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ext |
Source |
Title and Notes (if any) *Title from filename
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| 1 |
060715 |
htm |
WashPost |
Pumped Up on Carbon Dioxide, Vines Strengthen Their Grip
- Vines -- poison ivy, Japanese honeysuckle, kudzu -- snake through
the back yard, girdling trees and strangling shrubs, thriving, scientists
say, on the same pollution they blame for global warming.
- From backyard gardens to the Amazon rain forest, vines are growing
faster, stronger and, in the case of poison ivy, more poisonous on the heavy
doses of carbon dioxide that come from burning such fossil fuels as gasoline
and coal.
- But the vines also hint at a tantalizing solution to global warming:
Perhaps scientists can engineer a plant that would absorb extraordinary amounts
of carbon dioxide
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| 2 |
060926 |
htm |
NYT |
Emblem of the West Is Dying, and No One Can Figure Out Why - New York Times
- The aspen, an emblematic tree of the West
and the most widely distributed tree in North America, is rapidly and
mysteriously dying.
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| 3 |
061023 |
htm |
USAToday |
U S As Trees Under Attack
- from
ash and aspen to white pine and Hawaii's native wiliwili, are under attack
by insects and diseases in a growing assault coast to coast.
- Others are homegrown insects at epidemic levels because of drought
and unusual warmth
- Trees were weakened by drought or subjected to worse
infestations because warmer temperatures allowed the bugs to multiply
faster
- "we
see (aspen) dying in wet areas, too, so I'm not convinced it's drought
alone."
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| 4 |
070115 |
htm
O |
USAToday |
Warming Trend Visiblein Trees
- Rising temperatures are allowing Southern trees to thrive farther
north and stressing trees used to colder weather,
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| 5 |
071115 |
htm
O |
NASA |
Forest Damage From Katrina CO2release
- Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged 320 million large trees
in Gulf Coast forests, which weakened the role the forests play in storing
carbon from the atmosphere
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| 6 |
071208 |
htm
O |
WashPost |
Preserving Tropical Forests Is Key Issue at Talks on Global Warming
- Each year, tropical forests covering an
area at least equal to the size of state are destroyed; the carbon dioxide
that those trees would have absorbed amounts to 20 percent of the world's
greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as total U.S. emissions.
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| 7 |
080202 |
htm |
USAToday |
World Loses Trees At Alarming Rate
- From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia's
archipelagos, human encroachment is shrinking the world's rain
forests.
- U.N. specialists estimate
60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute
- Global warming is expected to dry up and kill off vast tracts of
rain forest, and dying forests will feed global warming.
- Forest destruction accounts for about 20% of manmade
emissions, second only to burning of fossil fuels for electricity and
heat
- "Deforestation continues at an alarming rate of about 13 million
hectares (32 million acres) a year,"
- Because northern forests remain essentially stable, that means 50,000
square miles of tropical forest are being cleared every 12 months —
equivalent to one Mississippi or more than half a Britain.
- Nigeria's
- Environmentalists say such a conservation approach may work for rural,
agrarian people in Nigeria, which lost an estimated 15 million acres between
1990 and 2005, or about one-third of its entire forest area, and has one
of the world's highest deforestation rates — more than 3% per
year.
- That's the goal of the post-Bali talks, looking for ways to integrate
forest preservation into the world's emerging "carbon trading" system. A
government earning carbon credits for "avoided deforestation" could then
sell them to a European power plant, for example, to meet its emission-reduction
quota.
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| 8 |
080203 |
htm |
USAToday |
Puzzle Over Amazon Impact On Warming World
- Scientists can now say with certainty that the Amazon is neither
the lungs of the Earth, nor the planet's air conditioner. Paradoxically,
the forest's cooling vapors also trap heat, by reflecting it back toward
Earth in much the same way greenhouse gases do.
- If preserving the 80% of the Amazon still standing would help offset
some greenhouse emissions, destroying it would almost certainly accelerate
global warming, by releasing perhaps 100 billion tons of carbon into the
atmosphere — equal to some 10 years' worth of total global
emissions.
- Deforestation — both the burning and rotting of wood in the
Amazon — already releases an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere every year, accounting for up to 80% of Brazil's greenhouse
gases, boosting this country to sixth place or higher among emitter
nations.
- By contrast, each acre of rain forest that remains intact takes somewhere
between 80 and 480 pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere each year through
the process of photosynthesis.
- Scientists estimate it would cost about $1 billion a year in lost
income for Brazil to end the clearing of forest by loggers, ranchers and
farmers, largely giant soybean-growing conglomerates
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