Trees & Global Warming
Out of context: Reply #59
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Global Cooling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glo…
Human activity - mostly as a by-product of fossil fuel combustion; partly by land-use changes - increases the number of tiny particles (aerosols) in the atmosphere. These have a direct effect: they effectively increase the planetary albedo, thus cooling the planet by reducing the sunshine reaching the surface; and an indirect effect: they can affect the properties of clouds by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. In the early 1970s some speculated that this cooling effect might dominate over the warming effect of the CO2 release: see discussion of Rasool and Schneider (1971), below. As a result of observations (aerosol concentrations may have increased, but not enormously) and a switch to cleaner fuel burning, this no longer seems likely; the overwhelming bulk of current scientific work concentrates on the forcing, prediction and understanding of possible global warming.
Plate tectonics also pull it's weight, no pun intended, for the cause of both.