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 The tropics on fire:
scientist's grim vision of global warming



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 The tropics on fire: scientist's grim vision of global warming

Forget not that we are per capita, by far, the bigger contributors to
global warming than any Chinese or Indian person...

The Guardian (London) February 16, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/16/chris-field-wildfires-tropical-forests

The tropics on fire: scientist's grim vision of global warming

By Ian Sample, science correspondent

Tropical forests may dry out and become vulnerable to devastating
wildfires as global warming accelerates over the coming decades, a
senior scientist has warned.

Soaring greenhouse gas emissions, driven by a surge in coal use in
countries such as China and India, are threatening temperature rises
that will turn damp and humid forests into parched tinderboxes, said
Dr Chris Field, co-chair of the UN's Nobel prize-winning
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Higher temperatures could see wildfires raging through the tropics
and a large scale melting of the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of
tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere that will accelerate warming
even further, he said.

Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institute, told the
American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in
Chicago at the weekend that the IPCC's last report on climate change
in 2007 had substantially underestimated the severity of global
warming over the rest of the century.

The report concluded that the Earth's temperature is likely to rise
between 1.1C and 6.4C by 2100, depending on future global carbon
emissions. "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007,
greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected,
primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a
huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on
coal," Field said. The next report, which Field will oversee, is due
in 2014 and will now include future scenarios where global warming is
far more serious than previous reports have suggested, he said.

Field said that if the tropics became dry enough for fires to break
out, tropical forests would pass a "tipping point" from absorbing
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to releasing it.

"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable. You couldn't get a
fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little,
the result can be very large and destructive wildfires. It is
increasingly clear that as you produce a warmer world, lots of
forested areas that had been acting as carbon sinks could be
converted to carbon sources," he said. The result could lead to
runaway warming.

Field's warning was echoed by French scientists, who said the IPCC's
estimate that sea levels would rise around 40cm by 2100 was likely to
be a best case scenario.

Former US vice-president Al Gore, who spoke at the meeting on Friday
night, called for a globally coordinated stimulus to tackle climate
change. "We've now reached the stage where continuing on our present
course will threaten the entirety of human civilisation," he said.




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