Changing Vegetation a Key Driver of Global Temperatures Over Last 10,000 Years:
Alexander Thompson, a postdoctoral research associate in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, updated simulations from an important climate model to reflect the role of changing vegetation as a key driver of global temperatures over the last 10,000 years.
Thompson had long been troubled by a problem with models of Earth's atmospheric temperatures since the last ice age. Too many of these simulations showed temperatures warming consistently over time.
But climate proxy records tell a different story. Many of those sources indicate a marked peak in global temperatures that occurred between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago.
Thompson had a hunch that the models could be overlooking the role of changes in vegetation in favor of impacts from atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations or ice cover.
"Pollen records suggest a large expansion of vegetation during that time," Thompson said.
"But previous models only show a limited amount of vegetation growth," he said. "So, even though some of these other simulations have included dynamic vegetation, it wasn't nearly enough of a vegetation shift to account for what the pollen records suggest."
In reality, the changes to vegetative cover were significant.
Early in the Holocene, the current geological epoch, the Sahara Desert in Africa grew greener than today — it was more of a grassland. Other Northern Hemisphere vegetation including the coniferous and deciduous forests in the mid-latitudes and the Arctic also thrived.
Journal ReferenceAlexander J. Thompson, Jiang Zhu, Christopher J. Poulsen, Jessica E. Tierney and Christopher B. Skinner, Northern Hemisphere vegetation change drives a Holocene thermal maximum, Science Advances, 15 April 2022
(DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj6535)
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday April 18 2022, @12:10PM (34 children)
1. Climatologists have come up with multiple models of global average temperature over the last 10,000 years using a variety of lines of evidence (ice cores, algae, sea level, vegetation, etc). While it is true that there was a slight peak around the time that this summary describes, what's going on now is a far bigger and far faster change than what happened then.
2. The models climatologists are using absolutely take into account vegetation levels. That's one of the reasons they've been sounding the alarm, because human civilization has very intentionally removed a lot of the most CO2-reducing vegetation, e.g. Brazil's recent efforts to deforest areas of the Amazon for industrial reasons.
So a reading of this that sure seems intended, namely "don't worry about anthropogenic climate change, we just need to plant trees and everything will be fine" is not justified.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by driverless on Monday April 18 2022, @01:12PM (1 child)
The baloney is there, but it's in the SciTechDaily summary, which seems to be talking about a completely different paper than the one referenced, which is about the Holocene Temperature Conundrum. To quote its abstract:
Perhaps they used the Guardian's guide on how to write an article about a science paper [theguardian.com]?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @02:10PM
Thanks for that link, made my day!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 18 2022, @05:45PM (26 children)
Don't forget how North America was deforested in a relative blink of the eye... reforestation is happening in some areas but commercial forestry captures far less carbon than the original forests did.
Also don't forget: the oceans are three dimensional, not to mention covering far more solar collection area than land based vegetation. In 1982 my marine science teacher was sanguine about the deforestation of the Amazon, back then the narrative was more "save the trees, they make the oxygen you breathe" (incidentally, by conversion of CO2...) His reasoning was that ocean algae would take up the slack of any O2 deficit from land based deforestation - and he's not entirely wrong. Of course, he's also dead by now, so he was right that it wasn't a problem: for him. Another thing that wasn't discussed in 1982 was a key reason we should save the whales - not just because of that cool album of Humpback songs released in the 1970s, but also: whale poop. Whale poop is a significant source of fertilization for algae blooms, makes a huge difference in how much CO2 conversion the polar oceans can do. How huge? Hard to measure, but the global harvest of whale populations may have been as impactful to CO2 conversion as deforestation was, at least up until the 1960s.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 18 2022, @07:54PM (25 children)
Only if you ignore that most such wood gets turned into permanent carbon sinks like paper in landfills or lumber in buildings.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 18 2022, @08:18PM (24 children)
Lumber in buildings is only as permanent as the building, and if you consider a wood frame construction building a permanent carbon sink you have serious problems with time-scales.
Paper in landfills? https://www.paperrecyclingcoalition.com/policyissues/how-recycling-paper-fights-global-warming/#:~:text=First%2C%20when%20paper%20is%20not,carbon%20dioxide%20(CO2). [paperrecyclingcoalition.com]
What's next. does your toilet paper not decompose too?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 18 2022, @08:43PM (23 children)
Which generally is several decades. It's a pretty good carbon sink.
I was thinking the same thing about your post. Long enough carbon sink doesn't need to be permanent.
Yes, still going by that. Consider the blurb you quoted:
So all a landfill has to do is keep enough carbon sequestered out of the atmosphere that the methane released is more than 21 times less than the corresponding mass of CO2 that is represented by the sequestered carbon. It can do that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 19 2022, @02:19AM (22 children)
Which is like flash-powder burning compared to something like a peat bog.
I'm very confident in your calculations.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 19 2022, @03:23AM (21 children)
And my point stands. We don't need a peat bog. We need CO2 out for a few decades until the economics of burning fossil fuels change. This is an effective way to do that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 19 2022, @02:34PM (20 children)
Are you sure? Peat bogs worked pretty well to usher in the holocene. 20 year repositories of carbon have been common throughout recent history and don't seem to be as effective.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 19 2022, @06:09PM (19 children)
Time scale issue again. How many years is "recent history"? 30 years is traditionally considered the minimum time scale for climate dynamics. And if your 20 year repository just gets moved around rather than burnt (like reuse or thrown in a landfill), then it sticks around for more than 20 years.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 19 2022, @08:14PM (18 children)
Look at the average lifespan of wood in a stick-built home. Not cherry picked examples of survivors which have stood for 200+ years, but the average house, built, remodeled, demolished and replaced either by fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, termites, or new owners who simply want something different. How much wood is recycled when taken from these old homes? Less than 1%.
Thrown in a landfill is not a good way to preserve wood or paper from decomposition. They built a neighborhood in my hometown on an old landfill that had been "stabilized" but, somehow, within 20 years or so there were sinkholes appearing over nearly half of the properties from pockets of decomposing organics in the "stabilized" ex-landfill. We cleared a large quantity of palmetto bushes during a 500 year drought, buried them in a deep hole down to the then-current water table (about 25' deep) and covered them with about 4' of soil. They stay under the water table 95%+ of the time, which is supposed to preserve wood (and, indeed, at the bottom of that 25' hole we did unearth an ancient chunk of tree which was preserved by the water), but... whenever the buried organics dry out, rot starts. We had zero settling for about 5 years (a period of normal water levels), but after the next drought, we started getting rot - which was nice in that it made the pond a couple of feet deeper and compensated for the filling that had been occurring at the surface.
Short version: No, Virginia, landfills will not capture carbon long term.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 19 2022, @10:09PM (17 children)
It's more than 20 years.
It's not a good way, it's a great way to preserve such. What's missing is oxygen. I guess you've never talked to someone who has worked at excavating a landfill. I knew someone who was involved with moving an Albuquerque landfill a few decades back in the 1990s. They reported that they could pull a 1950s newspaper out of the trash and read it.
In wetter parts of the world, these landfills wouldn't keep paper and wood intact, but they still would preserve it (as you noted, I might add, in your anecdote). You earlier mentioned peat bogs as an example of a carbon trapping environment. Well, landfills are the human equivalent.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 20 2022, @03:02PM (16 children)
You're right, it's about oxygen, and it's incredibly soil and water table dependent.
Not all of the world has clay soil or high water tables, and transporting garbage from sandy soils areas to those preservation capable landfills would generate even more carbon than would be captured in the better landfill.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 20 2022, @06:13PM (15 children)
But all of the world that has trash, has plenty of it. Bury trash with trash and you remove the oxygen problem no matter what the soil is like.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 20 2022, @06:56PM (14 children)
Thousands of years developing landfill technology, and we still don't do it well enough to accomplish that ideal - not unless there's airtight dirt available, and if you're relying on water to do the job then you're leaching landfill contents (which are far more than just carbon) into the groundwater.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 21 2022, @02:46AM (13 children)
My take is that there is no dirt in the world that isn't good enough. You'd have to deliberately force air (some sort of compressed air system or blowers) into the landfill to get the sort of oxidation you claim.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 21 2022, @12:31PM (12 children)
Your take doesn't explain the settling collapses that happen in old landfills throughout Florida.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 21 2022, @04:22PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 21 2022, @04:24PM (10 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 21 2022, @05:02PM (8 children)
Up to 40% of wood mass (20% of carbon stored in wood) decomposes anerobically, releasing methane and CO2. Breathe some oxygen down into sandy soils by seasonally raising and lowering the water table and you get much more decomposition.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 22 2022, @10:22PM (7 children)
Ok, I'll buy the mechanism. But I notice two things here. First, that leaves 80% of carbon. And that there's a lot of places including Florida that can be made highly resistant to seasonal changes in water table (for example, plastic liners).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 23 2022, @12:43AM (6 children)
At landfill scale, things like plastic liners fail, frequently. They have started making stronger plastic liners, but when one fails there is no opportunity for repair that landfill will always leak, and leaks more as the liner degrades.
When they started placing liners (in the 1980s, I think) the concern was for escape of leachate from the waste, layers atop the waste are somewhat effective at keeping rainwater from ingress, but do nothing about rise and fall of ground water, particularly in tidal areas like the Dade county (Miami) landfill.
Landfills have also consolidated, fewer larger and longer operating landfills than there used to be, less opportunity to start over with new approaches like stronger liners.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 23 2022, @04:40AM (5 children)
So what? We just need it to be good enough not perfect. I figure it's already good enough with a thick layer of dirt on it, even in Florida, but to address your concern I added plastic. If we want better than that, then more plastic or whatever.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 23 2022, @12:24PM (4 children)
We need it to be good enough for the wood grown to be carbon neutral, or better. That would include the fuel burned in the forestry management and harvesting equipment. The energy input to the steel and other materials making said equipment, processing factories, workers moving to and from those activities. The workers and equipment that build the wood into houses and other structures, the collection and transport of scrap waste during the build process, and finally, for the 50% or less of grown wood material that actually makes it from the tree farm eventually to a landfill, we've got leakage of carbon there too. The physical human labor involved in all this burns calories that emit atmospheric carbon, and usually significant amounts of methane, in the process.
If you want to make a story about how "wood is good because it captures carbon" the only way that's really going to work is if you grow it, then make a landfill right next to the tree farm to put the trees in, and even that is going to leak more than a third of the carbon captured during the wood growth.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 23 2022, @04:27PM (3 children)
Why do you think the wood isn't carbon neutral in the first place? Did you grow it strictly with coal dug out of the ground for that purpose?
My point is that as long as most of the carbon in that wood stays in the ground (and methane emissions stay low), you're well ahead. Nothing you've written has corrected that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 23 2022, @05:43PM (2 children)
Your point is missing the point: the wood growing / wood based products industry as a whole is immensely carbon emitting, even if some fraction of the carbon captured by trees during growth gets sequestered in landfills for a few dozens to hundreds of years. Hell, some tiny fraction of landfills will eventually compress to coal, and even diamonds in subduction zones. That doesn't change the net effect of the activity: CO2 and methane being emitted to the atmosphere faster than it is being captured by the growth of the involved trees.
Oh, and forgot some big ones: creation, operation and maintenance of infrastructure, primarily roads and rails but also the power generation facilities necessary for wood processing. It's all part of the "wood products" equation.
You win your point: some carbon stays in some landfills. You lose big picture.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 23 2022, @07:33PM (1 child)
Ok, how much carbon is used to make the carbon equivalent in lumber or paper? You have a number or are you just going to handwave "immensely" much you've done every other claim you've made here?
Depends on the region. I'd say it is in Florida, but not in Brazil or Indonesia.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:20PM
These would be your fantasy versions of Brazil or Indonesia where everybody changes their behavior and isn't doing slash/burn conversion of old growth forests to cattle grazing land and palm oil plantations?
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 21 2022, @05:05PM
From the outside, sure: Florida is lousy with karst sinkholes (also caused by lowering of the water tables), but those are pretty well mapped out where they do and don't happen, as are ex-landfills. The surface depressions in the ex-landfills are well correlated with the landfill boundaries and not with the dried karst.
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday April 18 2022, @05:50PM (1 child)
It is possible that the changing vegetation caused humans to start burning fossil fuels in ever increasing amounts. That could explain things.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 19 2022, @10:09PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dalek on Monday April 18 2022, @11:05PM (1 child)
Here's the actual paper [science.org]. I haven't read it over in great detail, but it appears to be quite credible. The paper isn't making any statements about anthropocene warming or its causes. This paper is a sensitivity study attempting to understand mechanisms responsible for warming that occurred thousands of years ago and trying to get the model to reproduce proxy reconstructions of the temperature record.
This work was done with the CESM climate model. One of the components of CESM is the Community Land Model (CLM). There is a dynamic vegetation component of CLM, and if you want to know how it works, here is a slide set [ucar.edu] that describes it. I suspect that refinements have been made since 2014 but the underlying principles are probably very similar. The presentation discusses some criticisms of dynamic vegetation models by ecologists and how the models might be improved.
This is very different from modeling many processes in the atmosphere and oceans, where equations like the Navier-Stokes equations, the first law of thermodynamics, the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, continuity, and the equation of state can explicitly describe those processes. You don't have nice equations like that to describe the vegetation in climate models. This is really a sophisticated parameterization, but one with some very clear limitations. It seems difficult to verify the accuracy of dynamic vegetation outside of limited observations we've collected in recent centuries and decades. Extrapolating this behavior to other time periods and climate regimes is likely to result in greater errors. It may still be a useful tool, but it shouldn't be blindly trusted, particularly when the model simulations and proxy reconstructions disagree.
This study prescribed the vegetation instead of using the dynamic vegetation scheme in CLM. It found that the simulated temperatures better matched proxy reconstructions than with the dynamic vegetation scheme. It doesn't prove that the vegetation was responsible for the warming, though that's implied. It does suggest that the dynamic vegetation scheme should be improved. The paper cites prior work that also describes this problem:
The point is that the models need to accurately represent vegetation in order to get the temperatures right. We know that current warming is seriously affecting many ecosystems. If we want more accurate climate predictions of the future, we need to improve how dynamic vegetation is simulated in our models.
I haven't given the paper a detailed read, but it seems very reasonable. I didn't notice anything that even remotely looked like quackery. Your comment misses the mark here.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 19 2022, @03:01PM
As a sibling reply mentioned: The baloney isn't in the paper, but in the SciTechDaily description of the paper.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by HammeredGlass on Tuesday April 19 2022, @02:11PM
The Amazon rainforest isn't even half of that 10,000 years old.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @01:57PM (10 children)
Stop eating all the vegetation so that global temperatures can start coming down.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Monday April 18 2022, @02:14PM (9 children)
I'm asking in ignorance here, please be gentle.
My non-scientific intuition is that bare desert terrain reflects more heat out during the day and radiates far more heat out to space at night than a similar green landscape. When you hike through it this is part of why it feels much hotter during the day and colder at night.
Does the math say that deserts have more net heat gain than a similar green landscape?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @02:59PM (1 child)
The scientist behind the article appears to be saying that more greenery led to a warmer environment. What the connection is, is not clear from the article.
One plausible hypothesis is that greater transpiration from well-greened areas maintains higher ambient humidity, thereby increasing local greenhouse functions, resulting in higher net heat capture.
But we don't have cause and effect locked down here. There are clearly several interconnected factors, such as heat stress on equatorial plants, compared with friendlier temperatures for plant growth in cold temperate zones, increased partial vapour pressure of carbon dioxide increasing plant growth especially at higher elevations, and faster water cycles.
(Score: 2) by dalek on Monday April 18 2022, @10:22PM
If you read the actual paper [science.org], two mechanisms are proposed early on:
In the absence of vegetation, the albedo is higher, and more heat is reflected. Plant vegetation and more of that heat is absorbed instead of being reflected. The secondary factor is the vegetation tends to anchor soil in place, preventing it from blowing around in the atmosphere. Aerosols like sand grains scatter incoming shortwave radiation, which has a cooling effect. Reduce the amount of aerosols and less incoming shortwave radiation is reflected back into space.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday April 18 2022, @03:47PM (3 children)
There is a reflective factor - sand reflects more sunlight than plants, so in the desert you are blasted by a bit more reflected sunlight from below than in a field. However, that doesn't explain why the ground itself is actually much hotter despite not absorbing as much sunlight (since it's being reflected).
I think that has to do mostly with the specific heat capacity of dry sand versus wet soil and plants (plants, like all life, being mostly water). The specific heat of rock varies between about 0.1 and 0.25 kcal/kg-C, compared to 1 for water - which means the same amount of absorbed solar energy that would heat water by 1 degree, will heat dry rock by 4 to 10 degrees. The wetter the environment, the slower it heats up.
There's also the issue of thermal radiance that may play a factor - e.g. that's why shiny metal roofs get scalding hot despite reflecting almost all the light that hits them, while a nearby black rock will be much cooler - at a given temperature metals emit far less thermal radiation than rocks do, so the trickle of absorbed sunlight just keeps raising the temperature. But by the same token, rocks are generally great thermal emitters, and sand is just tiny rocks, so I don't know how much of a difference that really makes.
Building on that - one final major factor, especially for the rapid cooling off deserts at night, is humidity. Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas (though it self-regulates via precipitation, which is why the comparatively tiny amounts of CO2, methane, etc. can have an such an outsized effect - they change the balance point so that the air can hold more water before precipitation becomes likely) Since there's very little water in desert air, the thermal radiation from the sand can easily escape into space, instead of being bounced back down to the surface several times by water vapor before it finally escapes like it would in a more humid environment.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday April 19 2022, @03:58AM (2 children)
The water vapor thing has another component in grassland/forest vs. desert. Non-desert plants transpire an impressive amount of water. They're pulling that water out of the ground where the temperature is usually significantly lower than the ambient air temperature. The ground acts as a cold sink.
I feel like the total heat gain is lower in a desert vs. forest, but I'm not in any way qualified to defend that opinion.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday April 19 2022, @04:37AM
That's a good point. In fact, not only are they bringing up cold groundwater - that water is *evaporating*. A phase change which consumes roughly as much thermal energy as heating water from almost-freezing to almost boiling - so should have a significant cooling effect.
Photosynthesis too - it may not be very efficient, but it's busy converting a portion of the absorbed sunlight into sugars and cellulose instead of heat.
I believe you're right about the total heat gain - heat is just another name for energy, and a more reflective surface means less energy gets absorbed in the first place. Plus, the heat that does get absorbed causes a larger increase in temperature, which means it's radiated away faster (the speed at which heat is radiated away scales with the fourth power of temperature), further reducing the net pace of heat gain - filling a bucket gets slower the faster it leaks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dalek on Tuesday April 19 2022, @09:09AM
I'm not sure I agree about this. In terms of evapotranspiration, the heat is still there. It's just the difference between sensible and latent heat fluxes. A lot more of the heat fluxes in the desert is sensible heat instead of latent heat. But it's complicated by another factor. Deserts generally don't have much cloud cover. Perhaps more heat is reflected from the surface but less is reflected by clouds. Phoenix averages 87% of possible sunshine annually. Atlanta is at nearly the same latitude but averages 62% annually. Even in midsummer during monsoon season, Phoenix gets 86-87% of possible sunshine, while Atlanta is around 62-63% at the same time of year. In terms of the total daytime heat flux, the real question is whether the increased albedo of the surface in the desert offsets the increased cloud cover.
Here are some maps [wisc.edu] of albedo. You're looking for planetary albedo, which accounts for both the surface albedo and the effects of cloud cover. In the US, the Southwest has a higher surface albedo, but the lack of cloud cover more than offsets the surface albedo. More of the heat is partitioned into sensible heat fluxes, but there's also just more heat generally because of the lower total albedo. The surface albedo is relatively high, but the cloud cover is low.
But this result isn't generalized. It depends on your desert and what you're comparing it to. I recommend figure 2 of this paper [uw.edu] and the planetary albedo map. In the case of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, the surface albedo is so high that the sum of the latent and sensible heat fluxes should be smaller than other places at comparable latitudes like India. Even so, there's also quite a bit of seasonal variability. In July, the albedo in India is actually higher than in the Sahara and Arabian deserts because of cloud cover from the monsoon.
Overall, I'd say deserts typically have high albedo, meaning that the sum of the sensible and latent heat fluxes is probably lower than in other areas. But it's a lot more complicated when you look into the details.
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(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @03:55PM (1 child)
The science is complicated but in layman's terms just think about this way: trees are never warmer than their surroundings, while cows are always warmer than their surroundings. The law of conservation of energy implies that the cows must be concentrating external heat into their bodies. Therefore, more cows means less heat available for global warming, with the steaks being a side benefit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @05:51PM
There appears to be a correlation between cows per capita and renewable electricity generation.
e.g. Uruguay has 3.45 cows per person and 96% renewables. While its neighbor Argentina has only 1.2 cows per person and only 21% renewables.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 18 2022, @05:48PM
It's more about the heat trapping greenhouse effects. Deserts are somewhat neutral in that game, and physically they do radiate a lot of heat to space in part due to their relative lack of cloud cover / dry air, etc. However, the processes that put CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere can have a much bigger effect than the simple radiation over a desert area. Atmospheric gases cover the oceans, which will always have a larger physical contribution to global temperatures than deserts, at least for as long as they are so much bigger than the deserts.
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