Could new (more reflective) varieties of wheat and barley save the planet from climate change?

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/15/climatechange-scienceofclimatechange

Could new varieties of wheat and barley save the planet from climate change?

Food scientists claim planet could be cooled by up to 2°C simply by planting crops specially bred to reflect more sunlight

Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 January 2009 17.00 GMT

Food crops could be used to keep the Earth's temperatures down and slow global warming, say scientists. By growing plants that can reflect more of the sun's radiation back into space, parts of Europe and North America could be cooled by 1°C in the summer, the equivalent of stopping billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere over the next century.

Growing agricultural plants such as maize or barley already cools the climate because they reflect more sunlight back into space than natural vegetation. Different varieties of the same plant can vary in how much light they reflect, a property called albedo, so selecting for higher-albedo crops would enhance the cooling effect from agriculture.

Using the same climate models as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Andy Ridgewell led a team of scientists at the University of Bristol to calculate how different varieties of crops would affect global temperatures. "It would be an optimistic scenario that, farming everywhere, people were happy to plant a slightly different variety of crop."

The results, published today in the journal Current Biology, showed that, in the most optimistic scenario with all the world's crops replaced by the most reflective varieties, the world would cool by an average of 0.1C, equivalent to almost a fifth of the warming since the Industrial Revolution.

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[jdlh8894]

1. Let's see

More barley OK
More corn OK

Damn! More whiskey and beer!!!

[GliderGuider]

2. The chest wound is still sucking. Slap on another Bandaid, quick!

How about we stop addressing the symptoms of the disease, and start addressing the underlying cause? You can't fix a broken leg with pain killers.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. On the other hand

If you know anything about first aid, you know there are priorities. The first priority is to keep the patient alive.

For example, while the primary cause of the patient's distress may be a compound fracture, your first priority is not to set the bone, but to stop the bleeding.

So, yes, we need to address the "underlying cause," but addressing the "symptoms" is a good idea too.

[GliderGuider]

4. Fair enough, but the Bandaids are outnumbering the splints by about 100:1 at the moment.

[Nihil]

5. Hmmm ...

> "... but it might require a lot of selective breeding or
> genetic modification to get that impact."

There would be enough of a question anyway about replacing the
existing strains with "more reflective" ones as one would presume
farmers choose their crops for reasons of cost, productivity,
resilience & availability rather than just to have a nice matt finish
to the field.

This stinks of someone trying to create another foothold for the
Monsantos of this world to increase their profits by f*cking up even
more species.

:thumbsdown: