Climate Change Update: Only Healthy Trees Can Save The Planet

First Posted: Jul 23, 2016 06:10 AM EDT
Close

Not all trees can save the planet. This is the new study published in the journal Ecology Letters stating that not all trees can help counter the progressing pace of global warming because they take carbon out of the air, only healthy trees do.

The climate change that causes hotter and longer summers that weakened trees, destroying the whole forest in  North America and be sources of carbon. From the researcher's point of view, North American trees won't save the planet from climate change.

The climate change causes the growth rate of trees to decrease, News Week reported. This is a reaction due to the environmental stressors such as cold or drought. According to a researcher at the University of Arizona and another author on the study, Noah Charney said that there is a critical and possible harm going on.

Some of the steps to fight the dangerous effect of climate change are to lessen the production of fossil fuels and use geoengineering to lock up carbon in the ground.

According to Valerie Trouet, the co-author, and an associate professor at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research said that there are a lot of studies made to that the boreal forests can save the people from the climate change by offsetting emissions but they did not see any greening in all results. What they see is browning. She said that the positive influence warmer temperatures and are believed to have on boreal forests but they don't see anything, IFL Science reported.

Greening is the assumption that trees in high latitudes or colder areas that do not grow nor live well have an advantage in a warmer, more carbon-dioxide-rich environments that the climate change will bring.

Due to climate change, the expected growth rate of trees in some continents is 75 percent percent slower for the second half of this century.  Alaska, Canada, and the Rockies forest have been affected by the climate change.

Margaret Evans, an assistant research professor in the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and the lead author of the study said that forests serve as a carbon sink because trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. However, due to the effect of the climate change, the rate of tree growths is decreasing so this lead to a less carbon they take in then will result in a faster climate change.

To understand more about how the planet's future climate change,  Evans and her team used more than 2 million historical tree-ring records across North America to understand the growth of a tree in a specific year then they will cross-referenced with annual climate conditions.

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

©2017 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science news.

Join the Conversation

Real Time Analytics