Word: tree
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When you think of maple syrup, whose 2009 season is just now wrapping up, the first image that pops into your mind is probably a huge tree trunk with a few metal buckets strapped on. Maybe you picture workhorses slogging through the snow, a sleigh laden with tree sap in tow. Maybe there's a little wooden shack with a chimney emitting a plume of steam. What you might not picture are the dollar signs many are seeing around this surging agricultural commodity - maple syrup producers are celebrating high yields and record retail prices this year. (See the photo essay...
...easy to kill a full-grown tree - especially one like the piñon pine. The hardy evergreen is adapted to life in the hot, parched American Southwest, so it takes more than a little dry spell to affect it. In fact, it requires a once-in-a-century event like the extended drought of the 1950s, which scientists now believe led to widespread tree mortality in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona...
...Sciences (PNAS), scientists at UA found that water-deprived piñon pines raised in temperatures about 7° Fahrenheit (4° Celsius) above current averages died 28% faster than pines raised in today's climate. It's the first study to isolate the specific impact of temperature on tree mortality during drought - and it indicates that in a warmer world trees are likely to be significantly more vulnerable to the threat of drought than they are today. "This raises some fundamental questions about how climate change is going to affect forests," says David Breshears, a professor...
Adams' paper is the latest in a number of recent studies that paint a grim fate for the world's forests if warming isn't slowed. A major Science study published in January found widespread increase in tree mortality rates in the western U.S., thanks in part to regional warming trends and growing water scarcity. Another study published last month, also in Science, found that even the seemingly limitless Amazon rainforest could be highly vulnerable to drought. And since living trees suck up CO2 from the atmosphere, massive tree mortality due to warming could produce a feedback effect, further intensifying...
...request from California Rep. Jerry Lewis: "...for the Joshua Tree National Park Visitor Center. Perhaps next year, if the park and Rep. Lewis still haven't found all the money they're looking for, they could ask Bono and U-2 for help instead of the taxpayers...