[Reader-list] (indiaclimatejustice) "What if forests started dying because of climate change? Oh wait… they already are"

[Nagraj Adve]

This is a hugely important posting. Would be good to know if there are
reliable studies/ info regarding already unfolding impacts in India. Some
of it is available for the Himalaya perhaps but other forested zones. The
MoEF study of a year ago mentioned a staggeringly high forest grids getting
affected but if I remember it was a future prognosis not of current impacts.
Naga

On 25 May 2012 11:11, Soumya Dutta <soumyadutta_delhi at rediffmail.com> wrote:

> Post from redd-monitor.   And yet,  there seems to be little action on
> climate change mitigation /adaptation.
> Soumya Dutta
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *What if forests started dying because of climate change? Oh wait… they
> already are
> *
> By Chris Lang, 24th May 2012
>
> Little progress seems to have been made at the UN climate negotiations in
> Bonn over the past two weeks. Meanwhile, climate change is already having a
> serious impact on forests, through the increase in severity and frequency
> of droughts, fires and/or beetle attacks.
>
> *According to Dr Craig Allen, Forest Ecologist at the US Geological
> Survey, in North America, “We’re looking at tree mortality over a scale of
> tens of millions of hectares in the last decade alone.” The bad news is
> that this is typical of what’s happening around the world*. In an
> interview recently on ABC Television, Allen explained that droughts and
> heat waves are triggering “mass waves of mortality”. He adds that, “No
> major forest type is immune.”
>
> It’s not necessarily the drought that kills the tree. Allen explains that,
>
> “There may be insects and fungal pests that emerge at that point in time
> but underlying it is the physiological stress on the trees that compromises
> their defences… So what we’re seeing in these forest die-off events around
> the world are trees passing the tipping point of stress – the thresholds of
> mortality. Unfortunately we don’t know very much about these thresholds at
> this point.
> The ABC programme can be viewed by clicking on the image below:
>
> This programme focusses mainly on the impacts of climate change on trees
> and forests in Australia. Scientists have found that the numbers of insects
> attacking the trees is increasing. Dr George Matusick, a forest
> pathologist, says that,
>
> “The numbers are scary. Where we might have seen one, maybe two per square
> metre, now we’re seeing fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. We’ve seen even as
> high as one hundred.”
> Scientists in the USA are seeing similar patterns. In March 2012, a study
> by scientists from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
> University of Colorado, was published in the American Naturalist. The study
> looks at the mountain pine beetles that have killed large areas of pine
> forest in North America.
>
> They found that mountain pine beetles are breeding twice a year:
>
> Long thought to produce only one generation of tree-killing offspring
> annually, some populations of mountain pine beetles now produce two
> generations per year, dramatically increasing the potential for the bugs to
> kill lodgepole and ponderosa pine trees.
> This means that there “could be to 60 times as many beetles attacking
> trees in any given year,” the scientists found. They point out the
> seriousness in terms of the climate of the mountain pine beetle [MPB]
> infestation:
>
> The current MPB epidemic is the largest in history, extending from the
> Yukon Territory, Canada, to southern California and New Mexico…. To date,
> more than 13 million ha [hectares] of trees have been killed in British
> Columbia. The MPB-killed trees in British Columbia alone will release 990
> million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, an amount equal to five times the
> annual emissions from all forms of transportation in the country.
> The 2005 drought in the Amazon led to the release of 1.6 billion tonnes of
> carbon to the atmosphere. The 2010 drought was even worse, leading to as
> much as 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon being released.
>
> As Joe Romm points out on Climate Progress, this is only the beginning of
> climate change feedbacks. In the USA,
>
> we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the last few decades.
> Imagine the unexpected nonlinear impacts and feedbacks we face when we warm
> 10 times that this century, as we are likely to do if we keep listening to
> the do nothing or do little crowd.
> The impacts of climate change on forests dramatically illustrate that
> doing something about climate change must mean reducing the amount of
> fossil fuel that is burned. There is no way of addressing climate change by
> trading the carbon stored in forests against continued emissions. Doing so
> will only accelerate the tipping point of the death of vast areas of the
> world’s forests.
>
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