We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
This is one more reminder that the forest is our best ally in terms
of optimizing water supply. Although it cannot do all the heavy
lifting, it does enough to be the dominant force everywhere. Again
recall that a tree puts a gallon of water into the atmosphere
typically. This then precipitates a ways down wind. The cycle
continues for great distances even in the absence of additional
Modern agriculture has far too often cleared the land of forest and
destroyed the hydraulic balance. We are getting wiser, but we have
not gone out and actively engaged in hydraulic restoration the way we
Recall that the Sahara was once fully vegetated. I am certain that
human destruction in concert with the goat destroyed it. Lakes
drained forthwith and it has never recovered not least because the
same goat subsistence lifestyle still exists although they are now at
least conscious of the connection.
New study shows how
climate change could affect entire forest ecosystems
by Staff Writers
Santa Barbara CA
(SPX) Nov 29, 2012
caused by fog collect on the needles of this Bishop pine tree on
Santa Cruz Island
The fog comes in, and
a drop of water forms on a pine needle, rolls down the needle, and
falls to the forest floor. The process is repeated over and over, on
each pine needle of every tree in a forest of Bishop pines on Santa
Cruz Island, off the coast of Santa Barbara. That fog drip helps the
entire forest ecosystem stay alive.
Thousands of years
ago, in cooler and wetter times, Bishop pine trees are thought to
have proliferated along the West Coast of the U.S. and Mexico. Now,
stratus clouds - the low-altitude clouds known locally as "June
gloom" - help keep the trees growing on Santa Cruz Island, Santa
Rosa Island, and on one island off Baja California. Other than these
locations, Bishop pine trees grow only farther north in California
where it is cooler and wetter.
Mariah S. Carbone,
first author of a new paper, titled "Cloud Shading and Fog Drip
Influence the Metabolism of a Coastal Pine Ecosystem," and her
co-authors, studied the influence of clouds on the largest Bishop
pine forest of Santa Cruz Island. Carbone is a postdoctoral fellow
with UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis (NCEAS). Their study was published in the journal Global
think about climate change, they're often thinking about temperature
and precipitation," said Carbone. "When you think about
precipitation, it's rain and snow, depending on where you are. What
this study showed is that you can have really important water inputs
coming from clouds that influence the carbon cycle."
She explained that
clouds are one of the largest uncertainties in global climate, and
that the forest ecosystem interactions with clouds have a large
impact - one that has rarely been studied before, particularly in
Changes in cloudiness
or cloud height with global warming will alter the types of forest
ecosystems that grow in coastal California, explained Carbone. While
predictions about how rainfall will change in California over the
next 50 years are uncertain, fog and low-stratus clouds might decline
as sea-surface temperatures warm.
Like the relict Bishop
pines on Santa Cruz Island, and the majestic coastal Redwood forests
in Northern California, forests remove and store carbon from the
atmosphere, and thus are important for understanding greenhouse gas
concentrations in the future. These coastal forests are also highly
valued for their aesthetic and recreation qualities.
Fog is often present
in coastal California during May through August. It occurs when the
land warms in the spring and summer, and moist ocean air is pulled
over cold, upwelling coastal waters. This moist air then condenses
under a stable atmospheric inversion layer, creating low clouds or
"The finding that
summer fog strongly impacts carbon cycling highlights the need for
improved understanding of whether we should expect coastal summer
cloud behavior to change in a warmer world," said second author
A. Park Williams, a former graduate student in UCSB's Geography
Department, now at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"A change in
summer fogginess could produce temperature, moisture, and carbon
feedbacks in coastal ecosystems that easily swamp out the effects
expected from increased greenhouse gases alone," said Williams.
The carbon cycle
involves the movement of billions of tons of carbon between the
oceans, lands, and atmosphere every year. Increased amounts of carbon
dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, are injected into the atmosphere
and contribute to climate change.
received help from NASA and NOAA in collecting information. "We
used satellite data to map the spatial distribution of cloud cover
across the western portion of Santa Cruz Island," said senior
author Christopher J. Still, formerly an associate professor at UC
Santa Barbara, now at Oregon State University.
"We had some
evidence of a cloud cover gradient from the coast to inland, based on
our own observations and our weather station data, but the satellite
data - from NOAA and NASA satellites - really allowed us to quantify
this gradient across the western half of the island and in particular
at our two study sites," said Still.
Still said that the
authors believe this study is unique in linking clouds to soil
microbial activity. "While most previous research on fog and
ecosystems has focused on its role in plant-water relations - such as
the well-known linkages between fog and coast Redwoods - we show that
soil microbial activity and metabolism in these coastal ecosystems
may be very dependent on the light but frequent fog drip that occurs
during the rainless summer months," said Still.
The study is also
unique in linking fog and low clouds to the carbon cycle of a coastal
ecosystem, including its impact on tree growth and soil respiration.
"What we found
was that there are two major effects of the clouds," said
Carbone. "One is shading, which keeps the temperatures cooler
and the soil moisture higher. The other is fog drip, which is a water
input into the soil."
The soil moisture
content was not depleted as rapidly where the trees were under more
cloud cover, and thus they were able to grow longer into the dry
season. Water pulses from fog drip immediately stimulated microbes in
the litter and soil below, but did not directly enhance pine tree
activity. The microbial activity releases carbon dioxide into the
provides us with a greater understanding of how fog and the low
coastal clouds which Californians commonly call 'the marine layer'
affect plant growth and the activities of microorganisms in the
soil," said John Randall, scientist with The Nature Conservancy,
which owns and operates Santa Cruz Island in cooperation with the
National Park Service and the University of California.
of the importance of fog and low clouds in influencing plant growth
and survival and microbial metabolism in the soil will help us
understand how changes in coastal fogs and low clouds that may
accompany climate change will affect the forests and soils on Santa
Cruz Island, other islands off the coast of California and Mexico,
and all along the coast of the adjacent mainland."