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• Damian Carrington (Planting billions of trees ‘best way to save planet’, 5 July) hails new research revealing that “a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities”. The analysis found there are 1.7bn hectares of treeless land on which 1.2tn native tree saplings would naturally grow. That area is about 11% of all land and equivalent to the size of the US and China combined.
Unfortunately that area also rivals the extent of the bright polar sea ice, whose loss to global warming threatens to amplify climate change by decreasing the Earth’s “albedo” – its average capacity to reflect solar energy back into space.
Just as the deep blue sea is darker than polar ice, green forests tend to absorb roughly twice as much solar heat as the generally paler ground they overshadow. Geoengineering is where you find it, and humanity’s impact on albedo – we have already physically altered half of the land surface of the Earth – deserves as much thought as managing our carbon footprint.
Russell Seitz
Senior research fellow, The Climate Institute
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Monday, July 8, 2019
THE WOODS ARE LOVELY, DARK AND DEEP
