FORESTS will be less effective at slowing climate change than scientists thought, because they’ll mop up less carbon dioxide than expected. That verdict follows a four-year experiment to see how much CO2 trees will absorb from the atmosphere when pollution has raised levels of the gas.
The results should hammer home the message that the world can’t rely on trees to solve the problem of CO2 emissions, according to William Schlesinger at Duke University in North Carolina, whose team carried out the work. “It throws doubt on nations such as the US who have carbon sequestration as…
