Whenever one reads about climate change, what they are invariably reading about is global climate change. By contrast very little attention is paid to climate change at the local or micro level. I can’t pretend to know much about this, but what I’ve read suggests that vegetation affects the climate around it. There are changes in precipitation whether it’s dew, mist or rain. There’s also massive changes in temperature, windflow etc underneath a tree canopy rather than walking bareheaded to the sky.
The Las Gaviotas project in Colombia planted trees on a barren savannah which had no economic use. Many people said that it would be impossible to grow trees in the soil since it was very acidic, but the man behind the project, Paolo Lugari, planted trees that could adapt to acidic soil conditions if planted in conjunction with fungus. The trees produced resins used by industry and increased precipitation in the area by 10%. The forest became the economic base for a wide variety of life enhancing projects.
Changing climate on the small scale must have an effect on changing climate on the large scale since one feeds into the other. If carbon dioxide is heating up the atmosphere surely it makes sense to plant more vegetation to counter that. The Chinese are planting millions of trees in an effort to stop Beijing turning into Cairo, the desert is racing towards the Chinese capital, and sandstorms a very infrequent occurrence is now something which happens again and again in the same year.
The big question in my mind is how far can you modify the climate? Would it be possible to green the Sahara, the Great Sandy Desert of Australia? I think a lot depends on what you grow, how you design the systems but I don’t see any reason why it should not be possible. There are a number of toys on the market that could make that all the more easy. The one that interests me the most is the Solar Desalinator from Zonne-Water which uses nothing more than sun’s energy to desalinate water. In theory this could provide sufficient water to convert a barren coastline into a coastline alive with vegetation. It could also create an oasis of green in by brackish waters of inland lakes. Small increases in precipation allied with the use of fungus holds great potential for buying a piece of land as a doer upper and turning it into your own little ‘use in case of emergency’ life support system. Can you stack changes in microclimate up, like a line of dominoes well the easy answer is I don’t know and I don’t think anyone does, but when you think about the Amazon feeds the trees water, the trees feed water vapor into the air and it falls again as rain.
What would you call the process of changing the face of the planet in such profound ways? Terraforming?
