Deaths of forests will change the world

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/science/earth/01forest.html?_r=1

Our kids and grandkids will pay the price for our greed and apathy. What a different world it will be for them, as Earth warms and forests die. Our planet is crying out to us for help -- but the killers in high places, greedily lining their own pockets, aren't interested. We the people must speak up, as the Wall Street demonstrators are doing--and throw the bastards out of the halls of Washington--and start electing more true representatives of the people like Dennis Kucinich and Elizabeth Warren. They are the real patriots.

But how to convince the deaf and dumb among us, who continually vote against their own interests? The Tea Party types believe whatever they are told by FOX NOISE and the military/industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about. There is no way to reach their ears with reasonableness or depth of understanding about the crisis we are in because of them and their blindly followed "heroes." They revere Reagan, the Bushes, and Cheney! -- and just look at their present slate of presidential candidates. Not a one of them even of the caliber you'd demand of your local dogcatcher. Nothing more need be said than only a sad shake of the head. And a heavy Sigh. Our kids and grandkids will pay the price for such stupidity and ignorance.

WITH DEATHS OF FORESTS, WE WILL LOSE KEY CLIMATE PROTECTORS
NY Times

EXCERPT: Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.

Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become.

Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer. For, while a majority of the world’s people now live in cities, they depend more than ever on forests, in a way that few of them understand.

Many scientists say that ensuring the health of the world’s forests requires slowing human emissions of greenhouse gases. Most nations committed to doing so in a global environmental treaty in 1992, yet two decades of negotiations have yielded scant progress.

If forests were to die on a sufficient scale, they would not only stop absorbing carbon dioxide, they might also start to burn up or decay at such a rate that they would spew huge amounts of the gas back into the air — as is already happening in some regions. That, in turn, could speed the warming of the planet, unlocking yet more carbon stored in once-cold places like the Arctic.

Scientists are not sure how likely this feedback loop is, and they are not eager to find out the hard way.

“It would be a very different world than the world we’re in,” said Christopher B. Field, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.