This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Climate change may be partly to blame for the massive die-off of pine trees in the Western U.S.

But it works the other way too. Forest die-offs. off of pine trees in the Western US.

But it works the other way too.

Forests can alter the global climate.

I like to think of this as kind of a parallel

to something like El Nino.

Abigail Swan, an ecological climatologist at the University of Washington.

And we think these are going to also have climate impacts far away from where those forests

are dying.

So it's going to ricoche to other places in the globe.

To model those ricoche effects, Swan and her colleagues used climate simulations to wipe out forests

and replace them with grasslands. In the Western U.S, the Amazon or both. They found that losing forests in one part of the globe does indeed affect climate very far away.

And that could be negative in a lot of places. it could be bad for the ecosystems in those other places,

but you could come up with scenarios where, you know, it makes the conditions a little bit better.

For example, killing off trees in Western North America leads to cooler temps globally.

That outcome means lower productivity in Siberian forests, a negative.

It also dries up forests in the Carolinas, another negative.

But conditions will get wetter in eastern

South America, a positive for the forests there. The results are in the journal Ploss 1.

One surprise though was that when researchers erased forests in both the

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