*[Enwl-eng] Forests, Water, and Climate: Time for Re-Conceptualization (статья А.Макарьевой)
ecology
ecology at iephb.nw.ru
Wed May 28 20:51:38 MSK 2025
Леса, водные ресурсы и климат: время для переосмысления.
Выводы
• Наука о климате находится на перепутье, и у нее есть редкая возможность
изменить свою траекторию в сторону более ориентированного на биосферу
подхода.
• Естественные леса защищают климат, регулируя влажность атмосферы, перенос
влаги и образование облаков.
• Научно обоснованное противодействие крупномасштабным проектам по
обезлесению является сложной задачей из-за политического и экономического
давления, но абсолютно необходимой.
• Экологическая стабильность, обеспечиваемая естественными лесами,
способствует экономическому планированию и защищает долгосрочные инвестиции.
• Международное и междисциплинарное сотрудничество нуждается в масштабных
объединяющих идеях — леса как стабилизаторы климата могли бы стать одним из
них.
Свет
От: Anastassia Makarieva <bioticregulation at substack.com>
Date: ср, 28 мая 2025 г. в 13:47
Subject: Forests, Water, and Climate: Time for Re-Conceptualization
To: <svetfrog at gmail.com>
Watch now (21 mins) | My contribution to CIFOR Science Days 2025: video (21
min) and edited narrative with slides
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Watch now
Forests, Water, and Climate: Time for Re-Conceptualization
My contribution to CIFOR Science Days 2025: video (21 min) and edited
narrative with slides
Anastassia Makarieva
May 28
READ IN APP
First of all, I must say that it is a great honour for me to speak at
this conference and to share my views with people who I know deeply
acknowledge the existential importance of forests.
We're meeting at a time when not only the global mean surface
temperature has reached a new high, but also the rate of the warming has
been rapidly increasing. While Douglas was talking about water availability
and regional perspectives on how important water is for everybody, I will
provide a more global perspective on how forests and water could be relevant
in this global context of increasing emergency.
What is essential about the current climate situation is that not only
the rate of warming has been increasing – on this graph to the right, you
can see the recent trend in the Earth's energy imbalance. It has been
increasing. It has actually doubled in recent decades. But what is also
important is that climate models are not able to describe it. They're
failing to describe this crucial process.
And then we should ask, why do we need to re-focus on forests and
water? Why are we having this session today, “Cool forests: Beyond carbon”?
>From my perspective, this is a recognition of two things. First, that so far
we have been largely focusing on carbon. Second, that we have overlooked
something very essential.
Our long-term focus on carbon reflected guidance from global climate
models that for many years have been the main tool of how we understand
climate. These models unambiguously tell us that that forest impacts on
climate are negligible if we are talking about anything beyond carbon.
You can see here a figure from a major report and these yellow marks
indicate the non-carbon forest contribution to the global temperature
change. It is at best a few percent of what’s really going on. We are now
talking about a 1.5-degree-Kelvin warming that happened in the last century,
while models say that deforestation beyond carbon could have contributed one
tenth of a degree at most (and this would likely be cooling).
If the models were doing fine describing climate, and as they are
telling us that forests don't matter except as stores of carbon, we could
hardly argue for focusing more on water and its role in climate. But the
models are not doing fine.
What I want to show you here is a compilation of how different global
climate models predict response to deforestation in terms of how much of
water vapor will be transported from the ocean. You can see that not only
the magnitude of the response differs by more than an order of magnitude
across models, but even the sign is not predicted. In other words, we can't
know from models what happens to the water cycle if we deforest land. They
don't provide any guidance. There is no robust response.
Accordingly, there is a growing recognition in the scientific
community that models alone may not be a trusted source of guidance
concerning the climate. Here you can see quotes from high profile scientists
who draw attention to the fact that our understanding of what's going on, of
the key processes behind climate change, has been lagging behind formal
numerical modelling.
We're at the point of re-prioritizing understanding from first
principles supported by empirical evidence. Analysis of multidisciplinary
evidence requires clear theoretical concepts and thinking frameworks.
From my perspective, one of such unifying concepts could be the idea
of natural ecosystems, primarily forests that are the most productive
ecosystems, serving as climate stabilizers. Their loss in the course of land
use and land cover change as well as in the course of oceanic exploitation,
if we are talking about the ecosystems of the ocean, has become a major
driver of climate destabilization.
Here we are talking not just about global warming but about
destabilization in the broader sense, including the increasing frequency of
droughts, floods and other water related cataclysms and long-term trends
like soil moisture loss.
Now let me show very schematically how the forest can enter the
current vision of global warming. This is the hardcore physics part of my
talk, so please bear with me for a moment; it will be just for a few
minutes.
In this graph to the right, you can see how air temperature depends on
height in the atmosphere of the Earth.
In the steady state, the Earth receives as much energy from the Sun as
it releases back to space.
The heat released from the Earth to space comes from the upper
radiating layer, which you can think of as where the greenhouse gases
molecules sit that radiate directly to space. Nobody catches this radiation
and nobody resends it back to the Earth.
The higher the temperature of this layer, the more heat it will
release.
When we add more greenhouse substances, this layer goes up. It goes up
and becomes colder. At this point the Earth releases less energy than it
receives and it begins to warm. This warming goes to the surface through
this red line, which is the how temperature declines with height.
The slope of this red line shows how fast the air temperature declines
with height. We have warming until the temperature of this upper radiative
layer is again equal to the equilibrium temperature.
This is the classical conventional view of the greenhouse effect,
which describes the impact of the increasing CO2.
Now going to the central scheme, we have clouds. What do clouds do?
Clouds reflect more sunlight, so they change the equilibrium temperature of
this upper layer. Even if we don't change the height of this layer from
which the radiation goes to space, still we can change the surface
temperature by reflecting more sunlight.
If there are forests and they're making clouds, then the temperature
is lower and their surfaces are cooler. And if we remove forests and remove
clouds, there is more sunlight absorbed and there is warming.
So one thing is clouds.
Second thing, you can see from the geometry that we not only can move
this line, the grey one, not only can we move the blue one, but we can also
move the red line, which is how the temperature changes with height when
there is transpiration.
Forests capture a certain part of solar energy at the surface in the
form of what is called latent heat. This latent heat is then released during
condensation higher in the troposphere from where it later goes unimpeded to
space.
Thus by transpiration forests smooth the temperature lapse rate and
thus cause cooling. If we reduce transpiration, then more heat remains at
the surface, the temperature lapse rate becomes steeper, and we have
warming.
Both effects (of transpiration and clouds) will be global and both
effects will involve how forests handle water.
Now let me show that both effects are very real and significant.
First, if we are looking at clouds, we have evidence that the record
heat in 2023 could have been facilitated by a biospheric breakdown, because
we know that in this year the Amazon suffered an unprecedented drought and
there were unprecedented forest fires in Canada. In both cases,
transpiration and cloud formation were drastically reduced.
We can see that cloud cover was reduced over the Amazon and the
adjacent oceanic regions. There is an additional hotspot of cloud reduction
over Canada.
This is backed up by our knowledge of how efficient forests are in
generating low level clouds that cool the earth. We can see that the the
more productive forests are, the more efficient they are in generating
clouds. While when we change them for non-forest systems the generation of
cloud cover is drastically reduced.
Now regarding transpiration and the role of atmospheric moisture
transport. Here again we can see that energy captured as latent heat through
transpiration at the surface goes up to the atmosphere and is released to
space from the upper atmosphere.
A new biotic pump film from Ray Asselin is available on Youtube
But this process does take time. If there is a long-range regular flow
of moist air from the ocean to land and back via the upper atmosphere, this
heat has time to be released and thus cools the Earth.
If we deforest and disrupt this long-range moisture transport, and
this is what we find in observations, precipitation will be more rigorous
over the deforested areas, but only locally. These more rigorous upward and
downward motions will be so rapid that the heat won’t have time to be
released to space from the upper atmosphere and it will return to the
surface with the downdrafts. This will cause an increase in the temperature
lapse rate and cause global warming.
As we showed in a recent study, the models don't capture this effect,
and the trend in lapse rate is indeed unexplained and it is very
significant, especially over land. Thus, there are strong lines of evidence
that when we deforest and when we disrupt the moisture flows associated with
transpiration, this produces globally significant effects.
From these more specific examples, I want to get closer to the
conclusions and to the more general concepts generally for these biospheric
climate regulating processes.
Forests require water to function, and the capacity of forests to
manage its water balance naturally declines when we begin to disturb them –
by logging, burning or disturbing them in some other ways. This leads to
climate destabilization through disruption in the water cycle, which can be
incorporated into the global change narrative using the notion of climate
sensitivity.
Climate sensitivity describes how much the planet warms if the CO2
concentration doubles. This can be calculated from models and the models
differ greatly in these estimates. [You can read more about how different
models describe climate sensitivity in this post.]
In the current narrative, -- this will be the simpler part without
formula or anything -- if this guy is CO2 and this is the Earth and this
arrow is warming, the more CO2, the more warming. This is how the current
narrative has it.
If we include the ecosystems and incorporate the biosphere, we will
see that there are different situations: sometimes it is more “difficult”
for a given amount of CO2 to warm the planet, and sometimes it is less
difficult.
If we destroy forests and remove their climate-regulating potential,
we will get more warming and more climate extremes for the same CO2
addition.
In the current narrative, we focus on decarbonization, while
biodiversity and forests are a minor thing which we only consider as
something of secondary importance.
In the narrative that incorporates the biosphere, our key strategy is
to preserve ecosystems to decrease climate sensitivity to CO2 accumulation.
The more forests, functional forests, self-regenerating forests we have, the
more stable our climate. [Further reading: “Natural ecosystems and climate
stabilization”]
Conversely, the more we take from the ecosystem, the fewer resources
it has to buffer climate extremes.
If we saw this 2023 anomaly after a drought in the Amazon forest that
was mercilessly plundered, especially during the Bolsonaro times with
increasing logging and burning, then now if we have this large-scale
deforestation project in Indonesia (MIFEE), we are explicitly asking for
more acute global warming.
Ironically, these terrible developments are facilitated by the
carbon-focused narrative. Much of the argumentation behind this huge
deforestation project in Indonesia is that they will have green fuel, like a
renewable fuel, but instead this will actually destabilize our planet even
further.
The conclusions would be that it so happened that the evidence that we
now have shows that climate science is in need of conceptual rethinking and
that there is a rare opportunity that its trajectory moves towards
recognizing a greater role of the biosphere.
And we need to know this, how imperfect the models are and not be
afraid of bringing evidence from different fields of knowledge, which people
working on the ground often get, and not afraid of talking about it because
the models are currently failing very spectacularly.
Natural forests buffer the climate by regulating atmospheric humidity,
moisture transport and cloud formation. It is crucial to stand up
scientifically against large-scale deforestation projects.
Also because, and it is another thing I want to mention, if we don't
raise the importance of forests in the global climate agenda, we can't hope
that any funding that currently goes to climate issues will go to the
forests.
If we demonstrate that forests are crucial players, this may totally
change the flow of funds towards their preservation and restoration.
Currently, the widely spread argumentation that I showed in the very
beginning, that they are not contributing anything to climate except being a
carbon storage, is depriving the forest topic of any significant funding,
including research funding.
Meanwhile, environmental stability provided by natural forests will
support long term economic planning and protect investments, especially in
the long term. I think that international and interdisciplinary
collaboration need some clear concepts, some unifying ideas. Probably,
forests as climate stabilizers could be one.
Conclusions
•Climate science is at a crossroads, with a rare opportunity to shift
its trajectory toward a more biosphere-oriented approach.
•Natural forests buffer the climate by regulating atmospheric
humidity, moisture transport and cloud formation.
•Standing up scientifically against large-scale deforestation projects
is challenging due to political and economic pressures — but absolutely
essential.
•The environmental stability provided by natural forests supports
economic planning and protects long-term investments.
•International and interdisciplinary collaboration needs big unifying
ideas — forests as climate stabilizers could be one.
Thank you very much and you can download my presentation from
https://bioticregulation.ru/cifor2025.pdf. It contains references to all
publications that I have referred to.
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От: Svet Zabelin <svetfrog at gmail.com>
Date: ср, 28 мая 2025 г. в 14:10
Subject: Fwd: Forests, Water, and Climate: Time for Re-Conceptualization
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