Thursday, March 26, 2015

Atmospheric CO2 is killing the trees in the Amazon Rain Forest



Recent research shows that as more CO
2 is added to the atmosphere by the human combustion of fossil fuels, the high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are killing the trees in the Amazon Rain Forest. This is a stunning development as it shows that several assumptions that have been made about Global Warming and Geoengineering are wrong.

Human use of fossil fuels currently releases about 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year and about 8-9 billion tons of that is absorbed into trees and other terrestrial carbon sinks. Tropical forests took about 4 billion tons, with 2 billions tons of CO2 being absorbed annually just into the Amazon Rain Forest.  Hopes have been raised that planting more trees might be a good way to geoengineer the climate of the earth.  Those hopes now appear to be misplaced.

Its long been known that more CO2 in the air results in plants having a higher growth rate. Many studies have shown that trees in the Amazon Rainforest are growing faster, and until recently they have been pumping down about two billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. But now huge numbers of trees in the Amazon Rain Forest are dying and the amount of CO2 being absorbed in the Amazon region has dropped by over 50%. It appears that in addition to accelerating tree growth, extra CO2 from the atmosphere is accelerating the life cycle of trees so that they die sooner.

The mortality rate of trees in the Amazon Rain Forest has gone up by more than third in the last 30 years. And when the trees die, the CO
2 that has been stored in the wood, the leaves, and the roots is released back into the atmosphere as the dead tree rots. Multiply that by millions of trees dying prematurely because of CO2, and the total effect on the earth's carbon cycle is huge.  Much more CO2 will remain in the atmosphere. 

And mostly likely the effect is probably not limited to trees in the Amazon Rain Forest---most likely every tree on earth is responding to higher levels of CO2  in the atmosphere by growing fast, maturing sooner, and dying faster.


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