Climate change and biology: Is the land biosphere about to turn against us?

Wednesday 11 November 2009, 12.15PM

Speaker: Professor Peter Cox, University of Exeter

The land biosphere performs vitally important roles in the earth’s climate system, including making the climate more tolerable for humans. Vegetation enhances rainfall recycling which helps cool tropical landmasses, and generally makes the land-surface darker, which acts to keep the snow-covered high northern latitudes warmer. Furthermore, soils and vegetation have been helping to slow-down global warming by absorbing about a quarter of human carbon dioxide emissions.

However the terrestrial biosphere is also strongly influenced by climate with vegetation distribution largely determined by rainfall, and soil carbon storage sensitive to both temperature and moisture. Consequently, global warming is likely to impact significantly on the terrestrial biosphere, which will feed-back on to climate change. In regions where the land-climate feedback is especially strong we may see “tipping points” beyond which the state of the coupled system could change irreversibly. This presentation will focus upon the consequences of these feedbacks and tipping points upon global climate change.

This lecture is the first in this term's York Biology Lecture series.  Other lectures in the series are:

Learning lessons is hard; making predictions difficult

Of maize and men or peas and people: the value of plants as model systems in molecular biology

The York Biology Lecture series is supported by the University of York Distinguished Visitors Fund and the Department of Biology.

Location: Room P/X001, Physics

Admission: Admission is free and open to all

Email: publiclectures@york.ac.uk

Telephone: 01904 432622