Duke: decade-long experiment says trees won't help global warming

RALEIGH, N.C. | A decade-long experiment led by Duke University scientists indicates that trees provide little help in offsetting increased levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

That's because the trees did grow more, but only those that got the most water and nutrients were able to store enough significant levels of carbon, the scientists discovered.

"The responses are very variable according to how available other resources are - nutrients and water - that are necessary for tree growth," said Heather McCarthy, a former graduate student at the private university in Durham who spent 6 1/2 years on the project. "It's really not anywhere near the magnitude that we would really need to offset emissions."

McCarthy, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Irvine, presented the findings this week at a national meeting of the Ecological Society of America in San Jose, Calif. Researchers from the U.S. Forest Service, Boston University and the University of Charleston also contributed to the report.

All helped in the Free Air Carbon Enrichment experiment, in which a stand of pine trees in Duke Forest were exposed to higher-than-normal levels of carbon dioxide.

The scientists also gathered data on whether the forest could grow fast enough to help control predicted increases in the level of carbon dioxide.
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