Woodsmen, Cut Down Those Trees!

Time for Canada and Alaska to do their part to fight global warming. Cutting down large tracts of fir trees in high latitude locales could produce global cooling, according to this report.

In high latitudes, for example, removing the forests could help to cool these regions. This is because the trees, which absorb sunlight, would be replaced by snow-covered fields in winter that reflect the light. But in tropical regions, cutting back on forests would mean that less water is transferred from soils into the atmosphere, meaning fewer clouds and a warmer planet.

Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California, and his colleagues have now compared these two effects and declared that the effect of boreal deforestation dominates. Removing all the forests would put a slight brake on global warming, they predict — enough to leave the world 0.3 °C cooler in 2100, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

So get out the chainsaws and axes and fell a fir for Gaia! But leave tropical rainforests alone.

h/t Lucianne.com