Aerial survey showing dead and dying trees in California, August 2016. Climate change is killing off trees in several ways. Photo by Pacific Southwest Region 5 / CC BY 2.0. The world’s most ancient trees are failing. And their demise is telling us something about the dramatic impact of climate change on the natural world, says famed botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger. The tree expert, who is also a medical biochemist, is clearly concerned, if not shaken. “It appears that the ancient forests are more vulnerable,” she says. “They have been around for more than 1,000 years and something is happening to them.” These trees provided food, shelter and medicines for civilizations more ancient than the Romans and “are the backdrop to nature.” In her bestseller The Sweetness of a Simple Life , Beresford-Kroeger described the global forest as “a molecular memo” that harvests one carbon atom at a time and […]