Geoengineering wars: Another scientist teases out a surprising effect of global deforestation

AUSTIN—A new and unpublished analysis of the regional impacts of a hypothetical scheme to mitigate global warming via radical deforestation was unveiled here Sunday at a gathering of science journalists and writers, on the heels of a blogging firestorm about geoengineering and climate change in anticipation of the release of Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.

The book, due out October 20, is the follow-on book by University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner, authors of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Related research on the impact of deforestation has previously been detailed by various scientists including Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, Calif. In a 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Caldeira used a 3-D climate model to mimic full global deforestation and found that by the year 2100, this approach would lower annual global mean temperatures by 0.5 degree Fahrenheit.

Taking the opposite tack, Caldeira had found in a 2005 paper in Geophysical Research Letters that replacement of all the Earth’s vegetation by forests would result in a 1.3 degrees Celsius increase in mean global temperatures. Alternatively, global replacement with grasslands would result in cooling of 0.4 degree Celsius.

Now, Caldeira is featured, reportedly not in a flattering light, in Superfreakonomics, drawing the attention of blogger and climate expert Joseph Romm who calls the book “error-riddled” and accuses it, in this Climate Progress post, of promoting global cooling myths and sheer nonsense. (Dubner responded in this October 18 blog post, which refers to Romm’s post as a “smear.”)

Following up on the same geoengineering theme, Earth and atmospheric scientist Kevin Gurney of Purdue University offered similar details as Caldeira has found to attendees of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s annual meeting of his modeling of what would happen in three latitudinal zones if all Earth’s trees were systematically stripped from land surfaces over time.

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Tags: atmospheric scientist, climate expert, climate model, geoengineering, global deforestation, global ecology, global replacement, global temperatures, joseph romm, ken caldeira, national academy of sciences, science journalists, stephen j dubner

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Consider This, Scientific American, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.