Rainforests Adapting to Global Warming

Man is doing his best to destroy the Earth’s resources, but nature has a way of adapting and resisting. James Fleure reports for Science Recorder:

A team of researchers, led by Dr. Chris Huntingford from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, has discovered more evidence of rainforest resilience to global warming. Their findings reveal that tropical forests are less likely to lose biomass due to global warming than climatologists previously thought. According to the BIOMASS Energy Centre, biomass is biological material derived from living, or recently living organisms.

Researchers undertook the most comprehensive study yet of the risk of tropical forest dieback due to global warming. They contend that their results have significant implications for the role of tropical rainforests in the global climate system and carbon cycle.

Researchers utilized computer simulations with 22 climate models to examine the response of the tropical forests in the Americas, Africa and Asia to greenhouse-gas-induced climate change.

They discovered loss of forest cover in only one model, and only in the Americas. They also discovered that the biggest source of uncertainty in the projections to be variations in how plant physiological processes are represented.

Although the study reveals more evidence of rainforest resilience to global warming, the study also shows where significant uncertainties lie in pinpointing how ecosystems act in response to global warming.

“Uncertainties are associated with different carbon stock responses in models with different representations of vegetation processes on the one hand, and differences in projected changes in temperature and precipitation patterns on the other hand,” wrote the authors in the study’s abstract…

[continues at Science Recorder]