Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 28: If the Amazon goes, so may Africa’s rainforests

The Congolese rainforests are the world’s second largest remaining tropical rainforest expanse and a 60 gigatonne carbon store. Although climate models have a hard time predicting rainfall changes over the Congo Basin and despite a multi-decade drying trend, these forests … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 23: Amazon ‘tipping point’ is a sliding process, from +1C

In this article we try to quantify the Amazon rainforest climate tipping point, based on available scientific literature. We conclude there’s no real basin-wide threshold temperature to activate the forest-killing biome switch. Rather it seems to be a sliding process, … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 21: Amazon rainforest die-off starts in the South, models show

People who follow climate science will likely be well aware that the Amazon rainforest is particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change – as the basin becomes increasingly prone to droughts under rising global temperatures. Much of the Amazon ecosystem, the … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 20: Amazon tree transpiration crucial to keep rainforest wet

The individual trees in the Amazon rainforest play a crucial role in keeping the rainforest intact. Not just because the trees together create the forest, but also because – together – they create the climate (through something called the shallow … Continue reading

This is what carbon climate feedbacks look like! Atmospheric monitoring shows dramatic 2015 CO2 emissions record unfolding

Welcome to the future. 2015: The hottest year on record. With a likely coral bleaching record. And sadly also the year with a likely extreme CO2 emissions record. Because, using satellites, we can see the very positive carbon climate feedbacks … Continue reading

Global 2015-2016 winter forecast: comparing NCEP model runs to NOAA’s ‘typical El Niño patterns’ – Brazil in for shock, little relief for California

Normally we think of droughts over South East Asia (i.e. Borneo) and north-eastern Australia (Queensland) associated with strong El Niño events. This for instance led to dramatic fires through the tropical rainforests of Borneo, during the last ‘Super El Niño’ … Continue reading

Vanished Brazilian Atlantic Forest still has negative carbon balance

Not so long ago Brazil was home to not one, but two of the Earth´s largest tropical rainforest biomes, the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. Including true rainforest, dry tropical forest and mangroves the Atlantic Forest used to span an … Continue reading

Amazonian highway is bad for the climate and hardly helps the economy

Paving a highway across South America is providing lessons on the impact of road construction elsewhere.

That’s what a University of Florida researcher and his international colleagues have determined from analyzing communities along the Amazonian portion of the nearly 4,200-mile Interoceanic Highway, a coast-to-coast road that starts at ports in Brazil and will eventually connect to ones in Peru.

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When the ice goes, so does the rainforest – boreal warming linked to Amazon droughts

We knew there must have been a connection between climate warming and damaging droughts in the world’s largest rainforest, as the two globally hottest years on record (2005 and 2010) coincide with the two record droughts in the Amazon – … Continue reading

Study shows binary switches between forest, savanna, desert: macro-scale climate-biodiversity tipping points

Researchers of Wageningen University find in South America, Africa and Australia under climatic change forest, savanna and treeless systems don’t gradually phase across, but rather tip over.