Man's New Best Friend May Be the Tree

By Michael Coppola
and Nancy Williams

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that not only must we immediately stop burning fossil fuels that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but we must also remove them to get the level back to pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. They say that once removed these gasses must be stored so they are not released back into the atmosphere.

Planting trees is one of the ways that we can remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Most people know, and what we often see in the media, is that trees take in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and give off oxygen, which helps in the battle against global warming. However, there are other ways that trees battle climate change.

What is rarely talked about is that trees cool the environment in other ways. They take in water and move it through the whole tree; ultimately sending the water out via little holes in its leaves to the atmosphere using the process of evaporation. This is similar to the way perspiration evaporating off your skin on a hot day keeps your body cool. This cooling keeps the local area near the surface cooler, which is why cities with trees are cooler than those that do not have trees! And obviously the shade they provide keeps the area beneath them cooler. Trees keep the surface around them from heating up and thereby keep the atmosphere from becoming hotter because there is less production of long/heat wave radiation that can be trapped by the greenhouse gases.

It turns out that these are not the only the benefits of trees. Scientists have recently discovered that the bark of a tree is actually capturing methane that is coming from the ground beside the tree trunk. This is a significant discovery because methane is a much more powerful heat absorbing gas than carbon dioxide and is responsible for 10-13 % of the warming of the atmosphere.

Finally, trees keep carbon locked up in their roots preventing the formation of carbon dioxide as well as methane which are the two key greenhouse gases. It’s simple. If you plant the kind of tree that will grow well in a region's environmental condition you will keep the planet cooler. If you are looking for something that you can do to help fight the battle against an overheating planet, plant a tree.

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