Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumBoreal In "Rapid And Startling Decline" - Warming Moving North @ 10X Forest Movement
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Many scientists, in fact, are deeply concerned about the state of the worlds largest forest. The Arctic and the boreal region are warming twice as fast as other parts of the world. Permafrost is thawing and even burning, fires are burning unprecedented acres of forest, and insect outbreaks have gobbled up increasing numbers of trees. Climate zones are moving north ten times faster than forests can migrate. And this comes on top of increased industrial development of the boreal, from logging to oil and gas. The same phenomena are seen in Russia, Scandinavia, and Finland. These disturbing signals of a forest in steep decline are why NASA just launched a large-scale research project called ABoVE Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, a major field campaign with 21 field projects over the next decade. But the studies will confirm in detail what many know is well underway.
Boreal forests have a potential to hit a tipping point this century, said Anatoly Shvidenko, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and a co-author of a survey of a recent research on boreal forests in the journal Science. It is urgent we place more focus on climate mitigation and adaptation with respect to these forests.
A tipping point would include the mother of all concerns: the unbridled melting of permafrost, one of the main thrusts of the ABoVE project. The permafrost in the boreal is more susceptible to thawing than in the Arctic because its closer to the freezing point. If large-scale melting occurs it would release more carbon dioxide and methane, which have been bound up in the frozen soil for thousands of years, and bring on more warming, and then more thawing, a dangerous loop. Scientists call it a positive feedback, but most people call that a vicious cycle, said Peter Griffith, chief support scientist for the ABoVE project.
Murray has been researching the boreal forest for 25 years, and he and his colleagues have seen many changes firsthand. In British Columbia, 80 percent of the province's mature lodgepole, another boreal species, have recently died from the mountain pine beetle, whose range and season both expanded greatly because of a warmer world. White and black spruce, the main trees species in the boreal, are also dying in vast numbers The southwest Yukon looks dramatically different than it did 25 years ago when I did my masters [degree], he said. Everywhere you go there is deadfall.
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http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_rapid_and_startling_decline_of_worlds_vast_boreal_forests/2919/
riversedge
(70,299 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,621 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)What we've accomplished in a scant few hundred years makes one's heart swell with pride. Or something.
pscot
(21,024 posts)people continue to say that our puny presence can't possibly cause such global effects.
NickB79
(19,258 posts)daleanime
(17,796 posts)mountain grammy
(26,648 posts)Cassiopeia
(2,603 posts)The damage is done and there is no will among the population to do the things needed to even slow it down, much less reverse the trend.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Wars hurt our environment. In wars, we burn fossil fuels at a very fast rate -- planes, trucks, tanks, all the transportation and some of the weapons of war harm everyone not just those against whom they are used.
War brings no good to anyone.