Tropical rainforests may begin pumping out carbon dioxide by 2050
Steve Bloom Images/Alamy Rising temperatures over the next few decades could cause Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems – including rainforests – to go from being net carbon sinks that remove carbon from the atmosphere to carbon sources which release it. How well an ecosystem can act as a carbon sink is temperature dependent. That is because living things have an optimum range of temperatures at which they can function properly. Beyond this, things start to go wrong. Advertisement Katharyn Duffy at Northern Arizona University and her colleagues constructed a temperature dependence curve for p...