Does Amazonian deforestation cause global effects; can we be sure?
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2016-05-27
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Journal Article
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Abstract
Does Amazonian deforestation cause global-scale teleconnections in the physical climate system? Some previous studies suggest that complete Amazon deforestation triggers global effects in temperature or precipitation, but other experiments did not find these remote effects. Some all-of-tropics deforestation experiments also found teleconnections, while others did not. Differences between these studies include scale of deforestation, strength of land-atmosphere coupling, and methods used for statistical testing. We examine how apparent teleconnections due to the biophysical impact of Amazonian deforestation vary with the scale of deforestation, how these teleconnections respond to the number of ensemble members, and which statistical methods effectively screen internal climate variability. We show that testing for field significance is crucial; no local statistical test can effectively screen all internal climate variability. The number of statistically significant grid points outside Amazonia does not scale with increased deforestation for most seasons, and we only find field significance for the largest perturbation. Hence, in our simulations we only find statistically significant remote effects from Amazonian deforestation for very large and unrealistic perturbations, but we would have found apparently significant changes for small perturbations had we not used multiple ensembles and field significance testing.
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published
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Volume
121 (10)
Pages / Article No.
5567 - 5584
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
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Subject
Deforestation; Field significance; Land cover change; Statistical testing; Teleconnections