With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors
By JUSTIN GILLIS
NYT
Published: October 1, 2011

"...In the 1950s, when a scientist named Charles David Keeling first obtained accurate measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a mystery presented itself. Only about half the carbon that people were releasing into the sky seemed to be staying there....

...As best researchers can tell, the oceans are taking up about a quarter of the carbon emissions arising from human activities....

...It is mainly trees that have the ability to lock carbon into long-term storage, and they do so by making wood or transferring carbon into the soil...

..If a forest burns down, for instance, much of the carbon stored in it will re-enter the atmosphere....

...Forests are re-growing on abandoned agricultural land across vast reaches of Europe and Russia. China, trying to slow the advance of a desert, has planted nearly 100 million acres of trees, and those forests, too, are absorbing carbon.

But, as a strategy for managing carbon emissions, these recovering forests have one big limitation: the planet simply does not have room for many more of them. To expand them significantly would require taking more farmland out of production, an unlikely prospect in a world where food demand and prices are rising...

...Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said. That is causing more severe water deficits in the summer, just as the higher temperatures cause trees to need extra water to survive. The whole landscape dries out, creating the conditions for intense fires. Even if the landscape does not burn, the trees become so stressed they are easy prey for beetles...."

I'm really glad I only had one kid and my siblings had none. When I hear people talk about having a half dozen kids and craploads of grandkids I think "Idiots."