Earth Science in the News

Dave Massaroni
According to an article written by Justin Gillis
on October 1, 2011, trees along western
Montana glow an earthy red 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. Wildfires race across the southwest parched
landscapes this summer, burning millions of 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. 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.
Scientists
have figured out that forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the
carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air from 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. If forests were to die on a sufficient scale, they would not only stop
absorbing carbon dioxide, they might also start to burn up or decay at such a
rate that they would spew huge amounts of the gas back into the air. That, in
turn, could speed the warming of the planet, unlocking yet more carbon stored
in once-cold places like the Arctic.
It
is clear that the point of no return has not been reached yet. “I think we have
a situation where both the ‘forces of growth’ and the ‘forces of death’ are
strengthening, and have been for some time,” said Oliver L. Phillips, a tropical
forest researcher with the University of Leeds in England. Many scientists say
that ensuring the health of the world’s forests requires slowing human emissions
of greenhouse gases. I do agree with Phillips in that we have not reached a
point of no return but we as humans need to protect our plant and continue regulating
the amount on carbon dioxide in put into the atmosphere. If we continue on the
path that we are on right now, this could cause major issues down the road as
to where these affects will become dramatically worse and could become a major concern
to humanity.
The increase in temperature touches on
some of the topics discussed in class. The increase in temperature due to the
lack of trees absorbing carbon dioxide affects three of the four Earth’s
spheres which are the; hydrosphere, which contains all of the planet's
solid, liquid, and gaseous water. The biosphere, which contains all of
the planet's living organisms, and atmosphere, which contains all of the
planet's air. This increase in temperature is a sign of global warming which
can cause polar ice caps to melt and increase the ocean levels drastically
enough that current coastal zones would eventually submerge, causing humans and
animals on land to retreat to land that they are not adapted to.

Article from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/science/earth/01forest.html?_r=2&ref=temperaturerising