WOW! What a misleading title! I know the spin was given by Nature but why has Mongabay carried forth such an obvious ethanol ploy? Surely replacing cattle pasture with sugarcane plantations would have a cooling effect but there is nothing that suggests that doing it to produce ethanol would produce more local cooling that to do it to produce sugar.

Currently there is a crisis in ethanol production in Brazil. Soaring global sugar prices are sending the cane to sugar mills instead of ethanol refineries. Right now this has precipitated a supply crisis forcing Brazil to import 150 million gallons of US corn ethanol this month (and also import gasoline because the shortage of ethanol is causing owners of flex-fuel cars to go to gas).

One can be certain that the dual pressures of food and fuel will drive more land-grabbing from native cerrado or forest lands for agricultural production. Yes, there is a lot of degraded land that could be restored for agricultural production but it is still cheaper to grab intact ecosystem land with good soil than to pay the costs of soil renewal in degraded places.

The resulting land-use conversion is what ultimately drives carbon emissions and global warming and not whether the crops are used for food or fuel.

Lou Gold
http://lougold.blogspot.com

Greg Asner and Scott Loarie have nothing to do with the cane ethanol lobby. The point of the paper is simply that converting cattle pasture to cane is better for climate than leaving it as pasture. The authors explicitly warn against converting natural vegetation, noting that loss of cerrado produces more warming than going from pasture to cane.

Rhett,

Asner and Loarie are outstanding scientists and. of course, they have nothing to do with the ethanol lobby.
I am not charging conspiracy.

I have read the original at Nature Climate Change.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1067.html

It is clearly framed as a statement about BIOFUEL along with a less prominent caveat against converting native lands.

The data show that sugarcane plantations are more cooling than cattle pasture. The data do not show anything about leakage or triggered land-use change or sugarcane expansion for ethanol versus sugar. We have three pressures here -- sugar, ethanol and beef. To favor any one is to push the others to new locations as long as global demand is soaring.

These ledes:

(from Mongabay) "Sugar cane ethanol cools climate when it replaces cattle pasture"

(from Reuters) "Sugarcane grown for fuel cools Brazil's climate"

are going to spread quickly across the global media as a counter argument to the established science showing that the cumulative impact of using cropland for biofuel production can trigger unfortunate consequences in the big picture.

Poor framing of good science can easily lead to more disinformation.

Why not be more careful?

Lou

I guess sugar cane better than cattle !reason less methane.any plant will help reduce co2.

article on sugar cane.

Very interesting.Though no mention was made I believe that this is because of the canopy that the sugar cane plants develop.

No mention had been made of the durability of this cooling effect.What I mean is that when sugar cane is harvested, the leafy canopy is removed and the land remain exposed to the solar heat for over six months every year.

My conclusion is that this refers to a temporary phenomenon and is not very significant.This can be confirmed by an inspection of the ex Sugar cane lands at Kantale Sugar Industry in Sri Lanka - it is now a desert.

Brazil is a tropical land and there are crops with canopies that will,yield more bioethanol than sugar cane.This taking into consideration the reported yield of more than 80 tons per acre of land in Brazil.
Sugar cane consume vast quantities of water. Canopied plants I mention does not require any irrigation water, these plants require less agro chemicals ( only at the initial stages)consume less machine time and fossil,fuels to run those machines.

Sugar cane is not just about ethanol but also about the use of its fibre to produce energy which avoids the use of petroleum derived products.