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Forests dying off as world’s climate warms
Posted by Xeno on October 9, 2011
A section of Montana forest largely destroyed by mountain pine beetles. – NYTimes
The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.
But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.
Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.
From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.
The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.
Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become.
Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer. For, while a majority of the world’s people now live in cities, they depend more than ever on forests, in a way that few of them understand.
Trees absorb vehicle emissions
Scientists have figured out — with the precise numbers deduced only recently — that forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels and other activities. It is an amount so large that trees are effectively absorbing the emissions from all the world’s cars and trucks.
Without that disposal service, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be rising faster. The gas traps heat from the sun, and human emissions are causing the planet to warm.
Yet the forests have only been able to restrain the increase, not halt it. And some scientists are increasingly worried that as the warming accelerates, trees themselves could become climate-change victims on a massive scale. …
Robert Dave Myrland said
Its kinda downgraded a bit… they use such language where the readers thinking pattern are confused to a great extent.
In stead of say its pollution doing all this they put a nicer language to it so that the pollution will continue as long as possible because they don’t care about it, what they care about is make money on oil and be better than the normal man in the street.
Its so because we the people are naive and let them control us all the ways they want.
Its about time that the wall street expand to world wide protest and hopefully we will get rid off the government somehow soon
Ian C. said
My government paid me to seek and destroy pine beetle infestation in Canmore Alberta in 2008. We would survey entire mountainsides from peek treelines to city streets below identifying any infested trees and marking them for destruction. The actual nature of this infestation is a combination of warmer temps, forest fire fighting, and pine – heavy reforestation techniques. I can not speek for the world wide treepocalypses though.
Xeno said
There are some natural predators of the beetles: nematodes, other beetles, wasps and woodpeckers.
http://www.barkbeetles.org/mountain/fidl2.htm
I like the idea of breeding battalions of woodpeckers with nematode coated beaks to save the trees while we lower our carbon emissions… But the oil company lie that global warming is a “hoax” has too many people fooled, so we will continue to live in excess … Until we will die from denial of responsibility.