Large forests may have a greater impact on the global climate than expected

By Thomas Clark

When rain falls in the forest where many trees gather, it contains a lot of moisture, and after the rain leaves trees and soil may release water vapor to create clouds. The possibility that such forests are affecting the climate on a global scale is being debated.

How Planting Trees Affects Climate Change - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/how-forests-affect-climate-change/572770/

When Professor Abigail Swan of the University of Washington started a career as a researcher in the mid 2000s, a scientist who advocates a theory that like plants like Swan "plants on the earth have a big influence on the climate of the earth" There were only a few. Many researchers believe that the climate is being influenced by rain, atmospheric movement, wind, and other physical phenomena.

However, after that, there seems to be an increasing number of scientists who agree with Mr. Swan's theory. Plants have the function of moving water, carbon dioxide, and other substances between the ground and the atmosphere, and by simulating it with a powerful computer, Mr. Swan plants have influenced the earth's climate I have backed it up.

An example of the extinction of plants that greatly changed the climate is a large sandstorm called dust bowl, which occurred in plain areas of the Midwestern United States in the 1930s. The farmers mowed the grass to expose the ground to change the plains, which was a large prairie until it was settled, until the Caucasus settled, so that the drying of the land proceeded and the dust clouds soared At the end of the event, sandstorms began to occur frequently. Due to that influence, agriculture was devastated in the Midwest, and many farmers were forced to give up agriculture.

On the leaves of plants, there are over 1 million small holes called "pores" in one leaf, through which the plants take in carbon dioxide and spit out oxygen and water vapor. Each pore is very small, but according to one theory it is said that one tree can release several hundred liters of water as steam a day. When such trees gather a lot to make a forest, and become a jungle like an Amazon, its work becomes very big. Mr. Antonio Nobre, climate scientist at the Institute for Space Research in Brazil, speculates that the Amazon rainforest will emit about 20 trillion liters of water a day.

Among scientists, from the late 1970s, Amazon rainforests became known to themselves to create storms themselves. Recent studies have also revealed the findings that more than half of the rainfall in South America is derived from the jungle. In the usual way of thinking, it is thought that "the forest develops because the climate is wet," Douglas Seal, an environmental scientist at Norwegian University of Life Sciences says, "On the contrary it is" because the forest makes the climate wet " I am asking you ".

By Rômulo Ferreira

Mr. Swan entered the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and has conducted doctoral research in collaboration with Atmospheric Scientist Inene Huang. Mr. Swan and Ms. Juan are conducting computer simulations using a climate model to investigate how the forest changes affect climate. For example, the results show that as the forest increases in the Arctic Circle, the Arctic temperature rises by 1 degree, but this is because the tree absorbs sunlight and releases greenhouse effect water vapor And it is explained. Just as the forest absorbs carbon dioxide, it absorbs infrared rays from the earth and releases a lot of water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas. After that, steam melts the ice on land and at sea, and the feedback is formed that the temperature rises as more solar light is absorbed by exposing the ground.

On the other hand, there is also a critical view on this approach. The reason is that the computer simulation using the climate model is not yet perfect, and the situation heavily depends on the Community Earth System Model (CESM) developed at the American Atmospheric Research Center . In addition, it is also a problem of computer simulation research to simulate different climate models based on the same meteorological data, the results are often quite different.

The earth's climate is an extremely complicated phenomenon in which every and all elements are intertwined and influence globally. It seems that it will take a long time to elucidate the whole climate where the teleconnection that the events that occurred at a certain point go round and affect another point.