[HN Gopher] A revelation about trees is messing with climate cal...
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A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations
Author : bilsbie
Score : 247 points
Date : 2023-09-30 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| Reminds me of this Scandinavian project:
|
| https://innovationorigins.com/en/selected/using-wind-turbine...
| shironandonon_ wrote:
| Canada had record wild fires in 2023 and now I'm wondering how
| this effect will snowball.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| And yet, if we look at the numbers, wildfires are actually
| nowhere near as bad as they were in the 90's:
| https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/data/charts/NFDB_stats_chart.p...
|
| I'd like a ban on people going outside and causing wild fires
| like we had in 2020 though. That was a good year.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Nope - your chart only shows up to 2021. Wildfires are
| actually much much worse than the 90s.
|
| "This year's fires have now burned more than double the
| previous record of 7.1 million hectares torched in 1995"
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/23/mapping-the-
| scale-o...
| stormbrew wrote:
| 17.577 million hectares have burned so far this year. If 2023
| were on that graph it would be a skyscraper towering over
| every big fire year in the 80s and 90s.
|
| This year is unprecedented. And it isn't even over yet and
| the fires are _still_ burning.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I am too. I think Canadians need to treasure their forests and
| should be seriously concerned by what's happening. Our current
| reforestation efforts aren't enough, and they're largely driven
| to support future logging activity, not restore ecology.
| pvaldes wrote:
| If I'm not wrong, Canada had record wildfires in a very curious
| set of years.
| alex_duf wrote:
| What so you mean by curious?
| pauldenton wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66612781 Need to wait and see
| if there's any charges brought forward for Arson
| pvaldes wrote:
| See it by yourself
|
| https://globalnews.ca/news/8045796/canada-wildfires-
| yearly-t...
| pvaldes wrote:
| The interesting graphic is the area burnt by year. If we
| take the years with more than 3 million hectares burnt we
| have some "specially hot years" falling over yearly
| average. This set includes:
|
| 94-95 Crimean referendum to choose between Russia or
| Ukraine
|
| 98 Russian financial default, start of the Yeltsin demise
|
| Ukrainian presidential elections of 1994, 2004, 2010 and
| 2014 (but curiously not 2019). Would be specially
| interesting to check if the wildfires happened after or
| before the elections.
|
| 2013-2014 Euromaidan. Russia anexionates Crimea. Start of
| the Dombas war.
|
| 2017 This is an outlier. The year of Voronenkow saying
| that Crimean annexation was illegal and fleeing the Duma
| before to be assasinated. The year of Petya also.
|
| We could probably add 2023 to this list at the end of the
| year
|
| In the country with the second largest expatriate
| Ukrainian population. Most probably happened by random
| (and I'm surely cherry-picking) but still a curious chain
| of events. I assume that the data shown in this graph is
| correct (I could be wrong about this).
|
| 2020 is also interesting. People at home = no wildfires
| lukas099 wrote:
| 91 94 98 03 06 10 12 15 18
|
| 3 4 5 3 4 2 3 3
|
| Help me out, what am I missing.
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| I've looked at clouds from both sides now
|
| From up and down, and still somehow
|
| It's cloud illusions I recall
|
| I really don't know clouds at all
| jmyeet wrote:
| While I believe the link between human activities and global
| warming have been well-established, I still find the certainty of
| imminent runaway climate that'll turn the Earth into Venus to be
| counterproductive. Even if it's true, this message just numbs
| people.
|
| The fact is that to a certain point the Earth has climate
| balancing mechanisms that we have little to no understanding
| about. Why do I say this? Because if it didn't, we would already
| be Venus. The climate on Earth has ranged from ice to the equator
| to being much warmer than it is even now. So why hasn't this
| runaway climate change happened in the last 4 billion years?
|
| Now for a long time the standard retort has been the pace of
| climate change is different now. Not so. Look at Dansgaard-
| Oeschger ("D-O") cycles [1]:
|
| > One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from
| cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a
| matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly
| warming 8 to 15degC
|
| This occurred multiple times over the last 100,000 years.
|
| So rather than focus on this doom and gloom scenario, consider
| that climate change isgoing to kill a lot of people (through
| famine, flooding, areas becoming uninhabitable and the upheaval
| from all the resulting migration). Even then, we as a society
| constantly make tradeoffs of personal convenience where the cost
| is people dying. Sometimes a lot of people. Even apart from
| dying, our society cannot exist as it is without the exploitation
| of the Global South. We as a society have decided we're fine with
| people people being paid pennies to work themselves to death in
| death trap factories to make our lives possible.
|
| It's not surprising that trees seed clouds. You can kind of see
| this in photos of a jungle canopy (eg [2]). The new part is
| learning how sophisticated this mechanism is. But I guess it
| makes sense: clouds reflect light and so it becomes a defense
| mechanism for trees drying out.
|
| [1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-
| cli...
|
| [2]: https://www.canopyintheclouds.com/
| docandrew wrote:
| It's easier to "raise awareness" than pick up litter or dig
| holes and plant trees.
| goatlover wrote:
| I don't think there's any climate model that turns Earth into
| Venus. That's just doomer rhetoric that you see online without
| any citation.
| bch wrote:
| I believe it was this phenomenon and more discussed in the CBCs
| _The Nature of Things_ "What Trees Talk About".[0] Well worth the
| time to watch.
|
| [0] https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/what-trees-
| talk-a...
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Why is this an archive link? The original article is still up;
| indeed, it's from yesterday:
| https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-mess...
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL now from https://web.archive.org/web/2023
| 0930090902/https://www.wired....
|
| Submitters: " _Please submit the original source. If a post
| reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._
| " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| It's fine to post archive links in comments but in general not
| as top-level submissions. If you've googled around for a
| current rendition of the article and have satisfied yourself
| that there really isn't one out there, then it's ok - but
| otherwise please post the original URL and include an archive
| link in the thread if you want to.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Archive links stand a better chance of continuing to work over
| time.
| naavis wrote:
| To get around the Wired.com paywall. They only let you read a
| limited number of articles for free.
| hgghxfbgyvd wrote:
| Ironic that you can synthesize these hydrocarbons from petroleum.
| Burn 10,000acres of forest, replace it with chemicals made from a
| barrel of oil sprayed into the atmosphere.
| paisawalla wrote:
| A great HN feature would be a link to a chatgpt chat, with the
| contents of the article loaded into the context, summary already
| generated. Some of these articles are five sentences of
| interesting information, hidden among five paragraphs of forced
| human interest.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I find this stuff absolutely incredible. I've been learning
| recently about this phenomenon being known, but not understood.
|
| The most obvious indication was that logging leads to less rain,
| so it seems as though trees actually cause rain.
|
| One theory was that turbulence in the air above forests could
| trigger precipitation, and while that might still be a factor,
| this explanation is very clean and easy to understand.
|
| This is awesome in any case. I've been wanting to use the "trees
| cause rain" point in discussions about forestry and hydrology,
| but had to be careful because we only had correlations as far as
| I knew. This doesn't fully solve that, but certainly helps
| explain and create a causative link.
|
| Also just incredible how evolution works. Of course trees cause
| rain, haha. I wonder if other plants such as grasses in vast
| plains have their own tricks to seed rain, or if their strategy
| is surviving drought extremely well. It's all cool either way.
| meristohm wrote:
| Trees are a collection of straws into the ground, sucking up
| water with negative pressure due to evaporation through the
| leaves. It's cool that there are cloud-seeding chemicals
| released as well.
|
| Forests smell and feel much better that clear-cut spaces, I
| know that much. I'd rather the USDA and Forest Service adopt
| more-sustainable logging practices, for leased land especially
| (where the economics equation currently favors clear-cutting),
| like the Menominee in northern Wisconsin.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| i've also wondered how much energy is absorbed by trees, I
| know on a 100 degree day the coolness of a shady grove well
| outcompetes the shade of a simple picnic shelter
| Avshalom wrote:
| there's a couple things going on there. Photsynthesis isn't
| absorbing much its ~1-2% efficiency (so mostly just waste
| heat) but plants are mostly water which has a high heat
| capacity so it warms slower than a kiln dried wood
| structure. Wood/bark is also way less reflective than
| concrete and (living) plants respond to heat by opening up
| pores and letting water evaporate out of them (basically
| sweating) which can lower the dry bulb temperature
| (especially if there's any breeze).
| luma wrote:
| Would evaporative cooling due to transpiration have a
| significant impact?
| nostromo wrote:
| Trees also act as thermal sinks. They transfer surface
| heat down into their roots, where it is cool underground.
| eep_social wrote:
| More precisely, the temperature underground is very
| stable. At 8-12 feet there is little to no variation over
| the course of a year. So in a cold season it will be
| warmer underground than ambient (this is why foundations
| are dug "below the frost line") while the opposite is
| true during a warm season.
| sampo wrote:
| In infrared, green leaves are more reflective than bare
| soil or concrete.
| imjonse wrote:
| They aren't called rainforests for no reason :)
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I had always assumed that causality ran the complete other
| direction! Rain -> happy plants -> big trees draped in ferns
| and vines and mosses.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| trees basically perform cloud-seeding by releasing micro-
| droplets of oils into the air
|
| "climate: a new story" by charles eisenstein is a great
| resource on an alternative understanding to climate change then
| simply "CO2 bad", which he presents as a red herring to
| ecosystem destruction
|
| conventional wisdom is apparently "fair weather leads to more
| biomass" when the reality might be "more biomass leads to fair
| weather" as every ecosystem acts as a chemical and energetic
| buffer
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| This is really interesting to consider, and I hadn't before.
| It lends a lot more potential weight and credibility to the
| idea that rewilding plains (for example), thus increasing the
| biomass there, would have significant climate benefits. This
| falls deep into the "We can't know that" category, but I'm a
| fairly large proponent of leaving more land alone and letting
| nature do what it does. At the moment, economic activity like
| grazing cows seems like it could be a net negative since it's
| clearly harming the environment while also preventing natural
| landscapes from establishing, which could have significant
| ecological benefits.
|
| The idea that biomass can bring stability and better
| conditions is certainly supported by my aquarium experience,
| though it's a closed system. If you limit the number of
| species, water parameters will swing all over the place. Add
| more species (particularly plants and micro flora/fauna), and
| the water becomes clearer and cleaner. Add some small
| crustaceans, snails, or other animals which love algae and
| it'll get even cleaner, and their populations will self-
| maintain quite well. Add some tiny fish and they will live on
| the algae, micro fauna, offspring of the shrimp, etc. These
| systems work well, but they need a huge amount of plants and
| tiny creatures, bacteria, and small animals to groom and
| maintain things. Without them, it'll crash and swing all over
| until just about everything is dead.
|
| If we imagine the world as a giant aquarium where we inhibit
| the micro flora and micro fauna, bacteria, and other
| balances, it certainly seems possible that restoring this
| would improve all kinds of factors like water and air
| quality.
| runsWphotons wrote:
| If you graze animals the right way you can also increase
| biomass/help the ecosystem.
| myshpa wrote:
| Not really true.
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/163735/myth-regenerative-
| ran...
|
| https://grist.org/climate-energy/cattle-grazing-is-a-
| climate...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25138
|
| https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/grazed-
| and-co...
|
| https://plantbasednews.org/news/environment/george-
| monbiot-r...
|
| _"So any story that says it's good to be farming these
| livestock, it's good to be eating these livestock, is a
| story which justifies among the most devastating
| processes on Earth," he said. "It is climate science
| denial."_
|
| _Monbiot linked this denial to the interests of major
| corporations like McDonald's, General Mills, JBS, and the
| Murdoch Network, who he says have "backed and weaponized"
| the idea that grazing cattle is environmentally
| beneficial. "The story is false," he said. "When you make
| a grand claim such as this one, that livestock can
| mitigate climate change, either you produce the evidence
| for that claim or if you cannot produce the evidence you
| withdraw the claim. The evidence has not been produced,
| the claim does not stand."_
| eep_social wrote:
| > aquarium experience
|
| Is this the Walstad Method?
| Beijinger wrote:
| [flagged]
| pvaldes wrote:
| Grasses (Poaceae) catch dew easily and move it towards its
| center. Most plants sometimes release water drops also (see
| guttation)
| hammock wrote:
| Without exploring the question of why, it makes sense from an
| evolutionary biology point of view that trees (forests, really,
| as trees with extensive root systems tend to be pretty drought
| tolerant) would attract rain. They require it to survive and
| thrive in the long run
| xctr94 wrote:
| I've been reading agroforestry and permaculture books for a
| while -- I'd love to get into farming --, and this has been
| known for ages.
|
| Even if not fully understood, it's well known in agro that
| trees raise the humidity level of an area and create micro-
| climates that increase the amount of rain (e.g. of doing nut
| trees in a valley).
|
| I think... modern agriculture just forgot/ignores ancient
| knowledge.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Without a doubt, and it's well known in urban planning and
| landscaping too. But in a discussion about why industry might
| be harmful, not having facts to back yourself up makes your
| case effectively irrelevant. Even pointing to countless
| reforestation projects with heaps of positive precipitation
| and hydrological data is no help; as long as the mechanism
| isn't clear, people who want to maintain business as usual
| will not listen.
|
| So, information like this is a huge help and a step towards
| having a more crystallized picture of why forests are crucial
| to hydrology.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Terpenes from trees also produce OH which converts methane to
| CO2. No idea whether this has a big effect, but I find it
| fascinating.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| I bet there's folk tales that parallel it with angry forest
| spirits, too. Explaining the unknown with
| anthropomorphization.
| philipov wrote:
| Are you telling me the _Rain Follows The Plow_ folks were
| actually on to something?
| mooreds wrote:
| Solid joke :) .
|
| Unfortunately, you typically don't plant trees with a plow.
| aeroman wrote:
| The increase in humidity is actually a different effect -
| evapotranspiration from trees is included in climate models
| (along with their response to increasing CO2 concentrations)
| [0].
|
| The effect in this article is more to do with the
| particulates that form from the chemical emitted from trees.
| The article doesn't make it clear, but an increase in tree
| particulates (known as aerosols) would actually cause less
| rain.
|
| Almost all cloud droplets form on an aerosol particle, so the
| cloud droplets in a cloud with more aerosols are on average
| smaller (as the water is spread out over more droplets).
| These smaller droplets take longer to grow large enough to
| form rain, an effect which is thought to decrease the amount
| of precipitation in some regions (although by a small
| amount).
|
| This effect is also included in climate models, but the
| sources of aerosol (such as from trees) are more uncertain
| [1], producing the uncertainty in future climate projections.
|
| [0] - https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/4/677/2011/gmd-4-67
| 7-201...
|
| [1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12674
| Avshalom wrote:
| local humidity levels is just transpiration, which yeah in a
| valley trapping the humidity can create rain but that's not
| the same as this cloud seeding mechanism.
| Loughla wrote:
| Modern agriculture didn't forget. It chose differently
| because quantity is the only measure of success. Trees
| causing rain has to be substantially less efficient in the
| short term than irrigation.
| sorokod wrote:
| Matches what Richard Dawkins calls "the extended phenotype"
|
| From wikipedia (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype ):
|
| "Dawkins develops this idea by pointing to the effect that a
| gene may have on an organism's environment through that
| organism's behaviour."
| lukas099 wrote:
| Re: grasses surviving drought, I believe they do this by having
| extremely deep roots (likely among many other adaptations).
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| StewedHarry wrote:
| You should read the extended phenotype by Richard Dawkins if
| you haven't already
| InSteady wrote:
| >but had to be careful because we only had correlations as far
| as I knew
|
| Sooner or later we need to throw caution to the wind when it
| comes to advocating for behaving more conservatively towards
| the environment and climate. If we have to wait until we have
| ironclad proof that we shouldn't be wrecking things, we are A.
| allowing our caution to be permissive of recklessness, and B.
| creating a situation similar to the asymmetry of spreading
| bullshit -- it takes far longer to prove something is harmful
| than it takes to switch over to some other equally (or more)
| destructive practice.
|
| Sorry, I'll step off my soapbox now. Not even sure if you were
| discussing these things in the context of conservation.
|
| It is indeed really cool stuff! The natural world continues to
| throw surprise after surprise at us, and the more we learn the
| more it looks like it really is Fern Gully operating in the
| wilds of our wonderful earth.
|
| Anecdotally, grasses do seem to put off some smell at times,
| including preceding a heavy rain. To me, they don't seem as as
| heady and "luscious" like the rich floral terpenes from a
| forest (then again I'm from the PNW, so I haven't spent as much
| time in the grasslands). I wonder if it is more soil bacteria
| that the grasses are in symbiosis with that do the heavy
| lifting in terms of rain seeding. Neat to wonder about.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Kinda matches the destruction caused by humans beings in the
| countryside in northeastern Brasil as well. Most of the trees
| for the somewhat arid climate were felled and droughts that
| were every 20 years started to become more and more common
| until now it's an eternal drought where very little actually
| grows as it barely rains.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It's fun also because this relationship is explicitly & deeply
| embedded in some north american indigenous ecologies, maybe
| others. We've been confidently dismissing it for generations.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Doesn't this seem obvious on its face? Any given tree harnesses
| a tremendous amount of moisture. And it's constantly
| "breathing." Why _wouldn't_ a preponderance of trees affect
| ambient moisture (and, by extension, clouds)?
| gmuslera wrote:
| Messing with very complex systems and expecting that random odds
| benefit instead of doom you and all mankind is a bad bet.
|
| And this kind of things gives another hint on how complex the
| system is, how many players influence and are influenced by it,
| including not even suspected ones.
|
| We should take into account things that we don't know that we
| don't know when betting big.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| If you've ever been among dense conifers trees, you'll have
| noticed a mostly blue-ish but ranging from grey to purple haze
| (like the smoky mountains, or Pacific Northwest).
|
| That's the terpenes (and other VOC, "volatile organic compounds")
| that the trees emit. These react with ozone, creating compounds
| that scatter blue light.
|
| I am not certain, but I believe this fog helps plays a role (in
| combination with specific needle microstructures and density) in
| the formation of water condensation on conifer needles, which
| they can absorb, either via drip or more directly when it
| collects toward the base of the needles. The exact capability
| will depend on the species.
|
| This chemical fog also acts as a communal defense against many
| pests and pathogens, isolated conifers are more vulnerable
| without it.
| steanne wrote:
| this effect is also the source of the name for the blue ridge
| mountains.
| makeworld wrote:
| > so we can fix our climate models.
|
| Is there any indication if this discovery will improve or worsen
| the current outlook? It doesn't seem like the article points in
| either direction.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| and humans mostly do the opposite, air pollution is preventing
| rain, sometimes it can fall the week-end when pollution is lower
|
| For me the "value" of a tree is extremely high, as well as
| plants, insects, worms.., humans values are the bottom of this
| scale, just after mosquitoes
| czbond wrote:
| > humans values are the bottom of this scale, just after
| mosquitoes
|
| Aren't us humans almost exclusively a net negative, except for
| a small few? Meaning in most cases to Earth, it's best we
| didn't exist? We create pollution, waste, consume large amounts
| of resources that are only a net benefit _in some cases_ to
| humans.
|
| Now in a cosmic sense, maybe the Universe gains by having life
| - but who knows
| pauldenton wrote:
| Has any other life form on Earth protected another life form
| on Earth from extinction? It seems like other life is
| spending 0 effort maintaining the environment, preventing the
| extinction of other species that are considered competitors
| for limited food and limited space.
| lukas099 wrote:
| The species that evolved in conjunction with those
| ecosystems don't have to put effort into maintaining those
| ecosystems. They do it automatically.
| czbond wrote:
| While I don't disagree with these points, wouldn't this
| mean some small number like 0.0000001% of all of us humans
| over humanities entire existence are not a net negative?
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Totally, the other animals that also have negative footprint
| are pets, farming animals due to their food and care
|
| All other animals are autonomous and participating in the
| ecosystem
| docandrew wrote:
| 65 million years ago an asteroid hit the earth, making untold
| species extinct and causing unimaginable climate change in
| the span of a few hours. Now, with humans on earth with
| telescopes and rockets and space-facing radar, we might stand
| a chance if it happens again. I'd say that counts for
| _something_.
| m3047 wrote:
| I don't have the source, it was a few years ago, but there is a
| positive correlation between particulates and precipitation;
| however it can take several days for the effect to reach
| maximum "signal" and due to the movement of air masses the
| actual precipitation can happen some distance (possibly
| thousands of miles) from the source of particulates: if it
| rains (or doesn't rain) on the weekend for you, that might have
| some correlation to location of the source of particulates in
| your area.
|
| A related effect would seem to be low sulfur fuel reducing
| ocean cloud cover (compared to previous fuel). I just saw an
| interactive map of a study using aircraft cruising altitude to
| impact cloud formation a few days ago.
| finneganscat wrote:
| [dead]
| thenobsta wrote:
| Are there correlation studies on this? I'm genuinely interested
| in reading about this.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Tangent - Earthworms are an invasive species in North
| America[1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_A...
| kibwen wrote:
| Sort of. Earthworms are a natural species in North America,
| but in the northern parts of the continent they were wiped
| out by glaciers ten to twenty thousand years ago.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-
| institution/earth...
| goatlover wrote:
| The entire idea of invasive species is kind of fraught,
| because organisms migrate over time. Barren volcanic
| islands will become seeded with life. Past extinction
| events change the ecological dynamic. Technically, ocean
| life invaded the land hundreds of millions of years ago.
| Land bridges open up, continents collide or separate, etc.
| Humans weren't the only organism to migrate out of one
| continent onto others.
| croo wrote:
| And the entire idea of species is kind of fraught because
| once we were all microorganisms?
|
| No. Invasive species are relatively new to the land, they
| disturbe the existing equilibrium often without any
| natural predators to hunt them and they wreak havoc.
|
| Like wild boars in USA. Like rabbits in Australia. Like
| humans on earth.
|
| Barren islands evolved for tens of millions of years in
| isolation were all over the world until humans built
| ships.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Earthworms is an entire subclass of animals. There are
| earthworms native of USA. Other aren't.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Are you sure it's not the other way around? I remember reading
| Mondays have the sunniest weather because there's less
| pollution over the weekend.
|
| And also from the article:
|
| >In the sky, aerosol particles attract water vapor or ice. When
| the tiny wet globs get large enough, they become seeds for
| clouds. Half of Earth's cloud cover forms around stuff like
| sand, salt, soot, smoke, and dust. The other half nucleates
| around vapors released by living things or machines, like the
| sulfur dioxide that arises from burning fossil fuels.
| SideQuark wrote:
| > air pollution is preventing rain
|
| Air pollution also causes more rain, changes rain from shallow
| to severe, and a large host of other effects. It's not simply
| "air pollution is preventing rain".
|
| A simple example - for ~100 years mankind has used silver
| iodide to seed clouds to cause rain. Silver iodide would easily
| be called air pollution. [1]
|
| Here's google scholar - note the large variety of rain and
| pollution interaction - and most certainly not as simple or
| negative as you post [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
|
| [2]
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,15&q=preci...
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| obviously talking of the common car traffic and related air
| pollution
| Loic wrote:
| Not a revelation at all. If you read the work of Francis Halle,
| it is very well explained. Also the communication between trees
| through released chemicals during fires.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Hall%C3%A9
| carapace wrote:
| Here in N. California I've seen it: the coastal forests breath
| out cloudstuff. When the conditions are right they breath out
| _something_ that immediately condenses a mist which rises and
| becomes clouds that drift inland. The trees on each ridge are
| synchronized so the initial mists are ridge-sized but they grow
| as they rise.
|
| It's cool that this is getting scientific attention, but really
| weird to me that this was some kind of revelation. It's plain as
| day if you just watch the forest.
| archsurface wrote:
| Does the term "seeding" have two meanings? I understood it to
| mean dropping particles into clouds to trigger rain. The article
| uses it to mean using particles to induce cloud formation.
| ffk wrote:
| Good question! The term is more generic, introducing something
| to an existing system to begin a chain reaction.
| joelrunyon wrote:
| Why is this not linking directly to the wired article?
| https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-mess...
| dang wrote:
| We've changed it now.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| I read an account a few years ago where an orange juice factory
| in S. America couldn't figure out what to do with the orange
| peels. Being filthy capitalist swine, they trucked it out to an
| arid area that was nothing but scrub, and dumped it.
|
| Fast forward 20 years. It turned into a garden that created its
| own micro-climate. All sorts of vegetation, including trees, was
| thriving in it, and the area it occupied was slowly expanding.
|
| It boggles the mind what can be done with the incredible amount
| of food waste humans generate.
|
| Since then, when I eat an orange, I just throw the peels out into
| the yard.
| ianburrell wrote:
| My city collects food and yard waste. Then sends it to be
| composted on industrial scale that can handle food scraps. The
| result is compost that can buy in stores.
|
| I think waste composting should be the standard everywhere. It
| separates organic waste from landfills where it would turn into
| methane. Composting produces CO2 but most of the carbon gets
| sequestered in the soil. I do wonder what should do with the
| compost when there is a huge supply. Mixing it into farmland to
| improve the soil might be good idea.
| [deleted]
| sampo wrote:
| This 2004 paper "A new feedback mechanism linking forests,
| aerosols, and climate" in _Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics_ was
| the first time I read about this.
|
| https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/4/557/2004/acp-4-557-200...
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Wow. I consider myself pretty open minded but the idea that trees
| are releasing chemicals to seed clouds with is more amazing than
| I could've envisaged.
| jokoon wrote:
| Are you french and is envisage an English word?
| deadletters wrote:
| It is, in fact
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I wonder if this is industrializable as cloud seeding tech?
| liquidpele wrote:
| I mean... Why not just industrialize the planting of trees
| for that? The damn things are practically free...
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Yeah. Thanks for sanity.
|
| I react the same to "we should build drone to pollinate our
| food if bees are sick."
|
| Poorly re-inventing the wheels is silly.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Same it's absolutely beautiful.
|
| Makes you realise how amazing the natural world (everything
| pre-industrial times) is.
|
| I'd absolutely love to go back 300 years and smell the forests
| and dive over pristine reefs.
|
| Anyway this has given me more motivation than ever to restart
| my guerrilla gardening efforts, planting trees in abandoned
| farmland in my locale.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Beavers building dams is the amazing natural world.
|
| Humans building dams is a sin against the natural world.
| glhaynes wrote:
| Some of the most unreligious people I know are also the
| most bought-into the idea of a nature/humans dichotomy.
| goatlover wrote:
| What if you told them that indigenous people pre-
| colonization sometimes built dams, dikes and aqueducts,
| and made use of irrigation?
| badpun wrote:
| Indigenous people pre-colonization had in many cases
| pretty advanced civilizations going on, with decent-sized
| cities etc.
| glhaynes wrote:
| A lot of those same people seem to treat indigenous
| people as outside of being touched by the "original sin"
| that the rest of us are.
| goatlover wrote:
| The original sin of farming, or hierarchy, or city
| dwelling. Problem is that the dividing line between our
| hunter-gatherer ancestors and civilization are murky and
| spread out over millennia, and across the planet in
| varying degrees.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Except your injecting all this into the conversation right
| ? I never said it's "wrong" for anyone to build a dam. I'm
| saying I'd like to see a world without mega dams, is that
| ok ?
| ethanbond wrote:
| If beavers got as good as we did, they'd be wrong too.
| sitkack wrote:
| We live in Mordor and have the ring.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's almost like scale is a quality of its own.
|
| Dropping a snowball on you might tick you off.
|
| Dropping an avalanche on you, and you probably won't have
| much to say.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Very correct.
|
| A world with co2 emissions from fire stick farming is a
| whole different game to what we've done in the last 100
| years.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > I'd absolutely love to go back 300 years
|
| It'd be fun if you could time travel and do it for a few
| days. I really doubt you'd want to live in that time forever.
| volkk wrote:
| unrelated to the broader tree discussion, but i find this
| comment incredibly indicative of the type of forum this is.
| only with engineers do you have to state your point and
| enumerate through all edge cases around how your idea can
| be interpreted even though GP PROBABLY didn't mean go back
| and live there until the end of his life. But even so,
| that's a derailment of the entire discussion anyway. You
| always have a person that needs to point out something
| inane like that which ends up causing a tangent discussion.
| On a forum, it's fine, you have threads, you can just
| ignore it and move on, but a lot of meetings & real
| conversations end up this way. there has to be a name for
| this because I want to call it something and then coach
| people out of it
| airstrike wrote:
| +1 on coaching people out of it. Very well put
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > On a forum, it's fine, you have threads, you can just
| ignore it and move on
|
| Yet we're on a forum, and you're not taking your own
| advice?
| volkk wrote:
| > On a forum, it's fine, you have threads, you can just
| ignore it and move on,
|
| I should note that ^ -- but it also proves my point.
| Digressions have gravity. And now this digression has
| created a complete fork of the original intended post.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Well that's how conversations go, coach. One thought
| leads to another, sometime tangentially.
|
| Don't worry, I'm done here now.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| HN comments are often a web or at least some thick
| threads of tangents. On most forums tangents are
| downvoted and labeled offtopic in capitals.
|
| In HN comments on the other hand those side tracks are
| mostly encouraged, I think that is a good thing.
| colineartheta wrote:
| This is so true.
| smokel wrote:
| A word for this might be "pedantic".
|
| (You were asking for a name, but I am trying to be
| pedantic here.)
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Have you ever seen The Truman show ? Your comment reminds
| me of that movie.
|
| I said that I want to visit. Not stay forever.
|
| On the other hand, I'm not sure what it is but people seem
| to always have to point this out. Actually seems like it's
| a more common thing to say nowadays. It comes across as
| insecurity to me.
|
| "You wouldn't want to go back to simpler times they are
| just awful, run along now..."
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Let's wait 20 years and re-assess.
|
| For context I live in US city that everyone knows, and the
| talk of the town is "when will our tap water will become
| brackish, and for how long?"
|
| Fun times ahead. Not sure the appeal of the industrial time
| will stand.
|
| Edit : the when is a matter of days / weeks. Not years. (
| salt of the gulf goes up the river )
| pixl97 wrote:
| 300?
|
| You mean closer to 30,000 years right?
|
| Humans have been shaping the world with fire for a long time.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| No 300 would be fine. I'm ok with fire stick farming, it
| makes forests beautiful, visit North Western Austalia
| during the dry season if you want to see a truly beautiful
| landscape shaped by indigenous fire stick farming.
| eachro wrote:
| Yishan Wong's startup Terra
| formation(https://www.terraformation.com/) is trying to tackle
| climate change with this more or less as the underlying thesis.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I love forests, any sort, but reforestation the right way, as
| Terra seems to support, takes more time than some are saying we
| have. The wrong way becomes the right way when it is all you
| have time for. Iron fertilization of oceans is promising for
| albedo already, if we can efficiently synthesize these terpenes
| in the right ratio to seed clouds perhaps that would buy some
| time.
| eachro wrote:
| It's probably fine to have some solutions that operate on
| different time scales than the other proposed solutions that
| others are trying.
| jonhohle wrote:
| More time than we have for what?
| ako wrote:
| The effects of global warming to have disastrous effects on
| humans.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Fortunately humans are adaptable and in many parts of the
| world already living in conditions significantly hotter
| than predicted in the medium term (50-100 years).
|
| I'm much more concerned about the cure being worse than
| the disease when it comes to novel methods of affecting
| climate. Plant trees, replace coal/oil with nuclear and
| solar, keep up on forest maintenance, etc.
| ako wrote:
| I'm sure you are aware that there's way more going on
| than just a slight increase in average temperature
| (otherwise maybe ask the people on maui, greece or canada
| if they like their slight increase in temperate), but I
| agree that we should be careful with any radical cures.
| czbond wrote:
| @galangalalgol can you expand on "if we can efficiently
| synthesize these terpenes in the right ratio to seed clouds"?
|
| It is too early for me to grok, and coffee hasn't kicked in
| yet
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "that would buy some time."
|
| Or mess things further up, in a way no one did foresee.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think financing and assisting reforestation projects is a
| worthwhile thing to work on, but selling carbon credits
| directly enables harmful behavior that more than offsets any
| potential benefits. I wish it were possible for this company to
| be funded by government grants or the UN or something like
| that.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Even if carbon credits do absolutely nothing else, at least
| they impose a cost on carbon release.
| burkaman wrote:
| Carbon credits are so incredibly cheap, and in most cases
| completely voluntary, that I genuinely don't believe they
| have impacted anyone's behavior. Companies and individuals
| that buy credits either were already planning on reducing
| their emissions (so in the best case the credits are
| useless), or don't want to reduce emissions and are using
| the credits for PR purposes to delay any actual reduction
| and call themselves "net zero".
|
| Even when they're legally mandated, most credits are
| completely unverifiable (what ratings agency will be able
| to certify that a tree you sponsored will last 100 years).
| It is actively harmful to allow someone to say that since
| they paid $10 to plant a tree that may or may not absorb a
| ton of carbon over the next century, that offsets the
| literal ton of carbon that they just emitted yesterday (and
| made a lot more than $10 off of). Just tax the carbon and
| put the proceeds towards ecological restoration, that
| accomplishes the same thing without letting anyone falsely
| claim they have offset their emissions, and allows the
| government to set the price to something meaningful.
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