Boreal forests and peatlands store more carbon than any other ecosystem, far more than tropical forests which have received more attention.

Boreal forests, found in Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and parts of the United States, cover 11 percent of the earth and store 22 percent of all carbon on the land surface in soil, permafrost, peatlands and wetlands. But this carbon is “the carbon the world forgot,” says this report from the Canadian Boreal Initiative. In cold climate boreal forests, much of the carbon in vegetation never fully decomposes and is gradually pushed into thick layers of peat and permafrost and stored for thousands of years. But this stored carbon is released as greenhouse gases when the forests are logged or soils are disturbed by logging, mining, and other industrial activities, including tar sands extraction and processing.

While boreal forests are under attack, the Greenland ice sheet is loosing mass at an accelerating rate. So reports a new study published in the journal Science. The mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland’s fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometer of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year. The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause a global sea level rise of seven metres. Since 2000, the ice sheet has lost about 1500 Gt in total, representing on average a global sea level rise of about half a millimetre per year, or 5 mm since 2000.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reports that a warming climate has resulted in twice as many daily record high temperatures than record lows over the last decade across the continental United States.

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Much of the nation’s warming is occurring at night, when temperatures are dipping less often to record lows. This finding is consistent with years of climate model research showing that higher overnight lows should be expected with climate change. The scientists’ modeling projects that in all likely scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions, record daily highs should increasingly outpace record lows over time. If nations continue to increase their emissions of greenhouse gases in a “business as usual” scenario, the U.S. ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.

I am frequently asked why this blog seems to publish almost nothing but discouraging, depressing news. My answer: because that’s the reality we have to come to grips with. We have no alternative but to embrace that reality and deal with it as best and as gracefully as we can.

Joanna Macy in an article at Yes Magazine encourages us to embrace our feelings of despair,  anguish and outrage at the fact that we are destroying our world:

Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit—or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival. . . .

Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from getting lost in grief.

Macy’s use of the word intention encompasses the ancient meaning of the word faith: the duty of fulfilling one’s trust, from the Latin fides and its root fider. This sense of faith as “loyalty based on promise or duty” is preserved today in “keep one’s faith”; in the Marine Corps slogan “semper fidelis (semper fi); and in common usage of faithful and faithless, which contain no notion of any divinity (faith in the religious sense of “mental acceptance of something as true” stems only from about the 14th century).

What is required from us is faith: the resolve to embrace whatever fate awaits us and do the best we can, no matter what the outcome may be.

Speaking the truth is essential to our task. As Macy concludes:

Speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive, charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive now, to take part in this planetary adventure.

The Greenpeace report says cutting down trees in the boreal forest is exacerbating climate change by releasing stores of greenhouse gases trapped in soil and vegetation. It also finds that logging makes the forest more susceptible to global warming impacts like wildfires and insect outbreaks, which in turn release more greenhouse gases.

The Executive Summary says:

“Canada’s Boreal Forest is dense with life. Richly populated with plants, birds, animals, and trees; home to hundreds of communities; and a wellspring of fresh water and oxygen, the Boreal has long been recognized as a critically important ecosystem. But as rising temperatures threaten to destabilize the planet, the potential of the Boreal’s carbon-rich expanses to mitigate global warming continues to be underestimated.

“Based in part on a comprehensive review of scientific literature by researchers at the University of Toronto1, this report examines the complex relationship between global warming and Canada’s Boreal Forest. It finds that the intact areas of the Boreal are not only actively helping to slow global warming, but are also helping the forest itself to resist and recover from global warming impacts. These unfragmented areas are also helping trees, plants, and animals to migrate and adapt in response to changing climate conditions.

“At the same time, however, it finds that logging is destabilizing the Boreal Forest in ways that may exacerbate both global warming and its impacts. The forest products industry and government regulators adamantly deny that logging in Canada’s Boreal affects the climate. But research shows that when the forest is degraded through logging and industrial development, massive amounts of greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere, and the forest becomes more vulnerable to global warming impacts like fires and insect outbreaks. In many cases, these impacts cause even more greenhouse gasses to be released, driving a vicious circle in which global warming degrades the Boreal Forest, and Boreal Forest degradation advances global warming. If left unchecked, this could culminate in a catastrophic release of greenhouse gasses known as “the carbon bomb”.

“For these reasons, the report concludes that greenhouse gas emissions must be drastically reduced and that intact areas of Canada’s Boreal Forest must be protected—for the sake of the forest, and for the sake of the climate.”