Tree planting may buy more time to fight climate change than thought | Science News
Earth has nearly a billion hectares suitable for new forests to start trapping carbon, a study finds.
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Fucking James Cameron and Ferngully, stop being so smug! How were we to know that savaging the world's forests would turn out to be a bad thing!?Planting trees on 0.9 billion hectares of land could trap about two-thirds the amount of carbon released by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution, a new study finds.
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The analysis revealed space to nourish enough trees to capture some 205 metric gigatons of carbon in about a century. That's close to 10 times the savings expected from managing refrigerants, the top item on a list of climate-fighting strategies from the nonprofit Project Drawdown, a worldwide network of scientists, advocates and others proposing solutions to global warming.
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Even something as simple as the darkness of tree leaves can change how much heat a landscape absorbs or reflects. Expanding forests into formerly snow-bright, reflective zones, for instance, might warm them. In the tropics, however, the enhanced cooling from clouds might be the more powerful effect.