Surprise: New Cause Of Warming Discovered By Scientists Doing Science

February 23, 2018 – 10:30 am

Meh. It’s still probably your fault for refusing to live in an off the grid tiny home while growing your own veggies and making your clothes out of hemp

Scientists Identify A Major Source Of Climate Warming. It’s Not CO2

For the first time, scientists were able to use satellites to map the potential warming effect of large-scale changes to vegetation on the Earth’s surface.

“Our results show that vegetation cover change over the period 2000–2015 has produced on average a brighter but warmer land surface,” reads a new study published in the journal Nature.

The European Commission Joint Research Center’s new study found “perturbations in the surface energy balance generated by vegetation change from 2000 to 2015 have led to an average increase of [0.23 degrees Celsius] in local surface temperature where those vegetation changes occurred.”

“Vegetation transitions behind this warming effect mainly relate to agricultural expansion in the tropics, where surface brightening and consequent reduction of net radiation does not counter-balance the increase in temperature associated with reduction in transpiration,” the study found.

A large part of this study is looking at land use, and how small changes can have big impacts, something that Skeptics have been saying for a long time, to go with the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) and natural variation. Things like forestation, deforestation, turning woodland into farmland (or cities). Planting crops in areas that didn’t used to have them. Creating woodland in areas that didn’t use to have them. All these things and more can have profound effects on weather patterns, and those long-term weather pattern averages are what is known as climate.

And let’s not forget that increased CO2 increases plant growth, and nature puts out more CO2 than mankind.

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This entry was written by William Teach and posted on at 10:30 am and filed under Collapsing Science, Global Warming. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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2 Responses to “Surprise: New Cause Of Warming Discovered By Scientists Doing Science”

  1. Jeffery says:
    February 23, 2018 at 3:02 pm

    Their abstract:

    I couldn’t find where the scientists called this a “Major Source”, but I may have missed it.

    Changing vegetation cover alters the radiative and non-radiative properties of the surface. The result of competing biophysical processes on Earth’s surface energy balance varies spatially and seasonally, and can lead to warming or cooling depending on the specific vegetation change and background climate. Here we provide the first data-driven assessment of the potential effect on the full surface energy balance of multiple vegetation transitions at global scale. For this purpose we developed a novel methodology that is optimized to disentangle the effect of mixed vegetation cover on the surface climate. We show that perturbations in the surface energy balance generated by vegetation change from 2000 to 2015 have led to an average increase of 0.23±0.03°C in local surface temperature where those vegetation changes occurred. Vegetation transitions behind this warming effect mainly relate to agricultural expansion in the tropics, where surface brightening and consequent reduction of net radiation does not counter-balance the increase in temperature associated with reduction in transpiration. This assessment will help the evaluation of land-based climate change mitigation plans.

    from their Discussion:

    It is worth noting that our approach addresses exclusively the direct biophysical impact of land cover change at local scales, since climate feedbacks and large-scale teleconnections cannot be assessed with this method of local space-for-time substitution.

    I didn’t see whether they addressed what proportion of overall warming they attributed to these land use changes compared to the proportion from CO2 changes, but maybe I missed it.

  2. Jeffery says:
    February 24, 2018 at 9:33 am

    TEACH: Can you point out where the authors called this a “major” contributor and/or where they estimated what proportion or warming this causes? I may have missed it.

    The “major” descriptor may have originated with the reliably unreliable Daily Caller, although I could be wrong.

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