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Trees have always helped reduce the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide. Thanks to global warming, a myriad of conditions are turning trees into CO2 contributors.

Global warming makes soil less fertile and trees less hearty. Global warming encourages droughts, wild fires, lightning and pine beetles, all of which kill trees. When trees die, they release carbon dioxide, and when trees are never replaced, they are not able to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You’ve got to hand it to anthropogenic climate change—when it sets out to do a job, it is thorough!

Chapter 9 of Al Gore’s Our Choice covers this topic very well.

PINE BEETLE INFO. Canada’s Pacific Forestry Centre: A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It’s now.”

LIGHTNING INFO. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research: Global Warming Could Lead to More Lightning Deaths

WILDFIRE INFO. Scripps Institution of Oceanography: large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons.

DROUGHT INFO. Ecological Society of America: “Extreme drought events can be considered as representations of the upper tails of climate variability distributions, whose probability is expected to increase due to trends in global climate change. These drought events can transform forest ecosystem structure and function if they exceed tree survival thresholds.”

THE ROLE OF TREES. The International Union of Forest Research Organizations: Forests’ role as massive carbon sinks is “at risk of being lost entirely”, top forestry scientists have warned.

TREES ARE DYING. U.S. Geological Survey: Tree Deaths Have Doubled Across the Western U.S. — Regional Warming May be the Cause

TREES NOW MAKING CLIMATE  CHANGE WORSE. Canadian Forest Service: Canada’s forests, once huge help on greenhouse gases, now contribute to climate change, significant distortion of the natural trend”

Did you see Tuesday’s What on Earth?

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Engines roaring… tires screeching… solar panels gleaming…

To effectively combat global warming, the international community will ultimately have to stage the fight with a coordinated, large-scale effort. In the meantime it’s encouraging to see people, towns and businesses taking initiative to reduce their carbon footprint.

Case in point: NASCAR–yes, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing–is putting effort into countering all the fossil fuels they burn when their racers whip around tracks at speeds of up to 200 mph.

Chicago Tribune, August 12th: “Pocono Raceway, the asphalt oval that helped propel Richard Petty and Jeff Gordon  to racing stardom, went online this month with a 3-megawatt, ground-mounted photovoltaic system, among the largest solar projects in Pennsylvania.”

Inhabitat: Is NASCAR Going Green?

NASCAR, 2008: NASCAR hires Lynch to head ‘Green’ initiative

Have you seen last Friday’s What on Earth?

BREAKING CLIMATE NEWS: “Skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg changes course! Climate change is “a challenge humanity must confront”; supports carbon tax. Read more…

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Climate change could cause 70% of U.S. counties to face water shortages or similar issues by 2050.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007, some friends of mine wondered what the discussion and study of climate change had to do with peace. Alfred Nobel wrote that the award should be given to “…the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

I figured that working towards international solutions for anthropogenic global warming now could help avert some big time unrest in the future. If the study I cite in today’s strip is anywhere near accurate, imagine the political battles over water supplies at all levels of government in the United States. And further, imagine the impact on third world countries who already suffering water shortages while residing anywhere near a nation blessed with a supply of water.

From Grist: “As global warming accelerates, the world will become not only hotter, flatter, and more crowded but also thirsty, according to a new study that finds 70 percent of counties in the United States may face climate change-related risks to their water supplies by 2050…One-third of U.S. counties may find themselves at “high or extreme risk,” according to the report prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council by Tetra Tech, a California environmental consulting firm.”

Seattle Examiner: “It has been predicted that droughts from global warming will make water more precious than oil and regional wars will most likely be fought over water rights.”

Promotional info about The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin: The Great Lakes are the largest collection of fresh surface water on earth, and more than 40 million Americans and Canadians live in their basin. Will we divert water from the Great Lakes, causing them to end up like Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has lost 90 percent of its surface area and 75 percent of its volume since 1960? Or will we come to see that unregulated water withdrawals are ultimately catastrophic?”. Ira also discussed the book on Science Friday.

The Observer in December 2009: “…the drought that devastated the Australian wheat harvest last year had consequences that shook the world…Wheat prices across the globe soared by 130%…scientists are warning that far worse lies ahead. A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages and water scarcity now threatens to unleash public unrest and conflict in the next 20 years…”

From NPR:

Retired U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Lee Gunn: “The American people expect the military to plan for the worst. It’s that sort of mindset, I think, that has convinced, in my view, the vast majority of military leaders that climate change is a real threat and that the military plays an important role in confronting it.”

Retired Air Marshal A.K. Singh: “It will initially be people fighting for food and shelter. When the migration starts, every state would want to stop the migrations from happening. Eventually, it would have to become a military conflict. Which other means do you have to resolve your border issues?”

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The sun shines its light on a better kind of solar power.

Fossil fuels pack a lot of power and enjoy the advantage of well-established technologies for locating, extracting and delivering energy…but they have the nasty habit of heating up the climate. Unfortunately clean, renewable energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric are not as efficient, and don’t have the myriad of other advantages we give to oil and coal.

Bottom line: renewable energy is not as affordable as fossil fuels, so people hesitate to jump on the green energy bandwagon.

But Stanford University engineers may have had a significant breakthrough: they have shown they can double—or even triple—solar power’s efficiency by pulling energy not only from sunlight, but also from the sun’s heat. There are thoughts that this efficiency could put solar power in a similar price range as oil.

From Stanford University: “A new process that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity could offer more than double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology, say the Stanford engineers who discovered it and proved that it works. The process, called “photon enhanced thermionic emission,” or PETE, could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil as an energy source.”

Did you get a chance to see Tuesday’s What on Earth?

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BREAKING NEWS—NOAA: WORLD’S 2nd WARMEST JULY, WARMEST YTD GLOBAL TEMP ON RECORD

FROM THE NOAA: “The combined global land and ocean surface temperature made this July the second warmest on record, behind 1998, and the warmest averaged January-July on record. The global average land surface temperature for July and January–July was warmest on record. The global ocean surface temperature for July was the fifth warmest, and for January–July 2010 was the second warmest on record, behind 1998…The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880…”

See all the fun and excitement of Bebbo and Kito discussing this year’s heat!

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