If tropical forests globally are as sensitive to warming, the authors suggest, they could soon become a major source of the greenhouse gas instead of a sink.
A recent study, from a different research group at BAS, indicated that year-to-year variability in the melting of the glacier was very sensitive to the amount of warm ocean-bottom water reaching the ice shelf's underside.
The most notable of these are wildfires and pest outbreaks, both sensitive to both warming and changes in the moisture regime.
Two big questions complicate efforts to predict the course of the earth's climate over the next century: how sensitive is the climate system, inherently, to the warming effect of greenhouse gases?
That has been puzzling, because the polar regions are thought to be more sensitive to warming trends than the rest of the globe.
Nonetheless, our results indicate that denitrification in freshwater ecosystems may be particularly sensitive to warming due to the strong synergistic oxygen effects in these systems.
"We are very sensitive to the issues and people warm to us, but we have to be objective, and fair and balanced," she adds.
People are becoming more and more sensitive to the ecological consequences of global warming and environmental devastation.
The temperature of subsea permafrost, near −1 °C (30 °F), is no longer as low as it was in glacial times and is therefore sensitive to warming from geothermal heat and to the encroaching activities of humans.
Mammals have thermoreceptive elements sensitive to warming or cooling within their brains, particularly in the spinal cord and the hypothalamus, a region at the base of the forebrain.
