Tracy Press

A new study by Tracy scientist Govindasamy Bala says planting more trees at certian latitudes might actually enhance global warming.

Glenn Moore/Tracy Press - family time:Research scientist Govindasamy Bala, shown sharing quality time with his family — wife, Indira, and children Priya and Vivek — at his Tracy home Thursday, has been studying global warming for many years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

As a child growing up in southern India, Govindasamy Bala was so interested in clouds and thunderstorms that he thought about becoming a weatherman when he grew up.

Now Bala, 40, a Tracy resident with a Ph.D. degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences who works as a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has jolted the international scientific community with the results of his research into the effect of forests on the earth’s climate and global warming.

Using computer modeling that simulates the results of environmental conditions, like the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Bala and his team have shown that planting forests doesn’t always help cool the earth, as was formerly thought. Instead, a forest can actually heat the earth by trapping sunlight in its dark blanket of upper leaves, or “canopy,” an effect more likely the farther the forest is from the equator.

Bala’s team presented its results at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco on Dec. 15. The research has been reported by regional and international media, including the BBC.

Bala is a warm, talkative man with an infectious grin. He received his doctoral degree at McGill University in Montreal, then pursued postdoctoral studies at Princeton University. He began working at LLNL 10 years ago.

He explained his research and its implications from the living room of the airy house in Tracy’s West Gate neighborhood that he shares with his wife, Indira, their daughter, Priya, 5, and son, Vivek, 8.

“Forests are darker than grasslands,” he said. “What that means is forests absorb more sunlight than grassland. Grassland actually reflects more sunlight. That’s why a forest could make the planet warmer.”

He said forests can also cool the earth, both by taking in carbon dioxide — a “greenhouse gas” — and reducing its warming effects, and also by collecting water from the deep soil and releasing it into the atmosphere, encouraging the formation of clouds, which reflect sunlight away from the earth.

But his research shows that these effects are likely only for trees near the equator. That’s important because of the deforestation taking place in the Amazon rainforest and other tropical regions, he said. The research shows that planting more trees in these areas, or at least slowing down the deforestation there, could mitigate global warming.

“Right now, this is actually a very serious problem,” he said. “In the Amazon, people are clearing the forest basically for economic benefit, because they are planting crops, for example, for ethanol. Ethanol comes from sugarcane from Brazil. Even historically, we have cleared forests to make room for cropland. There have been enormous studies on how this might have affected the planet. This is a very broad area.”

Bala worries about what he sees as a minimal interest by the U.S. in energy-related research and energy-efficient technologies.

“I had work last year around this time — this is a very interesting study I did, and we got a lot of press on it — where we made an assumption: Suppose we use up all the available fossil fuels in the next 300 years. How would the planet look The assumption was we don’t invest in energy-efficient products and renewable forms of energy.

“It was really a very, very scary result.”

According to Bala’s study, the planet was warmed by an average of about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and North America was warmed by about 20 degrees. Bala says that kind of warming could melt away Greenland’s ice sheet, which could contain enough water to raise the sea level by about 23 feet. That could flood most of the world’s coastal cities.

“My view is the likelihood of heat waves and hurricanes increases with global warming,” he said. “You remember the heat wave we had in the Central Valley last summer I would say, at least partly, global warming was responsible.

“You know, this debate about global warming: It’s basic physics that when you put greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, you get global warming. My feeling is in 20 years, there will be no debate about it. The signal will be above the noise level.”

Despite his worries about the Earth, Bala is a man who enjoys his job.

“At some point, all the pieces of the puzzle fit,” he said. “And that’s when you feel, OK, you know, you got something that is really new, and probably you are the first one to get to it. That’s when we all get very excited.”

Bala and his family moved to Tracy when he began working in Livermore.

“I like laid-back communities,” he said. “You know, the rural kind of community. So that’s how we decided to live in Tracy. It has grown now, compared to 10 years back. But still, we like it, you know. It’s still very quiet.”

To reach Janet Somers at the Tracy Press, call 830-4221.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comments