New Scientist: Clearing tropical forests for farmland is bad for the climate ““ no surprises there. But now we’ve learned that it’s also an inefficient way to feed people. Paul West of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues worked out the potential yields of 175 different crops if they were planted in different parts of the world. Then they estimated how much carbon would be released into the atmosphere by clearing these areas of wild plants. “In the tropics, clearing a hectare of land releases…