Tropical+forests+used+to+protect+us+from+climate+change.+Now,+scientists+say,+they’re+making+it+worse

Smoke billows as an area of the Amazon rain forest is burned to clear land for agriculture, near Novo Progresso, in Brazil’s Para state. (Nacho Doce/Reuters) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/09/28/tropical-forests-used-to-protect-us-from-climate-change-a-new-study-says-theyre-now-making-it-worse/?utm_term=.16a6b29c0f96

[|Tropical forests used to protect us from climate change. Now, scientists say, they’re making it worse] Washington Post September 28, 2017

The results, published in the journal Science, contradict prior work in suggesting that these forests, including the Amazon rainforest and other tropical forests, have become another addition to the climate change issue. Specifically, the study conducted that makes this assertion found that tropical forests are currently losing 425 million tons of carbon annually, on average, which is the net result after you sum up 861 million tons of losses and 436 million tons of gains as forests grow each year. This is because forests already are naturally storing 436 million tons of carbon per year, so if one reverses some of the larger losses, it is possible to get forests back to pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, which can dampen climate change.
 * __Summary__**

__**Relation** **to Class**__ This article relates greatly to the coursework we will/have done in AP Environmental Science as it delves to the core of the issue of climate change and the effects not only we, as humans, have on its intensity and consequences, but the impacts climate change can have on us humans. As climate change is an integral part of the sustainability of the environment of the Earth, it will hence play a major role in our course. This is because in order to analyze the role of humans on the earth (environmental science), we must analyze the topic of climate change and how the topic of climate change is changing.

Through reading this article, my feelings and urgency as a citizen of this world became more prevalent, as this article greatly analyzes the impacts of climate change on our earth and puts into perspective not only the factors that we humans contribute to the concept of climate change, but that of other human-species interactions, and environmental interactions as well. Reading this article opened a new perspective for me, one that I had not realized existed, or one that I had not seen in the media before reading this article, that of the fact that tropical forests may be making climate change worse.
 * __Opinion__**

This article relates closely to the Presidential Climate Action Plan, which, under the Obama Administration, which proposed a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. This Action Plan included preserving forests, encouraging the use of alternate fuels, and increased the study and funding of climate change. This is, in essence, what caused the study in the article I read to be conducted in the first place, government funding. On the first day of the Trump Administration, however, this Action Plan was eliminated and later nullified.
 * __Law__**