There’s been debate for years about whether global warming makes hurricanes more powerful or increases their frequency or, maybe, both. Now it appears that this may be part of a feedback loop because, as Sid Perkins reports in the online edition of Science News, there is good evidence that the trees blown down by hurricanes (and subsequently burned or decomposed) send a significant amount of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. It’s pretty much the same effect as burning a rain forest.

Perkins’s story is based on research published in PNAS by an ecological geographer (The Tracker has long had a fondness for geographers, whose research is often neglected by science journalists.) who studied the distribution and impacts of hurricanes and tropical storms hitting the U.S. coast since 1851. (That’s his map up there, the red marking areas that sustain tropical storm-strength winds or stronger at least once every three years.) Each year, on average, those storms blow down a surprising 97 million trees, which subsequently release more than 90 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s relatively small in the overall picture but way above the negligible category.

-BR

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