Trees capture and store CO2, they've been doing for millions of years, proven technology. Low maintenance, cheap to run, any mug can operate them. They even look nice. No, they don't reflect the sun's energy back into space like ice and desert. They weren't asking for that.
(Though, incidentally, using electricity generated from solar instead of electricity from other sources which add to the total heat in the atmosphere, would logically solve that problem.) OK, I'll throw that in as a bonus. Stop quibbling, I want my prize.
At 5:23 PM -0500 10/2/07, Doug Henwood wrote:
>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.
>
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