This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

As you gather around the Christmas tree, consider the TLC you give O'Tannenbaum.

Plenty of water and a relatively comfortable climate.

Wouldn't want to dry out the tree after all.

Now consider that in the house we all live in, the planet, we're hardly giving the same courtesy to your Christmas tree's wild cousins, who I might add are actually still alive.

As the planet warms, droughts are getting even drier, and they're getting hotter too. In fact, it's getting so bad that

researchers are now forecasting that conifers in the arid southwestern United States could be completely wiped out by the end of the century.

No more pinioned pines, ponderrosas, or junipers.

No more forests.

It's definitely a distressing result for all of us.

None of us want to see this happen. It's a bummer, honestly.

Sarah Rausher, a climate scientist and geographer at the University of Delaware.

She and her colleagues gathered data on how real-world evergreens in the southwest respond to drought and heat.

They basically starve, unable to carry on photosynthesis or transport water.

The researchers then combine those physiological data with a half dozen projections of how climate change might proceed.

But no matter what model we used, we always saw a tree death.

Specifically, 72% of the trees dead by 2050 and a near complete annihilation by the year 2100.

The results are in the journal Nature Climate Change.

But we'll always have Paris, right? But even if we used a scenario kind of similar to what the Paris Accords of agreed upon, so limiting global warming to two degrees, we still saw widespread die-off. It happened later in the century, but it still happened.

That said, the study does not account for trees' ability to adapt, or whether new populations could find friendlier climbs.

That is, whether conifers in the southwest can pull up roots fast enough to beat climate change.

Thanks for the minute.

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