Posted on 06/02/2009 10:57:21 PM PDT by neverdem
Loss of forests in India, China during the 1700s led to a decline in monsoon precipitation
The dramatic expansion of agriculture in India and southeastern China during the 18th century — a sprawl that took place at the expense of forests — triggered a substantial drop in precipitation in those regions, a new study suggests.
Winds that blow northeast from the Indian Ocean into southern Asia each summer bring abundant rain to an area that’s home to more than half the world’s population. But those seasonal winds, known as monsoons, brought about 20 percent less rainfall each year to India and southeastern China in the 1850s than they did in the early 1700s, says Kazuyuki Saito, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That decline, he and his colleagues contend online June 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the result of deforestation in the region.
In 1700, forests covered between 40 and 50 percent of India and China. But by 1850 that proportion had shrunk to between 5 and 10 percent, Saito says. The substantial decline in forests dramatically reduced the amount of moisture pulled from deep in the soil and sent skyward by trees — moisture that typically would have joined that present in the monsoon winds flowing from the ocean. The overall reduction in moisture, in turn, triggered a substantial slump in soil-dampening precipitation, the researchers note.
Western India, for example, received 20 centimeters (7.9 inches) less monsoon rainfall in 1850 than it did in 1700. The resulting drop in atmospheric humidity also led to a decline in cloud cover, which boosted heat at ground level and dried surface soil even further.
In their study, Saito and his colleagues used a global climate model to confirm the effect of deforestation in...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
The arrogance of little man knows no bounds.
The substantial decline in forests dramatically reduced the amount of moisture pulled from deep in the soil and sent skyward by trees -- moisture that typically would have joined that present in the monsoon winds flowing from the ocean. The overall reduction in moisture, in turn, triggered a substantial slump in soil-dampening precipitation, the researchers note.Bwa-ha-ha! Thanks neverdem.
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By the time I finished cursing Bill Gates, MacroShaft, and Windows, I couldn't remember what I had written.
But, rest assured, it was relevant, cogent, and coherent...what ever it was.
It must be true then. Its a model, models never lie.
That’s an ongoing dispute in my family. I’ve been using Firefox since 2004 (and spin-offs like Google Chrome), while my wife and everybody else still prefers Internet Explorer.
I believe you. Doncha hate it when that happens? The other day I’d written a reply to someone, worded beautifully, and had a Dog Ate My Browser moment. Sucked. Of course, the same day or thereabouts, I’d written another reply to someone else, and on a different forum (I do have a life outside FR y’see, okay, not much of one, but I do) and had it all ready to send, up in the preview window, but wanted it to go up before the other one I was working on. Instead of clicking “Send”, I clicked the close box due to stupidity, and then clicked “send” on the other one. Luckily I’d been so much in self-centered love with what I’d written that I’d pulled the text into a clipping file, and had the exact thing ready to go in no time. But it wasn’t in the order I wanted, dang. ;’)
There are huge holes in the data the article left out.
Such things as:
Is the reduction in rainfall continuing to this day? Have the forests been reestablished? If the reduction in rainfall stopped or went back to 1700 levels AFTER the 1850’s, but without reforestation, than this study is bunk. What other factors might have contributed to less rainfull in the 1850’s? What cycles in the amount of rainfall brought by the monsoons have been recorded? Any? If so, are there cycles that have been worse than others? They don’t say. Perhaps they don’t know. Perhaps 7231 years ago there was NO rainfall and yet the forests canopy lay unbroken from Karachi to Pieking, but who knows?
Very sloppy work, imho.
Rain don’t follow the plow?
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