I was interested (and somewhat amused) to read that the biggest reforestation project in the world has had some - wait for it - unintended consequences. Say it ain't so!
China’s massive tree-planting push has long been hailed as a climate win. But new research shows the country’s ambitious effort to slow land degradation, and fight climate change, has also reshaped its water supply in surprising, and sometimes uneven, ways.
When China dramatically expanded forests and restored grasslands under its "Great Green Wall" initiative, it didn’t just change what the land looked like, it changed how water moves between the ground and the atmosphere.
. . .
“They’ve actually increased forest cover by 15% over the last five decades,” [meteorologist Jennifer] Gray explained. “If you think about the amount of moisture that those forests are releasing into the atmosphere, it is just an incredible amount.”
. . .
What surprised researchers most wasn’t that water moved, it was where it ended up. “What’s so remarkable about this study is the scale of it and the unintended consequences,” Gray said. “The rain was distributed in completely different ways and in completely different places.”
The reason lies in the atmosphere itself.
“The atmosphere and the winds can actually transport moisture more than 4,000 miles,” Gray explained. “So if you plant trees in one area that doesn’t mean that that’s exactly where it’s going to rain.”
. . .
That’s why Gray says climate solutions can’t stop at planting trees. “It puts an exclamation mark on the importance of having city planners get involved, water management folks get involved as well,” she said, “so this can be carefully thought out as to where the water is going to be distributed once you do something like this.”
There's more at the link.
This is fascinating to me. I've never figured out how bureaucrats and political functionaries can dictate to Nature - "We are going to do this, to force you to do that" - without any real understanding of how Nature works, the interplay of forces and influences that mold and shape the world we live in. It seems ridiculous on the face of it; what my father would call "farting against thunder". The power of natural forces is so enormously greater than anything of which we can conceive that it makes fools of the bureaucrats who think that way. Perhaps this is yet another example of the folly that led to Mao's megalomaniac "Great Leap Forward", which led directly to the "Great Chinese Famine" and caused tens of millions of deaths.
I think it's a laudable ambition to halt desertification by reforestation . . . but just reforesting thousands of square miles doesn't mean they'll be transformed into the microclimate you want them to have. I'll be watching the progress of similar projects with great interest. Ethiopia is planting 50 billion trees; there's the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel; and India has The Great Green Wall of Aravalli. I wonder if they'll all run into the same problem?
(There's also the colonial-era Great Hedge of India, designed to prevent unwanted border crossing in either direction. Perhaps the Border Patrol might like to investigate that project?)
Peter
13 comments:
"climate solutions": the pay-off for devotees of the Great Goddess Gaia.
It goes farther than rain.
Lawmakers never seem to ever think, "and then what happens?" At best, they have linear thoughts. Ever look at photographs that show the ways clouds or ocean currents look? There isn't a straight line in the world.
There's a famous quote in biology where a reporter asked a biologist what a lifetime of studying nature had taught him about God, should there be one. The biologist said, "He's inordinately fond of beetles." I say He's inordinately fond of partial differential equations.
In about 1980 or 1981, because the beaches of Melbourne, FL were eroding at such an alarming rate, the Corps Of Engineers spread
several hundred truckloads of sand along the beach.
All that extra sand was promptly eroded away, and re-deposited about 20 miles south of there, silting up the Sebastian Inlet.
The Corps Of Engineers then had to dredge the inlet and dump that sand a few miles offshore.
BSLL@816: Wait, what? They didn't dredge it up and truck it back to the eroded beaches? Obviously, they needed MOAR Sand! Or maybe polymeric sand...
Everything man does, man being a part of the equation, redistributes that equation. Los Angeles, CA is infamous for its smog. Indeed, long before the automobile, the indians called the L.A. basin "The Valley Of The Smokes, as smoke from their campfires would loiter for long periods in that area. When clouds bring moisture into southern California, the moisture condenses on the smoke particles and causes more rain in the L.A. basin then elsewhere, "robbing" the inland areas of the rian they were supposed to get. Man pushes, Earth counters...
Missed a chance. They could have hired two guys with a truck and a loader and had them out there everyday, from then until now. What with overhead, incentives, and the like, they could have rivaled a Somali daycare in ̶p̶a̶y̶o̶u̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶k̶i̶c̶k̶b̶a̶c̶k̶s̶ political donations.
There is a staggering amount of water in a cloud. People have no idea.
A century ago, the Federal government tried to "re-forest" Oklahoma and Kansas. Speeches were made, funds appropriated, trees planted.
And then all the trees died, because the Feds didn't understand that if the land was suitable for trees, there would have been trees there already.
Entire books could be written about Corps of Engineers catastrophic screw-ups. Books probably *have* been written, for that matter.
They're dealing with chaotic systems and sometimes interering with those doesn't go as planned. But their list of just plain stupidity would still be just as long. And people died due to some of them. But they were only taxpayers, and as far as I could find out, the COE people involved were not only not fired, they weren't even censured, at least not publicly.
The Wikipedia link, "Four Pests campaign" [instead of the Great Leap Forward]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
is a much better read. Especially the last few paragraphs (skip to them).
Those poor sparrows :) !!!
"I've never figured out how bureaucrats and political functionaries can dictate to Nature - "We are going to do this, to force you to do that" - without any real understanding of how Nature works, the interplay of forces and influences that mold and shape the world we live in."
It's easy when you are of a certain personality type. You are a self-evident genius, and all we have to do is this one simple thing... The idea of unintended consequences never enters your head.
As someone who gets yellow dust from the Gobi paying a visit several times a year, most recently a couple of weeks ago, I'm all in favor of that reforestation even if it turns out to have unanticipated side effects...
It's interesting how the environazis who get all wound up about deforestation seem to miss the fact that there has been considerable global reforestation in recent decades
I'm not ragging on the COE, some politician probably got a kickback from spreading sand where the ocean clearly didn't want it.
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