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Georgia Tech: “50 percent of the [USA] warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes rather than greenhouse gases”
WattsUpWithThat
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
County-level land-use changes from 1950 to 2000, based on censuses of population, housing, and agriculture. A) change in population density; B) change in land area settled at “exurban densities” (i.e., 1 house per 1 to 40 acres); C) change in percent cropland (Brown et al. 2005).From a Georgia Tech Press Release:
Reducing Greenhouse Gases May Not Be Enough to Slow Climate Change
Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone publishes a paper in the December edition of Environmental Science and Technology that suggests policymakers need to address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization on climate change, in addition to greenhouse gas emissions.
According to Stone’s paper, as the international community meets in Copenhagen in December to develop a new framework for responding to climate change, policymakers need to give serious consideration to broadening the range of management strategies beyond greenhouse gas reductions alone.
“Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases,” said Stone. “Most large U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole – a rate that is mostly attributable to land use change. As a result, emissions reduction programs – like the cap and trade program under consideration by the U.S. Congress – may not sufficiently slow climate change in large cities where most people live and where land use change is the dominant driver of warming.”
According to Stone’s research, slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
![Georgia Tech: “50 percent of the [USA] warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes rather than greenhouse gases” aj150709banner1](http://www.prisonplanet.com/images/august2009/aj150709banner1.jpg "Georgia Tech: “50 percent of the [USA] warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes rather than greenhouse gases” Photo")
“Treaty negotiators should formally recognize land use change as a key driver of warming,” said Stone. “The role of land use in global warming is the most important climate-related story that has not been widely covered in the media.”
Stone recommends slowing what he terms the “green loss effect” through the planting of millions of trees in urbanized areas and through the protection and regeneration of global forests outside of urbanized regions. Forested areas provide the combined benefits of directly cooling the atmosphere and of absorbing greenhouse gases, leading to additional cooling. Green architecture in cities, including green roofs and more highly reflective construction materials, would further contribute to a slowing of warming rates. Stone envisions local and state governments taking the lead in addressing the land use drivers of climate change, while the federal government takes the lead in implementing carbon reduction initiatives, like cap and trade programs.
“As we look to address the climate change issue from a land use perspective, there is a huge opportunity for local and state governments,” said Stone. “Presently, local government capacity is largely unharnessed in climate management structures under consideration by the U.S. Congress. Yet local governments possess extensive powers to manage the land use activities in both the urban and rural areas.”
The Environmental Science and Technology article is available at http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag.
For more on land use change in the USA, see this NASA resource
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24 Responses to “Georgia Tech: “50 percent of the [USA] warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes rather than greenhouse gases””
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November 11th, 2009 at 11:10 am
From the above article:
> “According to Stone’s research, slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming.”
Informed people have been rightfully complaining about the alarming rate of “forest loss” for decades, yet this rate continues unabated because virtually everyone involved with this issue has either failed or refused to recognize the extent to which this problem is caused by the anti-labor/pro-land speculation tax system that virtually all governments impose on their respective populations:
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“It is incontrovertible, I think, that the rapidly-increasing destruction of the Amazon rain forest…is directly attributable to the fact that the Amazon basin is the only part of Brazil where free or cheap land is available, and this, in turn, is attributable to the fact that nearly four-fifths of Brazil’s arable acreage is covered by sprawling latifundios, half of which are held by speculators who produce nothing. Were the artificial scarcity of available land in the rest of Brazil corrected, as the Georgist remedy would unquestionably do, pressure on the Amazon basin would obviously cease.”
– Robert V. Andelson, Commons Without Tragedy, p. 32
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For those unfamiliar with the “Georgist” tax remedy, see: http://schalkenbach.org
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Colonel X Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
A guy I know runs this department at Ga. Tech.
If this report did indeed come out of his department you can take it to the bank.
That is all !!
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November 11th, 2009 at 11:51 am
duh… if you think CO2 is a problemo, then plant some trees.
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bob boblaw Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
that’s exactly what i was thinking
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Glen Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
The thing people forget about the tree planting campaigns is that most are zero sum not carbon reduction
If you plant a tree where there were trees in the past then there is no net gain just a return to zero difference from the original felling.
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November 11th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
new short film about lieing shawn hannity and laughting boy john edwards, gunrights, verichip and the coming chip thats here now, chemtrail and the brainwashing of the corp media- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmvCFd866R8
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November 11th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I’m not even going to read this article , just reply to it .
Georgia Tech , The warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to the Sun getting hotter !
The Sun is estimated to be some 4.6 Billion ( that’s , 4,600,000,000 ) years old . All things have a cycle . The Sun burns for a while , then it gets dimmer for a time , then it gets hotter for a time and then it goes back to burning steadily again .
Its not greenhouse gases , its not CO2 , its not land use changes and its not being used as a trick to further insult our intelligence .
So Please , enough already .
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wildcat Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
If you did read the full article, you would have found this link:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es903304s
Study reveals new mercury risks for fish and birds
Apart from that, the heatsink of cities is well known – the larger the city, the warmer the core temperature due to air-conditioning systems and combustion engines pumping out warm humid air. Not forgetting the heat from computers and monitors.
Trees do make the city streets a better place to live. Shame that many councils are cutting them down to avoid lawsuits from walkers “tripping up” on cracked paving stones.
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November 11th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Agenda 21?
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November 11th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
CRAP !!!!!!!!!
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November 11th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
yEAH LIKE PLOWING UP AND CEMENTING VAST TRACTS OF LAND FOR NEW SHIT DEVELOPMNENTS & MALLS…Thank you Chamber of Commerce….
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November 11th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Where is the proof that the sun is getting hotter? The white house says so? Al Gore? Congress critters? Oh, i see Jesus told you…get off the f drugs you buffoon…
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November 11th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Yeah!,somebody finally realises that cement,(almos tWhite),reflects heat,(the sun),,straight back up,yeeehaw!……
I noticed that when I was doing pushups in the military,just not the wider implications of such a phenomenon……
Couldn’t be that we are paving too much space for our cars and shit,could it?….
In a way,that twists into driving too much,don’t it?.
Watch those politicians,turn off your TV,grow a garden,stop going to work,buy solar panels.
Drink beer,burn your bible,but don’t forget it.
………………………………………………………
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November 11th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
There is no proof of anything changing here excepting for those inputs you have grown to take for granted,you weren’t lookin…..
You didn’t notice.
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November 11th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Over many years we have all been lied to by our Governments, but not just our Governments but many religous leaders. Many things we have been taught are not even in Scripture and millions have swallowed so many lies by these false prophets. If you are a truth seeker please visit the following web site and take the time to read some of the articles, you will be shocked.
http://www.2besaved.com
Blessings
Ben
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November 11th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
BEN..WE ARE SHOCKED ENOUGH BY THE BASTARD DEMONS IN WASHINGTON,THANK YOU..
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November 12th, 2009 at 3:24 am
The sun has been dead for over a year. yes, no trees= no precip=no snow… without new snow old snow evaps…. maybe if we call china and have them spray over the polar bears instead of them selves they would not be in such a predicament .
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November 12th, 2009 at 3:31 am
oh yea . china- drought/ sprayed into deep snow – buried, tonnes of salt melting bridges .water toxic goes back down river anyway. i guess the leaders us the us are dumming down those in china too
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November 12th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Why is the whole world watching James Damiano?
http://www.viddler.com/explore...../videos/7/
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November 12th, 2009 at 4:19 am
The U.S. Government pumps trillions of watts of heat into the rarified upper atmosphere with HAARP antenni, to control weather. I have seen doppler radar scans that suggest that some of our large ships also have such antenni, the specific ship projecting a wedge shaped beam into an Atlantic Ocean storm vortex was not identified. The U.S.S. Enterprise, for example, has eleven nuclear reactors available to power such weather controls, if so installed.
If you look up http://www.spaceweather.com/ you can plug in the date Nov 4, 2003 for archive info, that is the date the largest solar flare ever wittnessed from Earth exploded 90 degrees away from Earth. If it had been pointed at Earth, it would have burned out every electrical grid on the Planet, and killed plants and animals on the surface facing the Sun as the radiation from the explosion reached Earth. The blast was so big it stunned or burned out sensors monitoring solar energy emissions. We are now in an extended solar minimum that could lead into an ice age. The causes of aberations in the solar cycle are not well understood, but they are known to be periodic on an irregular schedule.
There is evidence that the last ice age occured quickly, like in the movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” such that flowers and grass froze between the teeth of Mammoths as they ate spring food, and the “larger than African Elephants” animals quick froze to the center of their gut, such that the meat was preserved deep inside the huge animals, in Siberia.
Sixty years ago California was sparsely populated with strong agricultural activity. Thousands of acres of orange trees and grape orchards are gone, thousands of acres of California Live Oak trees are gone, many dairys are gone, the land paved over and replaced with baby factories (streets and homes), malls, and highways. Los Angeles basin used to have several “real” rivers, now paved over as flood control channels, and the watershed has been destroyed in the Angeles National Forest by successive fires combined with bark beatle infestations, the latest fire (Station Fire) was allowed to burn virtually the entire forest due to no money available to fight the fire (liberal government in California tens of billions of dollars in the red, due to highly compensated public employee union members costing more money than the State tax revenues can support).
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November 12th, 2009 at 9:56 am
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
- excerpt, UN Agenda 21
How do you spell Hidden Agenda? Answer: CO2
http://www.green-agenda.com
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storky Reply:
November 12th, 2009 at 10:47 am
This clearly isn’t the first time you’ve been fooled.
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November 12th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Carbon Dioxide Levels.
The IPCC claim that current carbon-dioxide levels are rising by 2 ppmv per year.
Human emissions are approximately 8 billion tons, which is 4.1 ppmv. It is claimed that roughly half or 45% of human emissions remain in the atmosphere, while the other 55% is absorbed back into the biosphere. Can you see the obvious flaw in this claim? It implies that natural CO2 production or emission does not contribute to the increase or variation in overall CO2 levels at all and that we humans alone, are responsible for all the increase in overall global CO2 levels.
We are expected to believe that there is no variation in natural CO2 production and emission whatsoever. Even though we know for instance, that the oceans which cover 70% of the globe, absorb more CO2 when they are cooler and release more CO2 when they are warm, and that the strength of solar output varies with the sunspot cycle which has recently entered a quiet phase and that the Earth has a variable elliptical orbit around the sun, among the many other solar and climate variables.
We are all too familiar with the terms El-Nino and La-Nina and understand these to be oceanic temperature fluctuations which occur on such gigantic scales that we have no need to spend billions of dollars just to convince people they are happening because their effects are felt by us all. Not to mention all the other global temperature fluctuations that we all know have happened throughout history, entirely without any human influence whatsoever, such as glacial and inter glacial cycles.
Even with this given indisputable knowledge, are the IPCC and the rest of the AGW fraudsters expecting humanity to swallow their fairy story that this apparent 2 ppmv annual increase in CO2 is entirely the result of one single species of mammal in a world filled with millions upon millions of separate species of gas emitting mammals, organisms, and plants on both land and sea?
This has to be one of the most ridiculous, fraudulent and wantonly deceptive claims I have ever heard.
There cannot be a single scientist on the face of this Earth who genuinely believes such a fallacious claim. Therefore those in the science community who support such fallacy are at best, self serving intellectual prostitutes and at worst, co-conspirators in cahoots with the New World Order Nazi’s in their desperate and repeated attempts to impose a global dictatorship.
Two things are glaringly obvious to me at this time and it is with these two main points I would like to conclude:
1. A global border-less government (New World Order) requires a global border-less taxation system (carbon Tax/Life Tax). It has been suggested (Lord Christopher Monckton) and to anyone paying attention it will be all too obvious, that Copenhagen will be the venue at which Sovereign states will be expected to cede their National Sovereignty to a global governing body. It is also completely clear that this global government will be under the power and influence of the very same parasitic oligarchy, responsible for perpetrating the AGW fraud, which has lead to the Copenhagen summit in the first place. A nefarious group consisting of the largest gaggle of eugenics obsessed, population reductionist, intergenerational Nazi’s, this great and glorious world has ever known.
2. When this lofty, impossible dream of world domination collapses and believe me this is a given, if history tells us anything, the first sacrificial scapegoats will be those that have been instrumental in developing and scripting the sophistry responsible for herding the people of this world into the clutches of the financiers and planners of the previous centuries’ genocidal Nazi’s, namely the intellectual prostitutes of the science community. These scientists who have used sophistry in their pro AGW pseudo science papers, will likely be the first to feel the wrath of the free world. The politicians and elite, who are their paymasters, may be able buy some time but these treasonous traitors will be left high and dry. They will not have anywhere to run or hide this time. They are on record with their sophistry and they have been bubbled. The game is up.
The AGW fraud will be neutralized with one word……………… “CONVECTION”.
Hot air and the truth are subject to the same law of physics. They always rise.
Don’t believe AGW is a fraud, Know it!
http://www.spinonthat.com/CO2.html
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November 12th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Eeeer………. Georgia Tech is a serious Institution. Clearly, Atlanta, which in my opinion is still one of the cities with more trees in the US. still produces it’s own “wheather patterns near the Metro Area. It is not inmune to sprawl. Over the years I’ve seen an unabated sprawl, specially over the Northeast of the Metro Area. Whatever trees where there are gone, with the proverbial strip malls. One area in particular, the now incorporated city of John’s Creek is the poster child of these developments. John’s Creek industrial park has buildings that have been empty since 2001, while around these buildings more offices are built. The McGuinnis Ferry corridor is a clear example. Zero trees, more pavement, town house development [less land more people=more money] . I’ll post something in youTube, and if in your city you see something like that, post it. I mean, how can a real state company turn a profit with a park with 20% of park buildings unnocupied for 5 years plus? how could the county allowed more land use change and construction? All those buildings have a minimum or air conditioning ON, to keep mold at bay, increasing the need for electricity and indirectly, oil. Hypocrisy, not in environmental issues, but simple every day issues knows no end. Less emotion guys, more posting.
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