What happens if all trees are gone

The filthy air would also be full of airborne particles and pollutants like carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide and its temperature may increase by up to 12 F. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 2.

If deforestation get its way, those people won't be the only ones affected. The soil would become full of dangerous chemicals and pollutants that are usually filtered by trees. In addition, soil erosion is currently prevented by trees because they protect the land. However, soil would be unprotected, and vulnerable to reduction in soil quality and top soil nutrients.

Soil erosion would become more prevalent, and eventually all the soil will lose its arability and agriculture will fall Sounds crazy, right? During the "dry season," trees regulate and anchor the dirt by releasing water. Deforested areas, however, are liable to chronic droughts that obstruct river navigation, disrupt industrial operations and kill crop production all together.

Storm water runoff if it rains not reduced, but increased which'll contribute to small floods and topsoil erosion. Furthermore, trees add humidity into the air through transpiration but the lack of trees results in the lack of moisture in the air.

We use and waste paper everyday without realizing we're helping to kill four billion trees cut down every year. Due to global deforestation, there'd be no paper, baseball bats, barrels, books, blocks, benches, crutches, coffee filters, guitars, grocery bags, pencils, pine oil, beds, billboards, buttons, fuelwood, charcoal, industrial roundwood, candy wrappers,chewing gum, cork, crayons, spices, egg cartons, kites, linoleum, luggage, paper, pingpong balls, wooden chopsticks, rubber, tambourines, telephone books, tires, bark, fiber, dyes, incense, latexes, oils, resins, shellac, tanning compounds, waxes, toilet paper, turpentine, xylophones or wooden yo-yos.

Food harvested from trees like fruits, nuts, berries and maple syrup would be nonexistent as well. There are already many debates over whether we currently abuse non-renewable resources, but the most important of these resources is probably freshwater. Future politicians are going to have to make ground-breaking decisions on how to preserve enough freshwater resources for their country, and one option would be to wage war against othersto the death.

Rhett A. Butler, "Global Consequences of Deforestation in the Tropics. University of Michigan, " Global Deforestation. Shukla, C. If phytoplankton provides us with half our required oxygen, at current population levels we could survive on Earth for at least years before the oxygen store ran empty. Whilst there may be enough oxygen for humans to survive on Earth, at least to begin with, the air we breathe could still be responsible for our demise. Like giant filters, trees help to cut down on pollution levels.

Leaves intercept airborne particles and ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and other greenhouse gases are absorbed through the leaves stomata. In , outdoor air pollution was estimated to cause 3. Imagine the impact removing these environmental sieves would have on humankind. Armed with pollution masks, would the climate and temperature still be suitable for us? One important consideration is carbon dioxide.

In one year, an acre of mature trees soaks up the same amount of carbon dioxide that we produce by driving the average car 26 miles. Since human activities like this increase the normal level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, cutting down trees would tip the balance even further, not to mention the enormous amount of stored carbon that would be released from doing so.

However, the relationship between trees and global temperature is much more complicated. Eventually — perhaps over a few decades — these plants would no longer be able to head off the coming warming.

Large amounts of carbon would also run into the oceans, causing extreme acidification and killing possibly everything but jellyfish, he says. Trees help to cool the local climate by absorbing heat. The increased heat, disruption to the water cycle and loss of shade would take a deadly toll on billions of people and livestock. Poverty and death would also descend on many of the 1. More people still would find themselves unable to cook or heat their homes, given the lack of firewood.

Around the world, those whose work revolves around trees — whether as loggers or paper-makers, fruit growers or carpenters — would suddenly be jobless, devastating the global economy. The timber sector alone provides employment to Agricultural systems would likewise swing wildly out of whack. Shade crops like coffee would drastically decline, as would ones that rely on tree-dwelling pollinators. Due to temperature and precipitation fluctuations, places that formerly produced crops would suddenly fail while others that were previously unsuitable might become desirable.

Over time, though, soils everywhere would become depleted, requiring significant amounts of fertiliser for crops to survive. Further heating would eventually render most places uncultivatable and unliveable. On top of these devastating changes would be health impacts.

Trees clean the air by absorbing pollutants and trapping particulate matter on their leaves, branches and trunks. At least lives are saved as a result and at least , cases of acute respiratory issues are avoided. A sudden loss of forests everywhere could trigger a temporary spike in our exposure to zoonotic infections such as Ebola, Nipah virus and West Nile virus, he says, as well as to mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever.

A growing body of research also points to the fact that trees and nature are good for our mental wellbeing. Trees also seem to help the body recover: a famous study from revealed that patients recuperating from surgery experienced shorter hospital stays if they had a green view rather than one of a brick wall.

Trees are staples of countless childhoods and feature heavily in art, literature, poetry, music and more. They have factored into animistic religions since prehistory and play prominent roles in other major religions practiced today. Buddha attained enlightenment after sitting beneath the Bodhi Tree for 49 days, while Hindus worship at Peepal trees, which serve as a symbol for Vishnu. In the Torah and Old Testament, God makes trees on the third day of creation — even before animals or humans — and in the Bible, Jesus dies on a wooden cross built from trees.

Urbanised, Western lifestyles would quickly become a thing of the past and many of us would die from starvation, heat, drought and floods. Crowther, on the other hand, suspects that life would only persist in a Mars-like colony, enabled by technology and entirely divorced from the existence we have always known. Inside, bobbing in a bath of brown water, is a glistening disk the size of a dinner plate and the color of rich gravy.

Within this ancient trunk lie secrets that can help us prepare for the future. The results offer unprecedented insight into 2, years of Japanese rainfall patterns. By teasing out information locked inside the preserved wood of ancient forests, they are able to reveal just how much rain fell around the country over the past two and half millennia. It is an extraordinary record. About every years, the researchers found, the amount of rain falling on Japan would suddenly become extremely variable for a period.

The nation would toggle between multi-decadal bouts of flood-inducing wetness and warmer, drier years that were favorable for rice cultivation. As the rains came and went, Japanese society prospered or suffered accordingly.

Regardless of the outcome, he emphasises that such change caused large amounts of stress for the people who lived through it. As weather patterns today increasingly defy expectations, this window into past climate variability hints at what may be in store for us in the coming yearsAs weather patterns today increasingly defy expectations and extreme events become more frequent and severe, this window into past climate variability hints at what may be in store for us in the coming years.

But his latest findings, which he and his colleagues are currently preparing for publication, primarily rely on a new method that uses isotope ratios contained within wood to estimate precipitation patterns. Central Japan is a perfect location for such a study because of the multitude of hinoki, a type of long-lived cypress.

All of the wood ranged in age from to 1, years. The ratio of oxygen isotopes in the tree rings within the wood help to link it to environmental conditions in which it grew.

On dry days, leaves lose more water and are left with a higher isotope ratio than on wetter ones, helping to give information about the relative humidity in the atmosphere. Modern meteorological databases confirmed that the isotope ratios of the most recently-lived trees in his dataset did indeed provide an accurate read on summer precipitation.

Nakatsuka worked backwards, starting from a living tree whose age he knew.