The following post is by Ken Levenson, guest blogger at Climate Progress.
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As deforestation accelerates and grows ever more concentrated the climate change consequences appear even greater than previously thought. As reported in New Scientist:
Pristine temperate forest stores three times more carbon than currently estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and 60% more than plantation forests, according to research in Australia.
The study:
Mackey and colleagues used remote sensing and direct sampling to study eucalyptus trees at 240 sites across a 14.5-million hectare swathe of natural forest in south-east Australia.
Globally?
The global implications are not yet clear. It could be that the carbon-storing ability of other temperate forests, such as those along the Pacific coast of the US, have also been underestimated. Mackey’s team is now investigating this possibility.
One thing is clear: the IPCC desperately needs to update their projections to include data such as this, as well as “slow” feedbacks such as permafrost melt, wetland destruction, actic ice loss, and deforestation to name a few. As humanity debates what to do to combat climate change it’s clearer than ever that the climate change beast is still not fully exposed.
For the next American administration to make a serious attempt to combat climate change, up-to-date consensus climate models will be invaluable. The past year has brought an avalanche of data that is destined to profoundly affect the models.
So while the media remains insistent on hedging what has been with a few exceptions a bad to worse story — Al Gore’s remarks back in January at Davos ring truer than ever: “the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us.“
As many scientists have pointed out: “Things are happening 100 years ahead of schedule.”
Yet, disconcertingly, the IPCC is not scheduled to issue another scenario report until 2013.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
