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You are misrepresenting the science here. This wasn't "just a PhD thesis" in particular. Also, your take of this to be "sensationalism" is very odd. The dange
by Loquebantur 3y ago
You are misrepresenting the science here.
This wasn't "just a PhD thesis" in particular.
Also, your take of this to be "sensationalism" is very odd. The danger of imminent tipping points turning "climate change" into "climate catastrophe" is absolutely real.
> The researchers today report their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study united the RAINFOR and PPBio research networks, with dozens of short-term grants enabling more than 100 scientists to measure forests for decades across 123 experimental plots.
The plots span Amazon and Atlantic forests as well as drier forests in tropical South America.
> These direct, tree-by-tree records showed that most forests had acted as a carbon sink for most of the last 30 years, with tree growth exceeding mortality. When the 2015–2016 El Niño hit, the sink shut down. This was because tree death increased with the heat and drought.
- wredue 3y agoNow wait till the forests burn and instead of being a carbon sink, they become a carbon contributor. Hi Canada!
- Waterluvian 3y agoI think our peatlands are of considerably greater concern.
- raffraffraff 3y agoIn Ireland we're burning ours, like a bunch of idiots.
- civilitty 3y agoThe situation with Canadian forests is much worse. The Amazon accounts for 20% of the global carbon sink but the meters-thick layer of peat below Canadian forests is a third of all carbon stored (along with the peatland in Russia, which is also burning). There’s enough carbon stored in that peat to double or triple the CO2 ppm which would be absolutely catastrophic to the planet.
- fluoridation 3y agoThose trees are made of carbon that was already in the atmosphere, and they will release it back into it whenever they die in the next couple centuries anyway. Trees are basically irrelevant as carbon capture, unless they're cultivated to maturity and then buried underground.
- developer93 3y agoThey tie up carbon for 100+ years, they're hardly irrelevant
- fluoridation 3y agoThey buy a little bit of time. That's it.
- hgomersall 3y agoNonsense, a region that is forested has a proportion of carbon locked up in biomass indefinitely. If that region is deforested and no longer has any carbon locked up in biomass that is unambiguously a net source of carbon.
- fluoridation 3y agoIt's not locked up, it's continuously flowing in and out of that ecosystem. It's only locked up when it gets buried and can't return back to the atmosphere (except through technology). There's any number of reasons why a forest could get disrupted and die out besides intentional deforestation.
- developer93 3y agoAdmittedly I haven't checked for sources, but I'm willing to bet that it's mostly man made these days, either direct deforestation or climate change.
- developer93 3y ago
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago[flagged]
- olddustytrail 3y agoThese are not statistical models, they're physical models. Please don't equate your ignorance of a field with knowledge.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agomodel = not science. Model is probabilistic by nature. Science is deterministic by necessity. Both can create knowledge for sure. My only point is this is not science. The article even calls it research, not science. The article doesn't mention the word science, even once.
- Daishiman 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't post like this, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's completely against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you know more than others, that's great—please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... But please don't post putdowns.
- amaranth 3y agoI take it you disregard pretty much all of quantum physics then?
- PheonixPharts 3y agoI think it's far more far to say the opposite: science is an ever evolving model of the world, but science is always just a model. F = ma is a model. And you may try to limit your argument to only "statistical models = not science" but then you would be dismissing essentially all social sciences but also ecology, geology, climate science, not to mention every single aspect of statistical mechanics. Science is essentially hypothesis testing where hypothesis represent models of how the world works. Didn't you even take high school physics where you spend considerable time running experiments and writing up why they don't exactly match the formula's prediction in the book? Would you mind explaining what model-free science looks like? Is it just cataloging observations?
- WillPostForFood 3y agoHowever, intact tropical South American forests overall were no more sensitive to the extreme 2015–2016 El Niño than to previous less intense events, remaining a key defence against climate change as long as they are protected. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01776-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01776-4
- jiofj 3y ago[flagged]