farms. The panels aren't all going on city roofs, most of them (70%) are in rural areas on what used to be farmland. It is becoming an issue.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          It is a problem of Solar, that farms decide, their ground is more worth when producing electricity instead of produce?
          • One could expect an economic shock to result, as declining food production in favor of electricity would lead to a supply crunch rapidly driving up food prices until they reach a point where farmers start removing panels and planting more food. That shock will hurt, and it will take at least a year to revert to farming. Worse though is that having those panels in place may be damaging the soil. An issue I only found out about when looking up how much arable land is being turned into solar farms.

            I think

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by beep999 ( 229889 )
      There are plenty of places to put solar panels that don't cover farm fields or forests. Floating panels on reservoirs and aqueducts generates power and help reduce evaporation. Putting them over parking lots lets people park in the shade. There are designs to put them in highway medians too, and of course there are residential and commercial roofs.
  • #TeamTrees out to plant a few trees for millions of dollars without realizing it still doesn't work [youtube.com].

  • More trees, fewer people (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @06:18AM (#65437055)

    If you reduce the number of people while increasing the number of trees, the amount of cooling will be even more substantial. Fewer people means less pollution and less need to cut down trees to make space for people. With more trees able to grow, as the study suggests, cooling will increase and the people will have better lives.

    There's a reason places with parks, where there's large expanses of grass and trees, have happier people [spring.org.uk].

    • If you reduce the number of people while increasing the number of trees, the amount of cooling will be even more substantial.

      Well, you are in luck. The economic policies being enacted will reduce the population by quite a bit. The deaths will be due to starvation and exposure, but hey, your goal is achieved. Lucky you indeed. Your will is being done. (maybe not in the way you imagined? perhaps you thought war would reduce the population? voluntary death panels?)

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