Among the top Google News results for “climate change” is a National Public Radio (NPR) article with the headline, “Climate Change and Deforestation Mean Earth’s Trees Are Younger and Shorter.”
The article’s title and desired message to casual Internet surfers are that warmer temperatures stunt tree height and make trees shorter.
In reality, the article merely (mis)reports on a study asserting that deforestation is resulting in younger forests with trees that have yet to reach their full height. Fashion NPR’s fake tree-height scare as click-bait misrepresenting sound science.
As scientists have repeatedly documented, more atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming are assisting trees to grow taller and more rapidly.
NPR references an article in Science finding that a variety of factors are putting pressure on old-growth forests worldwide. These factors include logging, clear-cutting, and land-use changes.
After deforestation removes disproportionately old-growth forests, the remaining trees and forests tend to be younger. Younger forests don’t have as many very tall trees as older forests.
Thus, the authors of the Science article claimed deforestation leads to younger forests, in which tree size will be shorter than fully mature trees in older forests.
The authors of the Science study noted this while asserting that climate change may be causing an increase in forest fires.
Drought is the climate factor that would impact forest fires, yet objective data and even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report there is no documented evidence that climate change is increasing the frequency or severity of droughts.
In fact, as documented in Climate at a Glance: Drought, objective data show a decline in drought as our planet modestly warms.
Accordingly, the only asserted link between climate change and forest fires – drought – does not exist.
Even if such a link did exist, the result would be that climate change hypothetically causes more forest fires, not that climate change is making trees shorter.
Shame on you, NPR, for deliberately misrepresenting scientific facts.
Read more at Climate Realism
Since it came from NPR(National Public Radio)its just more Fake News just like it is with CNN and the other fake news from NBC,ABC,CBS and the Newspapers
“Among the top Google News results for “climate change” is a National Public Radio (NPR) article with the headline, “Climate Change and Deforestation Mean Earth’s Trees Are Younger and Shorter.””
The greater achievement of climate science is that it has killed the once esteemed credentials of the word science and also killed the once assumed credibility of the media as in the old Walter Cronkite days.
chaamjamal.com
Perhaps somebody will explain (come back to help, Dr Jung) how the words “science” and “scientific” have become the equivalent of “The Church says” or even “God says” or “the Bible says”. “Science” is from the Latin, referring to “knowing”. But what kind of “knowing”? Proper science should be a matter of exchange, debate, research, disagreement, until some kind of absolute “proof” is found. Until maybe that later changes. We know from history that agreed “consensus” which establishes a scientific “certainty” often changes over time to a new paradigm. not least because, as Quantum and psychology show, the observed is not separate from the observer, time and place. “Science” is especially suspect when linked to politcised goals and agendas.
Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels should make exceptionally tall trees such as 90m+ redwood conifers and mountain ash eucalypts more likely, rather than less likely. Not only does increased ACD fuel growth, it likely improves water usage in most plants and it is theorised that at such exceptional tree heights the decreasing capability for water ‘pumping’ to the apex is a major impediment to further growth. There is also the simple matter of rainfall often increasing with temperature, as well as trees of the tropics being rather larger than the trees of the polar regions…
All in all, we should listen to the science, not the doomsday cult.
Well said Chaamjamal, Roger and Gumnut.
One of the most obscene jokes that I ever heard came from my brother. ” What do you get from a forest fire? Crispy critters!” My brother is a liberal.