поучительная история про ЛЕСА (вернее, про то, как человечество их "сокращает")
Czech scientist Jan Pokorny has been traveling to Kenya for research for twenty years-and over that time has watched as the country has grown hotter and drier. He attributes this in large part to the loss of the region’s forests. Whereas forests used to cover more than half the country, it’s now less than 2%. A botanist who studies how vegetation affects the distribution of solar energy, Pokorny uses satellite technology and thermal infrared sensors to measure land surface changes and temperatures. Earlier December found him in a helicopter above Lake Naivasha, where mountain forests measured 19 degrees C; agricultural land that until recently had been forest hovered close to 50 C. As Pokorny says, newly tree-less ground "represents huge amount of solar energy changed into sensible heat, i.e. hot air." He’s also monitored the Mau Forest, where, over the last 15 years some 200,000 hectares were converted to agricultural land. Previously called a “water tower” because it supplied water to the Rift Valley and Lake Victoria, the forest region has dried up; in 2009, the rainy season-from August to November-saw no rain, and since then the rain’s been weak. The area’s gotten so dry that a Japanese company withdrew plans for a hydro power station and, in a desperate move to halt environmental disaster, tens of thousands of people have been evicted from the land.
Extreme drought, severe heat, formerly productive land gone barren-this is climate change. Yet, says Pokorny, these stories from Kenya are not about greenhouse gases, but rather the way that land-use changes-specifically deforestation--have an effect on climate. While this is happening throughout the world, the situation in Africa brings forest/climate dynamics to the fore. He notes that he types of changes that took centuries in Europe, the conversion of forest into agricultural land, “happened during one generation in Western Kenya.”