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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus2/26/2012 7:50:24 pm PST

re: #236 Mich-again

Deforestation is part of the CO2 story too. Humans have generated a lot of CO2 and at the same time have eliminated a lot of the forest over the last century or so.

Millennia. SW Asia, east Asia, Europe, eastern North America, eastern South America… we’ve cut them down.

That changes the albedo too, so it is hard to tell if it is a net wash or not wrt warming. Forests tend to be darker than the grasslands that replace them. However, changing the flora also changes the fauna, and we’ve also, in the past 20,000 or so years, pretty much wiped out most of the large fauna.

So, we’ve made lots of changes, all of which interact in very complex paths.