Trees May Not Save Us from Climate Change
Newsweek (July 20, 2016)
Trees can slow the warming of our planet by taking carbon out of the air, but only if they’re healthy. And hotter, longer summers could soon be weakening trees beyond repair, devastating whole forests across North America and turning them into sources of carbon, in some cases as soon as 2050. Scientists used more than 2 million historical tree-ring records from across North America, a metric used to understand how much a tree grew in any given year, which they then cross-referenced with annual climate conditions that year to make projections about how the planet’s future climate would correspond to tree growth in coming years.