Climate Scientists are Missing the Biggest Solution. Here's why.

Plants and trees have the ability to cool our environment quickly. But scientists and the institutions they work for cannot be bothered.

This is from Cows Save The Planet, by Judith D. Schwartz, one of my favorite environmental books and one which should be required reading for anyone who thinks biology plays a trivial role in our climate.

“If the sun's beams strike bare soil, what you primarily get is "sensible heat," which means it generates heat you can feel. If, however, solar radiation falls on moist soil covered with vegetation (and saturated soil invariably has plant cover), the scenario changes. Rather than producing palpable heat, the solar energy is transformed into "latent heat" held in water vapor.” (Cows Save The Planet, p. 80)

When the sun shines on bare soil, this is a solar powered hot plate. But when it shines on plants and trees, it is a solar powered air conditioner.

This is arguably the single most neglected fact in climate science.

If the powers that be really wanted to cool the climate, they would be talking about how we could increase the amount of plant cover in the world and decrease the amount of bare soil, including the widespread bare soil in crop fields and man-made deserts.

When the sun shines on plants and trees, the plants and trees use that energy to push water vapor out of their pores (aka stomata). 

This results in evaporation of large amounts of water. According to the US Forest Service a medium sized tree transpires 11,000 gallons of water per year, which averages out to about 40-50 gallons per day during the growing season. That’s a lot of water and a lot of evaporation. Each gallon of water that evaporates has a measurable cooling effect.

Evaporating water cools its surroundings. We experience this when we step out of the shower or the swimming pool. We feel cold because water is evaporating. Humans sweat or perspire because we need the cooling effects of evaporating water.

Humans perspire. Trees and plants transpire. Transpiration has the same cooling effect as perspiration.

Why do climate “scientists” not talk about this more? Maybe because they are not as objective as we have been led to believe.

The good news is that most if not all of us have a meaningful role to play in increasing the amount of plant cover in the world. You don’t have to be a PhD to make a difference and help others do the same, by understanding the true nature of the problem and taking relevant action.

Here’s another quote from the same book.

"The impact of increasing CO2 concentrations on the greenhouse effect can be completely compensated by a relatively minor change in the hydrological cycle over land," say Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov, as quoted in Cows Save The Planet, p. 88

Question: Given that bare soil creates a solar powered hot plate and vegetation creates a solar powered air conditioner, how much would we have to replace bare ground with vegetation, in order to reverse global warming? I don’t know the answer. But I suspect that the answer lies somewhere between 5% and 20%.

Here’s why.

According to Australian soil and climate scientist Walter Jehne, the amount of incoming heat on earth is 342 watts per square meter, on average. The amount of outgoing heat is 339 watts per square meter. This is the greenhouse effect. The excess of incoming heat over outgoing heat is the greenhouse effect. If we could lower the incoming heat and/or increase the outgoing heat, we could eliminate the greenhouse effect. 

Notice that the incoming heat is only 3 watts per square meter over the outgoing heat. That’s only a 1% difference. We only have to close this 1% gap and there would be no greenhouse effect, by definition.

I can’t prove this, but I strongly suspect that if we increased vegetation on land by 5-20%, we would eliminate the greenhouse effect.

I think our NASA and United Nations scientists should be looking into this, and the New York Times should be reporting on it. If they don’t, they are asleep at the wheel and don’t deserve the esteem common afforded scientists. All due respect. Emphasis on the word “due.” Respect is earned.

Yes, I’m somewhat miffed. But I think we all have the right to be, unless these so-called scientists can explain to us why they are not looking into the potential of vegetation to cool the planet quickly, cleanly and safely.

We can quickly close the gap between where we are and where we need to be by changing our practices in the realm of agriculture, forestry, wildlife management, livestock management, landscaping and gardening.

That sounds like a big task, but the science is on our side. Our job is to Learn, Do, Teach and Repeat.

We cannot rely on big institutions (government, media, Big Green) to do this work for us. They have already demonstrated their profound lack of interest.