forest growth
ddobbs | June 1, 2007
Don't count on the tropical forest gobbling up our excess carbon. Such is the warning from a recent study by Harvard's Kenneth Feeley and others in Ecology Letters, which suggests that we may not be able to count on surging tropical forest growth to slow global warming by consuming some of the excess carbon (via carbon dioxide intake). Why not? Because warming temperatures, contrary to previous thought and hope, were found to actually slow tropical forest growth in this 25-year study in Panama and Malaysia. As Feeley notes in the article's abstract, "these patterns strongly contradict the…