You sound pretty fair when you say you have no idea whether humidity has something to do with precipitation. You mentioned term ''deforestation'' a few times. It was my impression that you believe it has something to do with global warming. Could you eleborate on deforestation? Let's assume I own a land with trees on it. One day I decide to cut all the trees, sell the timber to a furniture factory and plant carrots / cabbages / rubber trees on the land. How would this deforrestation contribute to global warming?
Umm... what happened to the humidity question? "The range of emissions is strongly, but not only, influenced by the deforestation rates, and at its widest (a factor 14) can be better explained by the combined range of per capita deforestation rates, population, and carbon density."
You answered it. I assume you quoted somebody; but please explain in your own words: how my cutting a forrest and planting e.g. apple trees or cabbages is going to contribute to the global warming?
Because you would fart more, producing more methane? I always get that with apples and cabbage This is great guys, please continue
The term you're looking for is afforestation, and yes, I quoted the IPCC. They've written an entire report on just this topic that drills down into all the details you would like, with heavy citations and detailed well sourced statistics. And yes, afforestation can offset some effects of deforestation given enough time passes for the growth to occur and also assuming you regrow an entire forest and not just delicious cabbage. Unfortunately, much or most deforestation is of the "slash and burn" variety which itself leaves a major carbon footprint. So not only does the planet lose the oxygen generation capacity of the forest, but also loses all the stored carbon into the atmosphere via burning, a double loss.
Correct me if I am wrong. Most organism (plants inclusive) are small at the beginning and big at the end of their lives. As they (the plants) grow they need more food. When the plants are grown-ups, they need relatively less food (nutrition). As you most probably know from your biology lessons, plants are mostly made of carbohydrates. In other words they need carbon to grow. This carbon is derived from CO2. The younger a plant is, the more it has to grow and the more food (CO2) it consumes. Similar is the case with humans. As they reach certain age, they need less nutrition than they had needed when they were in the growing stage. Didn't it occured to you that in order to retain more carbon in plants it would be a better idea to deforrest grown-up areas and put young plants (e.g. cabbages or apple trees) on what used to be a forrest?
I'll take a stab at this furphy, much farmland lies fallow for long periods of time, growing little but weeds. It cannot compare, even most crops cannot compare to the surface area of of a mature forest. At issue perhaps , is the comparative stabilty of production /absortion etc-not that i would know, i suspect oceanic plankton play a larger role ( as do many researchers) in the climate.
Surface doesn't matter. A mature forrest exhaust more CO2 than it intakes in some cases. Young plant are on the other hand net producers of oxygen and net importers of CO2. Mature forrest is not an effective CO2 intaker.
In "some" cases, I'm talking about arable farmland, the likes of which most of the sahara desert, used to be. Which has quite clearly, been caused largely by human habitation, burning everything in sight for cooking fuel, running to many goats and the like. Now, i dont much care for the C02 debate, but human caused deforestation and desertification do go hand in hand; it is a fact here in australia, where vast areas have been cleared of native vegetation, to run sheep or cattle, to the current situation in india, where people are poaching firewood, from what remains of their forests...to many people, all of a sudden , native wildlife becomes extict, and forests dwindle. How can this be?