KU Professor Finds Land Use Can Contribute to Global Warming, Climate

Deforestation in the Amazon could possibly lead to climate changes in Kansas and contribute to global warming, according to new research by a University of Kansas professor.

"We're trying to get the climate change community to look at more than just global warming," said Johannes Feddema, KU associate professor of geography.

Feddema was the lead author of the research published in the Dec. 9 issue of Science in an article titled "The Importance of Land Cover Change in Simulating Future Climates." Feddema worked with six other scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder, Colo., while there on sabbatical for a year.

The article examines two different scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions and land cover projections set forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The first scenario assumes fossil fuels will not be depended upon as heavily in the future, and fuel efficiency will greatly improve, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The second, more pessimistic scenario, assumes fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions will increase steadily. The more pessimistic scenario showed that deforestation in the Amazon could lead to about a 2-degree Celsius increase in surface temperature across the Amazon by 2100 in addition to the 2-degree increase that is already expected. That rate is about double what could be expected without deforestation, Feddema said.

Just recently read a report from Venice, Italy where a picture with flooding and sewage spill right up and out from the sewer system was shown.
What accompanied this sewage outbreak however was data that revealed that Venice floods have risen by 16 feet from over 5000 years ago, based on sinking ground and raising water levels.
Whoa, and all this before there were SUV's in America.

Climate change has been studied for many years, but the work of Feddema's team was the first to incorporate land cover and ocean temperature in a fully coupled global climate model. Previous studies assumed a constant temperature for oceans. This land cover study took into account the interactions between land and atmospheric processes as well as feedbacks to ocean conditions.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Colorado, I too studied at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and contributed to data inputs for their climate models and their then brand new CRAY computer. They were mighty proud of their computer and their global climate models. But, the key is the word "atmospheric". Almost all their data was atmospheric data and almost all of it collected by Western climate scientists, very little data from the far reaches of the world.

I am amazed that their model still assumes constant sea temperatures. These climate models are the "evidence" for man's culpablity in global warming. I don't trust them for a minute, and neither should anyone else. We have plenty of evidence to support a global warming trend. We have almost no evidence to support a notion that this is anything more than a largely natural cycle - man's influence is a variable: may be somewhere in the range of .001% to 10%.

More research needed indeed. Much more research before we are ready to make ANY public policy decisions IMHO.

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