This article in The New York Times is talking about the UN meeting this Tuesday. The UN is meeting to talk about the climate crisis and measures that can be taken to reduce carbon emissions. One measure they will talk about is stoping deforestation and planting trees, but researchers have found this might not be the best route to take. Climate scientists have found that planting trees in the tropical areas would lead to cooling, but in colder areas it would cause warming. The article goes into more detail about their findings, but overall the measure to plant trees is probably not the best route to take for reducing climate change. President Reagan quote that, “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” might be less wrong than many assumed. This is indeed a sad conclusion because it is one of the easier measures to accomplish but the end results are proven to be unhelpful. Hopefully the UN will come up with better action plays, which are scientifically proven to help reduce climate change.
why so? trees are kinda important for our planet.. and yes.. i read the article but not agree with those UN stuff..
This was so interesting! I hadn’t factored in how the albedo effect would worsen the rise in temperature, but it makes a lot of sense. Even though planting trees was an “easy” conventional wisdom fix that anyone could do, we can take this information into account to possibly create another. What if we used the albedo effect to our advantage? The color white does this best… is it possible that creating “white” cities or reflectors would help? I also watched a documentary about aerosols for the atmosphere that would essentially work as a sunscreen for the Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_(geoengineering) ).