Biogeochemistry Reading Group: Gordon Bonan

April 20, 2009 – 1:18 pm

On March 3, Dr. Gordon Bonan visited us from the terrestrial sciences section an NCAR and we had a great discussion about modeling the effects of ecosystems on climate. Gordon did his undergrad as well as his Ph.D. at UVA and then eventually moved on to a postdoc at NCAR where he has been ever since.

Gordon got interested the interaction between ecosystems and global climate in 1988 when tropical deforestation catching headlines. He was fascinated by the huge impact of the rainforest on regional and global climate, which is why he eventually came to NCAR to work with a researcher named Bob Dickinson who studied the topic. Although he started on tropical rainforests, he eventually also became interested in how northern forests and other ecosystems affect climate.

Overall, we had a great discussion with Gordon and a couple of points really stuck with me from our chat with him.

First, we had a fun discussion with Gordon about public interpretation of his research. In a section of his paper that we read, he explains that deforestation in the boreal forests would actually help mitigate climate change due to the greater snow exposure, which reflects solar energy away from the Earth. We asked him about this and he explained that this conclusion comes from an earlier study he did in which he and his colleagues simulated the elimination of the boreal forest to see what the effects on climate would be.

We asked him if this study was ever used as a talking point by climate change skeptics. He told us that indeed, his study was seized upon by none other than Rush Limbaugh. Gordon explained to us how Rush worked his usual cherry picking shenanigans by using this study as a counterpoint to the environmental movement at the expense of broader context. Later, when we were discussing the many technological climate mitigation schemes that have been suggested recently, Gordon explained that “there is a lot of fodder for the Rush Limbaughs out there.”

My other favorite part of the discussion was when we talked about the inclusion of element cycling into the next generation of climate models. While the current models are basically based only on atmospheric physics, modelers have recently begun to incorporate biogeochemical cycling of carbon and even nitrogen.

Gordon said that because of the unknown parameters involved with such modeling, he thinks that this may lead to less overall certainty in the global temperature predictions in the next IPCC report. This would be a reversal of the trend in IPCC reports where scientists have voiced more and more confidence in their predictions over time. It will be interesting to see if this indeed occurs because it could have important implications for biogeochemistry research and would also be pretty interesting from a sociology of science perspective.

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