An Amazon Researcher's Quest To Understand Climate Change

Climate change is — as an overwhelming majority of experts agree — a process caused, fueled and led by humans. Our activities release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn act like a blanket for the planet. But climate change is not a linear process. There are more factors to consider.

One of them (and a worrisome one) is what I like to call feedback loops. Once a particular temperature threshold is crossed, unidirectional processes kick off and climate change is aggravated. For example, as the icecaps melt, less sunlight is reflected back into space, thus accelerating climate change (even if we halted all emissions).

Another of these intricate feedback loops have to do with trees. Forests are a huge sink of carbon, as trees capture atmospheric CO2 to build their own structures. However, at the same time, they breathe, letting out CO2 again. The balance is delicate, and any little change to the initial conditions may affect it. To understand climate change, we need to understand the forest. And that's exactly what Scott Saleska, the protagonist of this story, does.

What convinced me to recommend this article is not its outstanding design (bioGraphic's trademark), its vivid characters and images (I loved the wood chopping scene) or its paused and non-patronizing explanations. I chose it because it's an article about the process of science, and not about the results.

You won't find answers here. You won't learn the latest findings about how the Amazon reacts to climate change. Instead, you will find out how scientists work and how the data that helps us understand climate is gathered.

In an age where the breach between public and experts is ever growing, these are the articles we need to win the battle for the future.