On Feb 10, 2007, at 4:30 PM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>> Gore and Branson said that although scientists are working on
>> technologies to capture carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at
>> power plants and other industrial sources, no one has developed a
>> strategy to remove gases already released into the atmosphere.
>
> Easy, plant lots of trees. Gimme my $5 million deposit you wankers.
Actually it may not be so simple.
<http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/324200.pdf>
Climate Effects of Global Land Cover Change S. Gibbard, K. Caldeira, G. Bala, T. J. Phillips, and M. Wickett
Abstract
There are two competing effects of global land cover change on climate: an albedo effect which leads to heating when changing from grass/croplands to forest, and an evapotranspiration effect which tends to produce cooling. It is not clear which effect would dominate in a global land cover change scenario. We have performed coupled land/ocean/atmosphere simulations of global land cover change using the NCAR CAM3 atmospheric general circulation model.
We find that replacement of current vegetation by trees on a global basis would lead to a global annual mean warming of 1.6 C, nearly 75% of the warming produced under a doubled CO2 concentration, while global replacement by grasslands would result in a cooling of 0.4 C. These results suggest that more research is necessary before forest carbon storage should be deployed as a mitigation strategy for global warming. In particular, high latitude forests probably have a net warming effect on the Earth's climate.