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from the overcast-with-a-chance-of-light-wood dept.
The pre-industrial atmosphere contained more particles, and so brighter clouds, than we previously thought. This is the latest finding of the CLOUD experiment, a collaboration between around 80 scientists at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva. It changes our understanding of what was in the atmosphere before humans began adding pollution – and what it might be like again in the future.
Most cloud droplets need tiny airborne particles to act as "seeds" for their formation and growth. If a cloud has more of these seeds, and therefore more droplets, it will appear brighter and reflect away more sunlight from the Earth's surface. This in turn can cool the climate. Therefore understanding the number and size of particles in the atmosphere is vital to predicting not only how bright and reflective the planet's clouds are, but what global temperatures will be.
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The CLOUD experiment at CERN also recently discovered that gases emitted by trees can stick together to make new seeds for clouds in the atmosphere – without needing any help from other pollutants as was previously thought. Scientists had thought that the cloud seeds needed sulphuric acid (often mixed with other compounds) or iodine molecules to stick together to initiate the process.In our new follow-up study, published in PNAS, we worked with other CLOUD scientists to simulate this process in the atmosphere. Our work suggests that even today trees produce a large fraction of cloud seeds over the cleanest forested parts of the world.
More trees means more clouds, which means cooler Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:16AM
Actually, years (decades) of work on that have drastically reduced that sort of destruction. Does it still happen? Yes, but to paint it as a carpet of ashes is not accurate. Also, afforestation is happening in some habitats that had not previously been forested, so that's an element of where CO2 is clearly having a beneficial effect.
Not so fast. More CO2 does seem to link to more retention of heat, but the behaviour of CO2 in doing so is not apparently uniform across various conditions of temperature and pressure. Also, the retention of heat doesn't necessarily lead to huge heat spikes so much as a higher baseline. Many of the plants in those areas are already highly resistant to heat stress, and mostly shut down their biologies and wait for the peak heat to pass before it's business as usual.
Sure - if. One of the factors in play is higher ocean temperatures, which means higher vapour pressure, which means more evaporation, which means a faster water cycle, which means .... more rain. Is it uniform? No. Is it perfect? No. But you can't just paint things with a desertification brush either.
.... and so on and so forth. I largely agree with you, but there are a lot of things in play here. Not all of them lead down the road to hell.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:10AM
One group of researchers observed
[...] alarming losses comprising one-tenth (3.3 million km2) of global wilderness areas over the last two decades, particularly in the Amazon (30%) and central Africa (14%).
—http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30993-9 [cell.com]