Trees Bring Rain to Prevent Drought

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Do trees bring rain?

Despite many naysayers, the answer is YES.

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37.5 million billion gallons of water are in the atmosphere at this very moment in the form of vapor, liquid, or ice.

That’s enough to cover the entire surface of the planet (including the lakes and oceans) an inch deep in water.

It’s recycled 40 times a year mostly because of oceans … and trees.

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Trees, especially conifers compared to hardwoods, help recycle water.

Trees bring rain.

Destroy the trees, and it’s Bye Bye, Rain.

Cutting down the trees, results in drought, resulting in more dead trees.

For example, according to the U.S. Forest Service, 102 million trees have died since 2010 because of California’s drought.

60 million died in 2016 alone.

Of course, 100 million trees are cut down to send junk mail to Americans every year.

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Fortunately, oceans also bring rain.

If it weren’t for the atmospheric river called the Pineapple Express, California would still be up Crap Creek in a barb wire canoe with no paddle.

Fake News labeled it “Category Five Typhoon Storm Lucifer.” (Laugh Out Loud)

Not that the drought is over.

Not by a long shot. “It never rains in Southern California, but when it does it flows quickly out to sea.”

“L.A. was literally built as a drain,” according to environmental advocate Andy Lipkis.

He said (“Capture the Rain and Rebuild the Economy: It Can Happen Here!,” YouTube, Oct. 24, 2011) …

“People think of L.A. as a desert, but that’s a myth. The explorers noted that they could move from one end of the San Fernando Valley all the way to the other end, and always be shaded by oak trees.”

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Bill Mollison (“Trees: Guardians of the Earth,” Permaculture Journal, Feb.-Apr. 1988) wrote …

“The ‘capitalist’, ‘communist’, and ‘developing’ worlds will all be equally brought down by forest loss. Those barren political or religious ideologies which fail to care for forests carry their own destruction as lethal seeds within their fabric. We should not be deceived by the propaganda that promises: “for every tree cut down, a tree is planted”. The exchange of a 50-gram seedling for a forest giant of 50­1200 tonnes is like the offer of a mouse for an elephant.

“No new reafforestation can replace an old forest in energy value, and even this lip service is omitted in the ‘cut and run’ forestry practised in Brazil and the tropics of Oceania.”

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William K. Klingaman & Nicholas P. Klingaman (The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, 2013) wrote …

“Climate scientists now know that deforestation of large areas can cause prolonged droughts and exaggerate seasonal variations in temperature, such that summers become much warmer and winters much colder. [William] Dunbar [1750-1810] was partially correct in his conclusions, although he failed to understand how forest canopies maintain the climate beneath them. Forests insulate their environment not only by reflecting sunlight but also by trapping moisture; plant roots help to retain water in the ground, while the canopy prevents water vapor from escaping into the air above. Remove the forest, and the moisture in the soil quickly escapes; winds then transport the water vapor hundreds or thousands of miles away. This starts a vicious cycle: Less water in the soil leads to less evaporation into the air, which can lead — when applied to an area of hundreds of square miles or more — to less rainfall, which in turn leads to less water in the soil. What rain does fall will often be unable to penetrate into the dry, hard soil, further increasing the risk of devastating droughts.”
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