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posted by chromas on Thursday August 06 2020, @07:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-those-trees-which-survive dept.

In a warming world, New England's trees are storing more carbon:

Climate change has increased the productivity of forests, according to a new study that synthesizes hundreds of thousands of carbon observations collected over the last quarter century at the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research site, one of the most intensively studied forests in the world.

The study, published today in Ecological Monographs, reveals that the rate at which carbon is captured from the atmosphere at Harvard Forest nearly doubled between 1992 and 2015. The scientists attribute much of the increase in storage capacity to the growth of 100-year-old oak trees, still vigorously rebounding from colonial-era land clearing, intensive timber harvest, and the 1938 Hurricane—and bolstered more recently by increasing temperatures and a longer growing season due to climate change. Trees have also been growing faster due to regional increases in precipitation and atmospheric carbon dioxide, while decreases in atmospheric pollutants such as ozone, sulfur, and nitrogen have reduced forest stress.

[...] The trees show no signs of slowing their growth, even as they come into their second century of life. But the scientists note that what we see today may not be the forest's future. "It's entirely possible that other forest development processes like tree age may dampen or reverse the pattern we've observed," says Finzi.

Journal Reference:
Adrien C. Finzi, Marc‐André Giasson, Audrey A. Barker Plotkin, et al. Carbon budget of the Harvard Forest Long‐Term Ecological Research site: pattern, process, and response to global change [$], Ecological Monographs (DOI: 10.1002/ecm.1423)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:31AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:31AM (#1032724)

    Actually if you prove the orthodoxy wrong, you are set for life as a scientist. Exact opposite of what you wrote.

  • (Score: 2) by qzm on Friday August 07 2020, @08:52AM (1 child)

    by qzm (3260) on Friday August 07 2020, @08:52AM (#1032800)

    If you prove it completely wrong in one irrefutable step perhaps.
    Of you provide a small bit of evidence that it may be incorrect then expect to be marginalisation best and cancelled or worse if unlucky

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @06:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @06:52PM (#1033086)

      If you try to pass off a BS "study" as evidence, then yeah.

      Like the Autism thing where the study wasn't properly double blinded, but they guy went off and made a big deal of it anyway. And now when the scientists attempt to replicate it and cannot, the science illiterate call them liars. Those are the kind of "scientists" that get ostracized, and rightly so.

      As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.