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Climate impacts of U.S. forest loss span net warming to net cooling
Climate impacts of U.S. forest loss span net warming to net cooling
- Source :
- Science Advances
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2021.
-
Abstract
- Avoiding deforestation in the United States cools in some places but warms in others.<br />Storing carbon in forests is a leading land-based strategy to curb anthropogenic climate change, but its planetary cooling effect is opposed by warming from low albedo. Using detailed geospatial data from Earth-observing satellites and the national forest inventory, we quantify the net climate effect of losing forest across the conterminous United States. We find that forest loss in the intermountain and Rocky Mountain West causes net planetary cooling but losses east of the Mississippi River and in Pacific Coast states tend toward net warming. Actual U.S. forest conversions from 1986 to 2000 cause net cooling for a decade but then transition to a large net warming over a century. Avoiding these forest conversions could have yielded a 100-year average annual global cooling of 0.00088°C. This would offset 17% of the 100-year climate warming effect from a single year of U.S. fossil fuel emissions, underscoring the scale of the mitigation challenge.
- Subjects :
- Climatology
Multidisciplinary
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences
National forest inventory
Global warming
0211 other engineering and technologies
SciAdv r-articles
02 engineering and technology
Cooling effect
Atmospheric sciences
01 natural sciences
Fossil fuel emissions
Pacific Coast States
Environmental science
Global cooling
Research Articles
Research Article
021101 geological & geomatics engineering
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 23752548
- Volume :
- 7
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Science Advances
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....8d2851da8eace25a420932422bf3f0eb
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax8859