Tropical Rainforest Climate Change

The good news is that science economics and politics are.

Tropical rainforest climate change. Forests and the climate are inextricably linked. Tropical rainforests store a lot of carbon as living biomass. On top of that various sources state that it was because of a sudden change in weather from wet and cold to hot and dry that caused some of the largest trees in the rainforest to die off and release carbon exposing the ground layers of the forest which was normally shaded by the forests upper layer known as the canopy and this caused animals to move out from their natural habitats.

Tropical forests will be resilient to global warming but only if nations act quickly to cut greenhouse gas emissions new research suggests. So any changes in the size of the global rainforest can have a big impact on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Despite their importance tropical forests and their ecosystems are being destroyed at a high and increasing rate in most forest-rich countries.

Two new studies published in the journals Nature and Nature Geosciences suggest die-back is likely to be far less severe than scientists previously thought. Tropical rainforests are among the most threatened ecosystems globally due to large-scale fragmentation as a result of human activity. Climate change a tipping point for tropical rainforests.

Yet with every passing year climate change cuts into tropical forests capacity to operate as a safe natural carbon capture and storage system. Rainforests help to regulate Earths climate. Nature Geosci 6 268273 2013.

Worldwide the degradation and destruction of tropical rainforests is responsible for around 15 percent of all annual greenhouse. But theres a tragic irony to clearing rainforests for agriculture. Studies have shown that halting tropical deforestation and allowing for regrowth could mitigate up to 50 of net global carbon emissions through 2050.

Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time-averting climate change and promoting development. Habitat fragmentation caused by geological processes such as volcanism and climate change occurred in the past. Rainforests are perhaps the most endangered habitat on Earth the canary in the climate-change coal mine said Sassan Saatchi a JPL scientist and lead author of the new study published July 23 in the journal OneEarth.