Thanks for a great article Rob. The paper of Pielke sits on my desk because I plan to write someting about it. But now you did it in an elegant way! I restacked your article, not that I really understand what that means!
Great article. Cool you got to converse with Pielke. Wondering if you could clarify a bit more how the land use change in the Florida peninsula affected precipitation. As it gets deforested and paved over, more of it will heat up, causing convection to rise. How does that affect the water evapotranspiring from the marshes, and then flowing to the altered land?
Great question. That was what I thought at first. It has do with the geography. Pielke theorizes that under original, wet conditions, the middle part was often under water, with the deepest water in the center, which heats up more slowly than the margins, causing air flow from center of the peninsula outward, where it converges with the incoming sea breeze. When drained and developed, the heat simply rises and doesn't flow outward to converge with the breeze. Does that make sense?
Heres my way of intrepreting what Pielke is saying : if you develop the land it will also have less water, and so there is less water to evapotranspire, which means less water to converge to form rain. In addition if there is more developed land, there is a much bigger heated region, which means a much bigger convergence zone. So the air moisture when it converges to that region is then spread out much more, and so less likely to reach a humidity point that can create rain.
HI Rob, i think he is talking about the shutting down of the biotic pump and being replaced by a heat dome which nullifies the ability for cloud formation as we see in many parts of the world.
Rob, excellent pulling together of information to solidify my belief that the ecology and the climate are interconnected. It makes sense and affirms the route to keeping the Climate Crisis from totally destroying our planet. But, humans are not great at making changes to the status quo - so I am not very optimistic about my grand and great grand children having a livable planet. Thanks for sharing, Rob!❤️
Well said! There's an organisation called Perspectiva whose people are working with heart and head and right relationship to bring about global change. See Perspectiva's substack.
As I begin to understand the implications of this and be moved by both the beauty, the clarity and poetry to look up and around, I ardently want to mind my natural manners.
Thanks, Jason. Lopez is my pole star. Keats had his concept of negative capability, which I think has an ecological meaning. Somehow we need to be capable of less.
Wow, Rob, this is an amazing paper. It should be given top billing at a conference where these issues are discussed in a sane and useful manner—instead of buzzwords, knee-jerkism, and ideology. But no, Canada’s Child King will go ahead with his zero-emissions policy, impoverish the citizens, and only make things worse.
Excellent work, Rob. I'll put this in my links next week and hopefully send some folks over to get a deeper understanding of the unity between climate and ecology. It's an elegant way to describe the reality. Thank you.
Thank you for this Rob, have learnt a lot from your essays here and they continue to inform and inspire the way we manage our piece of land here in the Philippines.
We have a river that borders the north side of our property, at the moment it runs year-round and the difference it makes to our comfort is noticeable, especially in the mornings. I went down there for the first time since this very dry season began and it was as if the river hadn’t received the memo that it’s summer already.
My daughter and I camped up on the mountain range that’s the source of the river last night, a beautiful area that’s sadly lacking in any sort of visible environmental protection. There’s quarrying going on for the road and housing developments nearby, whilst “eco” parks are opened to disguise the fairly obvious pillaging. There’s barbed wire fences across hiking trails that were once free to roam for the public. Hard for any sort of protest against this in a country where activists are often “disappeared”, taken from their beds.
In the morning from our tent, I watched for a time the clouds form on the windward tip of the higher peaks and drift across the rest of the range. For a time they drifted over us also, suddenly requiring us to don all the extra clothing layers I’d brought…. and it’s the tropics!
On the hike down we passed a brutal reminder of what often passes for land stewardship here, an ex-army colonel had cleared several hectares of land on the steep side of the mountain in order to build a chicken farm. My daughter, who at 10 seems to have more sense than most people multiple times older than her, remarked the chickens would have been far happier scratching in the fallen leaves and weeds littered below the remaining forest.
Wow, Leon. How heartbreaking and illuminating. I remember during a recent heatwave going in to a local woods that had old trees and it was like you said, they didn't get the memo about the heat wave. It was cool and none of the leaves drooped.
Awful that land defenders are disappeared there. One of my frustrations with environmentalism in America is how little attention is paid to environmental repression in other parts of the world, such as the Philippines, but also Latin America. It looks like things are going to get even worse in Indonesia too.
How delightful your daughter's wisdom. All we can do is fight for her world.
Consensus science has a well documented history of being way wrong and abusing those who dared to challenge it & the consensus is wrong about GHE & CAGW.
1. Earth is cooler w the atmos/WV/30% albedo not warmer.
YouTube: Greenhouse Effect Theory Goes Kerbluey
2. Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics use bad math and badder physics.
YouTube: Atmospheric Heat Balances That Don't
3. Kinetic heat transfer modes of contiguous atmos molecules render a BB surface model impossible.
Search: “Bruges group kerbluey”
GHE & CAGW climate “science” are indefensible rubbish so alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.
Hi Nick: I'm afraid your comments are a bit over my head. I don't think greenhouse warming is rubbish-science at all. My point is more subtle, that the climate crisis is caused by both greenhouse warming and ecological destruction. There are two things going on, and they effect the same system, the Earth system, or Gaia. My argument has never been that greenhouse warming is false. It's that it should be seen in an ecological context.
However, the author should learn that the possessive of "it" is "its," not "it's." Also, he should learn the difference between "effect" (usually a noun) and "affect" (usually a verb).
Really interesting article. I guess I have a hidden belief similar to your position. I well remember reading many articles by Roger P snr about landscape change and such related matters, when he had a blog many years ago. I have often thought how little attention there seems to have been to such things in more recent times.
Thanks, Jason. I haven't read these, but I know the argument. It is being used right now to prioritize northern boreal forests for harvesting, because of the albedo effect of bright snow in winter in a clearcut. There are real problems with this assumption, in my opinion. For one, it neglects the ecological effects, which are also climate effects, of removing forests, particularly primary forests. These are places evolutionary tuned to, and tuning, their environments and climate. Destroy them and all that genetic intelligence and memory is gone. Also, while trees absorb more energy, they use that energy not only to fuel photosynthesis but water cycles and cloud creation, which are key elements of the climate system. Third, it destroys the biotic pump by which forests move moisture across vast distances. Destroy forests in one place and places downwind dry out. It's a recipe for global aridification, in my opinion. Lastly, it reduces living things to machines, in this case carbon and albedo machines, a habit humans seem unwilling to move on from.
Indeed. I would hope policymakers entertain all the complexities of these sorts of issues.
I think a paper like this is more useful in the case where reforestation assumptions are too ambitious — turning previously unforested land into plantation-type forest especially.
Yes. Good point! Random tree planting without consideration of what is meant to be there is really problematic. It can end up sucking away moisture without effective cloud generation. Tree planting itself, if monocrop, is also problematic. My motto is "defend what's left, restore the rest."
Roger, I think you’re missing something here. When you say “One can predict with basic certainty that if you clearcut a forest it will immediately got hotter and drier in that place, and that will effect the local and therefore regional, and ultimately global climate. One can also predict that if the forest is converted to industrial monocrop the soils will degrade and desiccate and the plantation, lacking biological complexity and hydrologic function, will become susceptible to disease and fire. One can further predict that after such a fire, the unprotected ground will be susceptible to erosive rains, losing vital soil, such that come summer it will be even more susceptible to drought, while at the same contributing to it.”
I imagined a specific place.. it depends on how large the area is. Would a 30 acre clear cut affect “global” climate? probably not. And my observations of “mono cropped” loblolly pine plantations is that they are not more susceptible to disease.. and where the economics pencils out (in the US) for plantation forestry (industrial and small landowners) tend to be relatively moist places (think PNW and SE) with moderate climates where fire is not as much a problem.
My basic point is that climate folks tend to make generic worldwide statements but the biota is ultimately pretty specific in times and places. Ultimately it’s a bit of an epistemic problem. There is an idea (which I trace to math envy) that we can understand wholes without understanding parts; we can understand “forests” by averaging over the planet, or assuming the facts of one place to apply everywhere. Otherwise the science communities who actually work with specific places and organisms and people would have to be included, including those in the less-favored parts of the world.. the center of the US; the Global South. As long as we leave scientists and practitioners out.. as long as we have the Global Gaze, we are going to be missing out on reality. IMHO.
Thanks, Sharon. I agree about the dangers of the Global Gaze. Great term. And yes, every place is unique. You mention the PNW, and I assume you mean the Pacific Northwest. This is where I live and where my example is meant for. Research shows stream flows decreasing by 50% after a clearcut and for many years after, decades really. A thirty acre clear cut may not effect the global climate, but it will get drier and hotter "in that place." In my view, plantation forestry is destroying the PNW forest ecosystem. But yes, focusing on specific places rather than global formulas is key. I sometimes think of the climate as made up of climates.
So I think perhaps it would be good to be more specific.. here's aa photo of a 28 year old D-fir stand post-clearcutting. Canopies close relatively quickly in moist forests.
"So little sunlight reaches the floor, and so little wind stirs deep within the woods, that moss is the sole groundcover and creeps its way up the lower trunks of the trees."
Well. It's complicated, and I don't claim to be an expert. But so much depends on timing. I should have mentioned that the clearcuts decreased summer streamflow, which is when we need it. Winter stream flow, on the other hand, increases with clearcutting because the water just runs off, silting in the rivers. And as you say, not all logging is the same. And I recently saw a presentation on ecological forestry which was quite interesting.
For the winter, It seems like it would depend on the slope.. and how soon cover grows back, including grasses and forbs, which come back fairly quickly. Do you have a specific study you are referring to?
Maybe I'm missing something. I searched on the word "clearcut" in that study and only found only this in the citations.. "Brunengo, M., Smith, S., and Bernath, S., 1992, Screening for Watershed Analysis - A GIS-Based Method of Modeling the Water Input From Rain-On-Snow Storms, For Management and Regulation of Clearcut Forest Harvest: WA DNR Forest Practices Division, 23 p." ? It seems like a hydro prediction using downscaled climate models.
I wonder if it is akin to slash and burn and the immediate release of nutrients much of which has accumulated over thousands of years from chemical weathering of bedrock and animal deposition and then is lost to the ocean along with the top soil? As scientists rightly point out the ability to create weather and rain has ecological tipping points which alter whole ecological regions. In Australia when the English first discovered Tasmania they described it as a savanna like landscape where there should be temperate rainforest all because of the cultural burning.
Interesting article. Could someone provide a reference for the statement, attributed to "Gates'" but with no more information; "the possibilities of scientific climate prediction and control rest directly upon our understanding of the physical processes involved."
A second question: do you feel that Pielke Sr's position, that "climate and ecology are words for the same system" will ever be accepted by the climate alarmists? It implies that the climate system is far more complex and unpredictable than imagined by the models, a fact that is brought out in this essay. But by portraying the climate system as "complex" defeats the alarmist's narrative of a single point of blame, fossil fuels. Or, am I misunderstanding the thesis here? (that is entirely possible!)
The comment can be found on pp 112,113 or the Proceeding of WMO's first World Climate Congress, 1979.
I don't use the term climate alarmism. I think we should be alarmed. My point is as you describe, that the climate system is complex and what we do to the land is as important as what we put in the atmosphere. It's more than CO2, but that doesn't mean CO2 isn't a problem. However, treating carbon as the ONLY cause is a problem.
As to whether climate and ecology will be ever be accepted as two words for the same system, it will to some degree have to be, as one leads to the other.
Thank you very much, sir. Respectfully, I disagree with being alarmed. I believe we should protect against climate dangers, but to fight "climate change" is hopeless as it as much a geologic process as it is physical or biological.
That said, your insights are revealing and educational. thanks again.
Fantastic essay that makes it clear, particularly in the Florida example, that land use is a major driver of climatic change relative to CO2. I notice you seem to view the altering of natural landscapes by man as inherently negative which I interpreted from your use of the word "distruction." Have I read you correctly? The value of the work you're doing, in my view, comes from a better understanding of the impacts of land use change so mitigation of any negative effects can be part of the planning and approval process.
Thanks, Clayton. Yes, most of what we call "land change" registers to me as destruction, though as I point out, not always. For instance, when we restore land, that is also a "land change." But a good one.
Fantastic Rob, thank you so much!
Thanks for a great article Rob. The paper of Pielke sits on my desk because I plan to write someting about it. But now you did it in an elegant way! I restacked your article, not that I really understand what that means!
Thanks, Gunnar. I think restacking means it gets sent out again to the Substack network. Though I am as mystified as you by how it all works!
Great article. Cool you got to converse with Pielke. Wondering if you could clarify a bit more how the land use change in the Florida peninsula affected precipitation. As it gets deforested and paved over, more of it will heat up, causing convection to rise. How does that affect the water evapotranspiring from the marshes, and then flowing to the altered land?
Great question. That was what I thought at first. It has do with the geography. Pielke theorizes that under original, wet conditions, the middle part was often under water, with the deepest water in the center, which heats up more slowly than the margins, causing air flow from center of the peninsula outward, where it converges with the incoming sea breeze. When drained and developed, the heat simply rises and doesn't flow outward to converge with the breeze. Does that make sense?
Heres my way of intrepreting what Pielke is saying : if you develop the land it will also have less water, and so there is less water to evapotranspire, which means less water to converge to form rain. In addition if there is more developed land, there is a much bigger heated region, which means a much bigger convergence zone. So the air moisture when it converges to that region is then spread out much more, and so less likely to reach a humidity point that can create rain.
HI Rob, i think he is talking about the shutting down of the biotic pump and being replaced by a heat dome which nullifies the ability for cloud formation as we see in many parts of the world.
Rob, excellent pulling together of information to solidify my belief that the ecology and the climate are interconnected. It makes sense and affirms the route to keeping the Climate Crisis from totally destroying our planet. But, humans are not great at making changes to the status quo - so I am not very optimistic about my grand and great grand children having a livable planet. Thanks for sharing, Rob!❤️
Hi Kathy. I know. We humans seem hopeless, especially at the moment.
Well said! There's an organisation called Perspectiva whose people are working with heart and head and right relationship to bring about global change. See Perspectiva's substack.
And thank you, Rob. Your work is profound.
Thanks, Kathryn. I will check them out.
As I begin to understand the implications of this and be moved by both the beauty, the clarity and poetry to look up and around, I ardently want to mind my natural manners.
Yes. Manners. Respect. Thanks, Deanna!
Barry Lopez referred to it as the need to practice restraint. I've always loved that phrasing.
Thanks, Jason. Lopez is my pole star. Keats had his concept of negative capability, which I think has an ecological meaning. Somehow we need to be capable of less.
Wow, Rob, this is an amazing paper. It should be given top billing at a conference where these issues are discussed in a sane and useful manner—instead of buzzwords, knee-jerkism, and ideology. But no, Canada’s Child King will go ahead with his zero-emissions policy, impoverish the citizens, and only make things worse.
While approving pipelines and keeping the tar sands going.
Excellent work, Rob. I'll put this in my links next week and hopefully send some folks over to get a deeper understanding of the unity between climate and ecology. It's an elegant way to describe the reality. Thank you.
Thank you for this Rob, have learnt a lot from your essays here and they continue to inform and inspire the way we manage our piece of land here in the Philippines.
We have a river that borders the north side of our property, at the moment it runs year-round and the difference it makes to our comfort is noticeable, especially in the mornings. I went down there for the first time since this very dry season began and it was as if the river hadn’t received the memo that it’s summer already.
My daughter and I camped up on the mountain range that’s the source of the river last night, a beautiful area that’s sadly lacking in any sort of visible environmental protection. There’s quarrying going on for the road and housing developments nearby, whilst “eco” parks are opened to disguise the fairly obvious pillaging. There’s barbed wire fences across hiking trails that were once free to roam for the public. Hard for any sort of protest against this in a country where activists are often “disappeared”, taken from their beds.
In the morning from our tent, I watched for a time the clouds form on the windward tip of the higher peaks and drift across the rest of the range. For a time they drifted over us also, suddenly requiring us to don all the extra clothing layers I’d brought…. and it’s the tropics!
On the hike down we passed a brutal reminder of what often passes for land stewardship here, an ex-army colonel had cleared several hectares of land on the steep side of the mountain in order to build a chicken farm. My daughter, who at 10 seems to have more sense than most people multiple times older than her, remarked the chickens would have been far happier scratching in the fallen leaves and weeds littered below the remaining forest.
Wow, Leon. How heartbreaking and illuminating. I remember during a recent heatwave going in to a local woods that had old trees and it was like you said, they didn't get the memo about the heat wave. It was cool and none of the leaves drooped.
Awful that land defenders are disappeared there. One of my frustrations with environmentalism in America is how little attention is paid to environmental repression in other parts of the world, such as the Philippines, but also Latin America. It looks like things are going to get even worse in Indonesia too.
How delightful your daughter's wisdom. All we can do is fight for her world.
Consensus science has a well documented history of being way wrong and abusing those who dared to challenge it & the consensus is wrong about GHE & CAGW.
1. Earth is cooler w the atmos/WV/30% albedo not warmer.
YouTube: Greenhouse Effect Theory Goes Kerbluey
2. Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics use bad math and badder physics.
YouTube: Atmospheric Heat Balances That Don't
3. Kinetic heat transfer modes of contiguous atmos molecules render a BB surface model impossible.
Search: “Bruges group kerbluey”
GHE & CAGW climate “science” are indefensible rubbish so alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.
Hi Nick: I'm afraid your comments are a bit over my head. I don't think greenhouse warming is rubbish-science at all. My point is more subtle, that the climate crisis is caused by both greenhouse warming and ecological destruction. There are two things going on, and they effect the same system, the Earth system, or Gaia. My argument has never been that greenhouse warming is false. It's that it should be seen in an ecological context.
Believe is religion.
Think is opinion.
Know is science.
Stand in front of a blazing campfire on a chilly evening.
Holdup a banket between.
Do you know if you are colder now or warmer?
Drop the blanket.
Do you know if you are colder now or warmer?
That's how we know that the albedo blocks the Sun and makes the Earth cooler not warmer.
The albedo is created by water vapor, clouds, ice, snow.
Water vapor is the major GHG.
The GHE makes the Earth cooler not warmer.
Consensus science has a well-documented history of being wrong & abusing those who dare to challenge it.
Consensus is wrong about GHE & CAGW so alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.
Excellent, interesting article.
However, the author should learn that the possessive of "it" is "its," not "it's." Also, he should learn the difference between "effect" (usually a noun) and "affect" (usually a verb).
Good eye. The author should spend more time editing.
Really interesting article. I guess I have a hidden belief similar to your position. I well remember reading many articles by Roger P snr about landscape change and such related matters, when he had a blog many years ago. I have often thought how little attention there seems to have been to such things in more recent times.
Thank you, Mike. Yes. It really is odd how little attention has been given to the link between climate and land, something I'm trying to address.
An interesting paper going around this morning on the link between reforestation and climate fyi
https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1773293557719183771
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46577-1
Thanks, Jason. I haven't read these, but I know the argument. It is being used right now to prioritize northern boreal forests for harvesting, because of the albedo effect of bright snow in winter in a clearcut. There are real problems with this assumption, in my opinion. For one, it neglects the ecological effects, which are also climate effects, of removing forests, particularly primary forests. These are places evolutionary tuned to, and tuning, their environments and climate. Destroy them and all that genetic intelligence and memory is gone. Also, while trees absorb more energy, they use that energy not only to fuel photosynthesis but water cycles and cloud creation, which are key elements of the climate system. Third, it destroys the biotic pump by which forests move moisture across vast distances. Destroy forests in one place and places downwind dry out. It's a recipe for global aridification, in my opinion. Lastly, it reduces living things to machines, in this case carbon and albedo machines, a habit humans seem unwilling to move on from.
Indeed. I would hope policymakers entertain all the complexities of these sorts of issues.
I think a paper like this is more useful in the case where reforestation assumptions are too ambitious — turning previously unforested land into plantation-type forest especially.
Yes. Good point! Random tree planting without consideration of what is meant to be there is really problematic. It can end up sucking away moisture without effective cloud generation. Tree planting itself, if monocrop, is also problematic. My motto is "defend what's left, restore the rest."
Roger, I think you’re missing something here. When you say “One can predict with basic certainty that if you clearcut a forest it will immediately got hotter and drier in that place, and that will effect the local and therefore regional, and ultimately global climate. One can also predict that if the forest is converted to industrial monocrop the soils will degrade and desiccate and the plantation, lacking biological complexity and hydrologic function, will become susceptible to disease and fire. One can further predict that after such a fire, the unprotected ground will be susceptible to erosive rains, losing vital soil, such that come summer it will be even more susceptible to drought, while at the same contributing to it.”
I imagined a specific place.. it depends on how large the area is. Would a 30 acre clear cut affect “global” climate? probably not. And my observations of “mono cropped” loblolly pine plantations is that they are not more susceptible to disease.. and where the economics pencils out (in the US) for plantation forestry (industrial and small landowners) tend to be relatively moist places (think PNW and SE) with moderate climates where fire is not as much a problem.
My basic point is that climate folks tend to make generic worldwide statements but the biota is ultimately pretty specific in times and places. Ultimately it’s a bit of an epistemic problem. There is an idea (which I trace to math envy) that we can understand wholes without understanding parts; we can understand “forests” by averaging over the planet, or assuming the facts of one place to apply everywhere. Otherwise the science communities who actually work with specific places and organisms and people would have to be included, including those in the less-favored parts of the world.. the center of the US; the Global South. As long as we leave scientists and practitioners out.. as long as we have the Global Gaze, we are going to be missing out on reality. IMHO.
Thanks, Sharon. I agree about the dangers of the Global Gaze. Great term. And yes, every place is unique. You mention the PNW, and I assume you mean the Pacific Northwest. This is where I live and where my example is meant for. Research shows stream flows decreasing by 50% after a clearcut and for many years after, decades really. A thirty acre clear cut may not effect the global climate, but it will get drier and hotter "in that place." In my view, plantation forestry is destroying the PNW forest ecosystem. But yes, focusing on specific places rather than global formulas is key. I sometimes think of the climate as made up of climates.
That's really interesting, because at Hubbard Brook, clearcutting led to increased streamflows, and there has long been interest in clearcutting for increasing water. https://hubbardbrook.org/experimental-watersheds-research-sites/watershed-101/
Happens that I shared an office with Hubbard Brookians at Yale is why I know that. And in California, there is scientific disagreement about that ... similar, but not as vehement as, climate debates, e.g. the PBS side of the story https://www.pbssocal.org/redefine/study-logging-forests-wont-increase-water-supply
So I think perhaps it would be good to be more specific.. here's aa photo of a 28 year old D-fir stand post-clearcutting. Canopies close relatively quickly in moist forests.
"So little sunlight reaches the floor, and so little wind stirs deep within the woods, that moss is the sole groundcover and creeps its way up the lower trunks of the trees."
https://www.nnrg.org/to-thin-or-not-to-thin/
Of course, not all plantations are alike.
Well. It's complicated, and I don't claim to be an expert. But so much depends on timing. I should have mentioned that the clearcuts decreased summer streamflow, which is when we need it. Winter stream flow, on the other hand, increases with clearcutting because the water just runs off, silting in the rivers. And as you say, not all logging is the same. And I recently saw a presentation on ecological forestry which was quite interesting.
For the winter, It seems like it would depend on the slope.. and how soon cover grows back, including grasses and forbs, which come back fairly quickly. Do you have a specific study you are referring to?
Ecological forestry has quite a history..I wrote a chapter on a book on it in... 1997! https://andrewsforest.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/lter/pubs/pdf/pub2331.pdf
Hi Sharon: Here is the study I referred to. https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2196&context=wwuet
Maybe I'm missing something. I searched on the word "clearcut" in that study and only found only this in the citations.. "Brunengo, M., Smith, S., and Bernath, S., 1992, Screening for Watershed Analysis - A GIS-Based Method of Modeling the Water Input From Rain-On-Snow Storms, For Management and Regulation of Clearcut Forest Harvest: WA DNR Forest Practices Division, 23 p." ? It seems like a hydro prediction using downscaled climate models.
I wonder if it is akin to slash and burn and the immediate release of nutrients much of which has accumulated over thousands of years from chemical weathering of bedrock and animal deposition and then is lost to the ocean along with the top soil? As scientists rightly point out the ability to create weather and rain has ecological tipping points which alter whole ecological regions. In Australia when the English first discovered Tasmania they described it as a savanna like landscape where there should be temperate rainforest all because of the cultural burning.
Interesting article. Could someone provide a reference for the statement, attributed to "Gates'" but with no more information; "the possibilities of scientific climate prediction and control rest directly upon our understanding of the physical processes involved."
A second question: do you feel that Pielke Sr's position, that "climate and ecology are words for the same system" will ever be accepted by the climate alarmists? It implies that the climate system is far more complex and unpredictable than imagined by the models, a fact that is brought out in this essay. But by portraying the climate system as "complex" defeats the alarmist's narrative of a single point of blame, fossil fuels. Or, am I misunderstanding the thesis here? (that is entirely possible!)
Thanks for your questions.
The comment can be found on pp 112,113 or the Proceeding of WMO's first World Climate Congress, 1979.
I don't use the term climate alarmism. I think we should be alarmed. My point is as you describe, that the climate system is complex and what we do to the land is as important as what we put in the atmosphere. It's more than CO2, but that doesn't mean CO2 isn't a problem. However, treating carbon as the ONLY cause is a problem.
As to whether climate and ecology will be ever be accepted as two words for the same system, it will to some degree have to be, as one leads to the other.
Thank you very much, sir. Respectfully, I disagree with being alarmed. I believe we should protect against climate dangers, but to fight "climate change" is hopeless as it as much a geologic process as it is physical or biological.
That said, your insights are revealing and educational. thanks again.
Fantastic essay that makes it clear, particularly in the Florida example, that land use is a major driver of climatic change relative to CO2. I notice you seem to view the altering of natural landscapes by man as inherently negative which I interpreted from your use of the word "distruction." Have I read you correctly? The value of the work you're doing, in my view, comes from a better understanding of the impacts of land use change so mitigation of any negative effects can be part of the planning and approval process.
Thanks, Clayton. Yes, most of what we call "land change" registers to me as destruction, though as I point out, not always. For instance, when we restore land, that is also a "land change." But a good one.