Blame - Someone!

Yes – we evil ‘neo-cons’, and our – ‘we don’t yet know enough about Global Warming/Cooling/Intemperating/Vaccilating/Vomiting to really be able to say whether we are the cause or not’ has come in for some wild beating over the last little while. Fascinating, really, when all we’ve ever said is, ‘we don’t know’. How stupid we are!

Well, the knowledge tree is slowly giving up its fruit, and it seems some of our major enemies in the global globalling Armageddon are not, in fact, cars, factories (and the USA, of course), but. . .

Global warming: blame the forests

Research identifies plants as source of methane - climate scientists shocked by new findings. . .

The result has come as a shock to climate scientists. "This is a genuinely remarkable result," said Richard Betts of the climate change monitoring organisation the Hadley Centre. "It adds an important new piece of understanding of how plants interact with the climate."

Yadvinder Malhi, a specialist in the relationship between vegetation and climate at Oxford University, said the plant source of methane had probably been missed in the past because scientists have a poor understanding of the way methane circulates in the atmosphere. "There are a variety of sources and sinks of methane and there are huge error bars on those terms," he said. "What's been uncertain is where the methane is coming from and where it's going. Unlike carbon dioxide, methane is much more dynamic; it lasts about 10 years in the atmosphere."
And there you have it. ‘Scientists have a poor understanding. . .’

Why is this so hard to understand? Well, that is assuming you don’t really have some other motive for wanting the USA (and only the USA) to shut down half its industry. . .

In other 'surprise' results:

Tree planting
Researchers in North Carolina found that planting trees to soak up carbon dioxide can suck water and nutrients from the ground, dry up streams and change the soil's mineral balance.

Aerosols
A recent study in Nature found cutting air pollution could trigger a surge in global warming. Aerosols cool the Earth by reflecting radiation back into space. Scrapping them would have adverse consequences .

Global dimming
In 2003 scientists noticed levels of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface had dropped by 20% in recent years because of air pollution and bigger, longer-lasting clouds.

I don't know about anyone else, but I wouldn't call any of this a surprise, but rather more of the 'we don't know. . .'

But that's just so much nasty old 'neo-con' talk again, I guess.

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