Future land cover change work published in Science.

Future human land cover change is simulated based on the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios as illustrated in figure 1. These simulations show that in a fully coupled Ocean atmosphere GCM human land cover change in the Amazon and other regions could have significant impacts on climate. For example the A2 scenario shows that Amazon deforestation could affect not increase temperatures in the Amazon by about 2C, and cooling over the mid-latitude agricultural areas. In addition, in these fully coupled simulations there are also changes in Ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (figure 2). Diurnal temperature ranges are also significantly affected in this simulation.

Figure 1: Future human land cover change scenarios for the B1 and A2 scenarios

Figure 2: Temperature changes as a result of projected future human induced land cover changes for the A2 scenario.