As the world warms and the atmosphere becomes increasingly fertilised with carbon dioxide, trees are growing ever faster. But they’re also dying younger – and overall, the world’s forests may be losing their ability to store carbon. That’s the key finding of our new study, published in the journal Nature Communications.
Like millions of people in the western United States this week, I woke up to deep red, sunless skies, layers of ash coating the streets, gardens, and cars, and the smell of burning forests, lives, homes, and dreams. Not to be too hyperbolic, but on top of the political chaos, the economic collapse, and the worst pandemic in modern times, it seemed more than a little apocalyptic.
It's impossible to deny — humans are destroying the natural environment at an unprecedented and alarming rate.
In five years’ time, if the planetary temperature overshoots a rise of 1.5°C, southern Africa, heating by twice the global average, will be a dangerously hotter region and this will threaten everything. South Africa’s climate science is not an allegory, but an echo of the final warning to all of us about a worsening climate-driven future.
Johan van den Berg -Independent Agricultural Meteorologist -(M.Sc Agric, Agricultural meteorology, UFS)
Climate change has already had observable effects on the environment and far-reaching implications across the globe. Global warming is the increase of the Earth's average surface temperature, due to greenhouse gases that collect in the atmosphere, trapping the Sun's heat.
