HOW INCREASINGLY SEVERE EL NIOS ARE THREATENING TROPICAL FORESTS AROUND THE WORLD

HOW INCREASINGLY SEVERE EL NIÑOS ARE THREATENING TROPICAL FORESTS AROUND THE WORLD

And with tropical forests storing almost 250 billion tons of carbon, their fate has major implications for the Earth's atmosphere.
CLAIRE SALISBURYAN HOUR AGO


In the summer of 2014, governments across tropical Asia readied for a looming weather and political emergency—potential droughts, crop failures, and food shortages that could stress developing world nations and challenge their ability to respond. According to weather observatories, the chance of an El Niño event occurring before the year's end was high. The central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean was warming up, a predictive precursor of El Niño, a temporary increase in global temperature that at its worst can generate a worldwide cascade of catastrophic changes to weather patterns.

It was a false alarm. But the following year El Niño materialized with a vengeance. Boosted by the earlier warmth in the Pacific, the 2015–16 El Niño turned out to be one of the strongest events on record. Intense droughts affected almost 40 million people in southern Africa; flooding swept South American countries, displacing 150,000 people; and coral reefs experienced the most significant bleaching event scientists have ever seen, with nearly all corals in some parts of the Great Barrier Reef dying due to the high temperatures.

In space, a new NASA satellite, launched on July 2nd, 2014, allowed scientists to study the El Niño’s rise and fall, and its effects on the global carbon cycle in greater detail than ever before. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) was equipped with sensitive instruments able to measure atmospheric CO concentrations 10 times more accurately than previous methods.

Overall, the 2015–16 El Niño led to the fastest rise in atmospheric CO on record, and helped push CO concentrations above 400 ppm for a full year for the first time in modern history. The OCO-2 findings went deeper. They revealed that the sudden surge in CO was greatly enhanced by emissions coming from the tropical forests of South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia—all responding to the El Niño by temporarily shifting from carbon sink to source. However, there were striking regional differences in each forest's response.

More:
https://psmag.com/environment/el-nino-is-threatening-rainforests

Environment and energy:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127118162