Global warming: Restoring forest cover is the solution
The United Nations must developed a deeper understanding of the known and unknown parameters of the laws of nature regarding air, water and forests due to a copious amount of water on earth acting as an increasingly powerful weapon of nature in the backdrop of global warming and a colossal increase of carbon dioxide emissions.
These important factors have not been given proper attention by UN bodies till now.
The surface area of the world totals to about 510,100,100 square kilometres. Water in the oceans covers about 361,800,000 square kilometres i.e., some 70% of the world’s surface. Only about 30% of the planet consists of land, which covers about 148,300,000 square kilometres.
It is very important for researchers and administrators involved in climate mitigation to know that for maintaining the serenity of atmosphere and for balancing the ‘water cycle’, nature had from the beginning provided forest cover of about two-thirds of the total area of land. Owing to human negligence, forest cover has got reduced to 31% of the world’s surface area, according to the World Bank data.
By the late 1940s, tropical rain forest cover got reduced to about 16 million square kilometres of the earth’s surface.
In the late 1980s, forests covered only about 10 million square kilometres. About another 1,00,000 square kilometres of tropical rain forests are being destroyed every year mostly in Latin America and South East Asia.
Since 1980, unchecked and thoughtless destruction of forests has further reduced the forest cover and the remaining is also not equitably distributed.
Hence special traits endowed by nature for sustaining all life on the planet need be properly understood and carefully applied for restoring the serenity of the atmosphere.
Water is the most common substance on earth and is found in all three forms: ice, liquid and steam viz., solid, liquid or gas. There is colossal quantity of 1,385 million cubic kilometre of water on the globe of which 97% is in oceans and ice caps. Only about 3% of the water on earth is fresh water. The rest is salty and fills the oceans.
Every year under normal weather conditions only about 0.00038% of this water i.e., merely 5,25,000 cubic kilometre or only about half a million cubic kilometre evaporates in the normal course from the vast oceans and continents, more or less the same amount falls back to earth as precipitation – rain, snow, hail or fog. Climatologists have thus to take a special note of the fact that this apparently small percentage of water getting into air as vapour under normal atmospheric conditions of heat rotating through the atmosphere had been satisfying all the needs of the world through rain and snowfall earlier.
Hence, it is vitally important to observe the effect of global warming, that too prolonged, on a huge quantity of water that fills the oceans.
Land absorbs and releases heat from the sun quickly but the oceans absorb as well release the sun’s heat slowly. Thus, the gradual and continuous warming of vast ocean waters to the extent of 1385 million cubic kilometre together with constantly increasing temperature on earth signals the danger of much higher evaporation which is already resulting in abnormal precipitation i.e. ferocious floods and mega snowfalls at various places throughout the world.
Hence it is imperative for US President Donald Trump to relent on the policy regarding global warming and join the world for climate mitigation. Floods in Houston, Texas, in August last year and the current record-breaking snowfall in the USA is caused only by ingress of a large quantity of moisture from warmed oceans.
This problem shall pester them increasingly hereafter. Plantation of billions of trees and restoring forest cover is at present the only major solution for global warming. The writer is managing secretary, Feroze Gandhi College, Rae Bareli.
(Views are personal.)