Deforestation and Global Warming: Who Knew Nadine Unger?

Professor Unger, the younger

If history is one long argument, then science is not far behind. We do have certain accepted principles in most of science, but everything is always open to challenge, even the things, especially the things, we want to believe.  And since science is the search for truth, we try to be careful to avoid the traps of politics and law, where the way people look and sound when they say something often becomes more important than the content of what they say--"the media is the message" thing.

So, when you take a look at Professor Unger as the buxom blond bomb shell, you start dreaming of the Saturday Night Live skit which could ensue.

Reading Nadine Unger's article in today's New York Times this morning, it was the content, not her  physical attributes which was enough to make the Phantom  spill his coffee all over the page.

Well, dark stuff absorbs heat

Nadine Unger is on the Yale faculty of Forestry and Environmental Sciences [not atmospheric and environment as I originally posted]  and she uses computer models, which means math, which means it's hard to argue with her. And what her models tell us is, and here's one of the really annoying things, when Ronald Reagan said trees cause more climate change than cars, he wasn't right but he was on to something.

After all, all you have to do is to look at the results of clear cutting of forests and you get a gut feeling that can't be good.

But what she says is:  1. Trees do suck carbon dioxide out of the air and pump back oxygen, but they often keep that oxygen right in the forest and so it is not just an oxygen producing pump for the rest of us to breathe.  2. Trees, being dark, suck up a lot of the sun's heat and so they tend to warm the surface of the planet, which is why the Northeast of the United States, which is the most densely tree covered part of the country, often heats up during the summer.   3. For reasons she does not explain, reforestation in the tropics might well help to cool the planet, but in the northern latitudes, apparently, her calculations suggest the loss of trees may actually cool the planet because those dark, heat absorbing trees are now replaced with lighter colored stuff.  4. Trees emit "volatile organic compounds" (VOC's) which mix with stuff coming out of cars and factories to create even more noxious chemicals in the atmosphere. So the worst place you can be, presumably, is on a road by a factory, surrounded by forests.  6. Trees do suck up CO2 but they also suck back some of the oxygen they make, so they are not just givers but takers. And when they die and fall to the forest floor and decompose, the CO2 contained in them goes back into the atmosphere.

Trees, then, from an atmospheric perspective  are not the unalloyed good citizens of the earth, according to Professor Unger.

Of course, you know, reading along, there must be some reasons to doubt her hypothesis. Anyone who's ever walked through New York City in Mid-August, at dusk, anyone who has felt the heat radiating off those stone buildings, which have been cooking all day like bricks in an oven, knows that however much  heat forests trap, the alternative to forests may trap even more. 

The problem with all this is the New York Times  has followed it's standard practice of publishing Ms. Unger's article without running a "counterpoint" article next to it. There are good commercial reasons for doing this:  1. "Oh, we don't have the space." Well, if you don't have the space for the response, why publish at all?  2. From an "impact" consideration,  when you publish a controversial piece, it gets people riled up, creates buzz, sells papers, gets website hits.  But if you publish the counterpoint right next to it, (as some medical publications do) the reader reads that and breathes a sigh of relief--"Oh, she might be wrong," and this  defuses the outrage, and people turn the page saying, "Well, that's an interesting idea, but I don't buy it for all the reasons in the counterpoint," and they turn the page and read about the stupid thing John Boehner said. 

Older and soon to be famous, now

So, it's not Professor Unger's fault, her incendiary ideas have provided Fox News drill -baby-drill anchors with a day's source of fun and frolic.  She is following the data, she will say. Her interpretation is doubtless challenged by other professors in her field, and it's not her job to provide the opposing argument. Well, actually, in science, you are supposed to say what you understand the weaknesses in your argument are, how you might be wrong and what studies could be done to resolve the doubts--science is not law. It's not about winning and losing but about seeking the truth. 

Ms. Unger and the Times will argue they cannot control what is done with their ideas; they can only put the ideas out there and let the conversation take its course. On the part of the Times, of course, this is the definition of disingenuous, because they could have put the ideas out there in a form which contained the counter arguments as, inevitably, will appear in letters to the editor at a time when the audience for them will be a tenth the size of the audience which heard the original piece and only the most interested will hear it.

But the Times, any newspaper is not about seeking the truth. News reporting--apart from NPR and the News Hour--has always been about selling papers and grabbing attention. Headlines sell papers, reasoned discussion hasn't been seen in American newspapers since the Lincoln-Douglas debates were printed ver batum in the papers before the Civil War. 

Can this really be good for the planet?

The only thing wrong with publishing Dr. Unger's hypothesis is the sure knowledge that the Right will have a field day with it. A day, to be sure, but still, Rush and Sean and the whole crew of those Barbie Doll anchors and Ann Coulter will all be talking about this for months. 

Unmentioned, will be Paul Krugman's piece from yesterday which reviews the data which show that if we switched away from fossil fuels, it would hurt the oil companies but it would help the economy with the jobs and profits from what replaces it--sun, wind industries. As he notes, the same people who are always arguing that capitalist systems are strong because they are so flexible, so eager to respond to the new and embrace it and make a profit, are the same people who say we cannot embrace new sources of energy because with need to protect the dinosaurs of oil (literally dinosaur based) from extinction. We watch happily as other industries (news media, stock brokers, book publishing, music recording) all change or vanish, but oh, we cannot have the coal miners or oil barons threatened by wind and solar competitors. 

So, there you have it, science marches on, and it runs smack into politics, the yowling hyenas of Fox News and the great unwashed masses of Joe Sixpacks who are sitting in their bars gloating. 

Lewis Black at Portsmouth Music Hall

You know you matter when Lewis Black books a stop in your town. Portsmouth has come of age. Not only did he do a show here, at the gilded and gorgeous Music Hall, but the place was packed, despite the heat, which strained the air conditioning but not the tempers of the crowd.

Black alluded to his age, and his fear that as he gets older, he gets less funny, because, maybe he's mellowed a little.

But, if anything, his mellowing has added bite to his shtick because it has added a dollop of sadness to the notion of the absurdity of life which so irritates him.

He noted, among other observations, the transience of modern life and the 24/7 news cycle. Those 50,000 refugee kids in detention centers along our Southern border--so yesterday's news.  He looks at the audience, incredulously, and asks, "So, what? They don't matter any more? Oh, them. They're just there." 

His warm up act, a friend whose humor reflects his own, mentioned Scott Brown and his pick up truck.  Driving a pick up truck qualifies him to be a Senator?  Oh, so you are now one of the guys? 

Black has done a lot of shows in Arizona and Texas, but that doesn't mean he likes anybody down there. It warmed the heart of the Phantom to see him identify those two abscesses in the soul of this nation. He did neglect to mention, South Carolina, but that can wait.

He's just got back from Europe, and the experience obviously was not wasted.  Speaking of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, three socialist countries, he observed, "Obama is no socialist. I am one of the seven socialists extant in this country and he has never shown up for one of our barbecues."

And as for "Obamacare," he's outraged at the perversion of language. It's a terrible law, poorly written and poorly conceived and poorly executed, "But," and here he does his slapped in the face moves, "We had to do something." It is, he says, the Affordable Care Act, and why would any of us want our healthcare to be affordable? Why would we want to give up going into bankruptcy with the first big time illness we get?  

Disarmingly, he dwelt on things he actually loves, as opposed to his usual rant. Tahiti really is paradise, he revealed. And it's just two hours beyond Hawaii. He urged everyone in Portsmouth to move there immediately.  Never been, myself, but I might consider a visit.  Black recounts ordering a Coke and being served a Ginger Ale, and thinking, "Hey, okay. I'll have a Ginger Ale," with a beautific smile. So what?  This place is paradise. What's the big deal?

In Copenhagen, he was entranced by the photographs of beautiful female breasts on the external advertising panels of buses. What he did not have to say is you would never see photos of bare female breasts in the USA, but the point he was making is, female breasts, large or small tend to be beautiful, why would you want to undergo surgery to enlarge them?  That's what these billboards were--ads for augmentation surgery.  

And that was one of his strongest riffs--time and again he returned to what we have done to women in this country, to diminish their value, to laden them with burdens, to prevent their ascendance. 

Of course, he was not without his barbs for the establishment. Where were our vaunted intelligence services when ISIS was forming?  We learned, recently, the American government had been spying on Germany.  "A little late, don't you think?"

A great night on the Seacoast. Another reason to believe we are very lucky to be living here, at this time, as Portsmouth is in resurgence.  Gone are the bar brawls, the red light district, the disheartening level of street crime--gentrification can be good. 

We walked out of the Music Hall and looked in the direction of the new steel framework for the new Whole Foods going up across from the Sheraton. This is a place which could be great, if only we can keep it going.