Our Nation’s Timberlands Flip: Mortality Exceeds Growth by 2:1 Because of climate change, our nation’s forests are dying faster than they are regenerating. This was not supposed to happen for a long, long time. It’s really something that is not even projected, except in very vague terms about ecosystem transformation. But today, already, we see…
The Texas Forest Service has come out with their final numbers on the 2011 tree kill. After counting plots and comparing to before and after satellite photos, 301 million trees were killed by drought and disease related to drought in 2011. this is right in the middle of their 100 to 500 million estimate (see…
“The death of the forests – primarily comprised of conifers, which are distant relatives of today’s pines and firs – was part of the largest extinction of life on Earth, which occurred when today’s continents were part of one supercontinent, Pangaea. The so-called Permian extinction likely was triggered by immense volcanic eruptions in what is…
The World Wildlife Fund says that we could lose 57 billion acres of forest to development and agriculture by 2050. There is NO mention of loss of forests due to climate change in their new report. Even though, 64 million acres are dead from a climate change induced insect attack in the North American Rockies….
This is yet another climate change impact happening before it was supposed to – a big one too. Findings from this team led by a biologist at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and including scientists from the USGS and the US Forest Service tells us that the black spruce forest of Alaska (much of…
In 2005, the Amazon had a one-hundred year drought. An event like this is basically supposed to be once in a hundred-year occurrence. Five years later they had another. But the 2010 drought was likely more than half again as extreme as the 2005 drought. We can not say with scientific certainty that because we…
Two US Geological Survey researchers published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences of the United States of America this month and found, not only is there ongoing unprecedented forest die-off from warming and, drought, beetles and disease, but these forests are particularly susceptible to eco-regime change: these forests will likely…
A new mega report by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations states the obvious. Persistent drought, insect infestations and disease have increased just as the scientists predicted they would over 20 years ago. These problems have already had enormous impacts on the forests of the world and those impacts are increasing in severity and…
A study in Nature last month confirmed ongoing increased CO2 storage in tropical forests – on the gigaton scale – that’s a lot. So the CO2 fertilization effect is confirmed? Yes of course, we new this all along, CO2 is a fertilizer. But in reality the benefits of the CO2 effect have already been surpassed…
