20 Aug 2012: Report Gauging the Impact of Warming On Asia’s
Life-Giving Monsoons In Mongolia, U.S. scientists are studying
climate clues in ancient tree rings to help answer a crucial
question: How will global warming affect Asia’s monsoon rains,
which supply water for agriculture and drinking to half the
world’s population? Bouncing along bad roads in a jeep through
central Mongolia, with bright blue skies and high clouds
overhead, we drive for miles through a treeless landscape,
passing only dry grasslands dotted with cattle and white yurts.
But as we head north — myself, two U.S. scientists, and one
Mongolian forestry expert — we begin to notice Siberian pine and
larch growing on the northern slopes of rolling hills, but not
the southern slopes, and at some elevations, but not others. In
water-scarce Mongolia, as my travel companion Neil Pederson of
Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
explained, the precarious growth of trees is limited by
temperature and moisture availability; small var