Leaves Maintain a Constant Temperature

Research shows that leaves on trees in the tropics to the Arctic maintain a fairly constant temperature of 70°F.

Scientists assumed leaf temperature was the same as its environment because trees are not warm-blooded. The shocking find reveals that leaves from the tropics evolved mechanisms for keeping cool (e.g. angling themselves away from the sun) while trees in polar regions have ways to heat their leaves (e.g. having more leaves per branch to bundle up).

Burps Maintained Warm Earth

National Geographic highlights a study that suggests when humans killed off mammoths and other Ice Age "megafauna" disappeared from the Americas ~13,000 years ago, their planet-warming burps left which created the Younger Dryas cooling period.

Dryas occurred ~1,000 years following human migration into the land, as did the extinction of 114 herbivorous species. The link between extinction and cooling is methane, a greenhouse gas 20x more powerful than C02 when it comes to global warming.

When digesting plant material, herbivores give off the gas - ~90% of which is burped. Records show the Dryas period had 2x-4x less methane than any other period in history.

The study suggests the cause is all the missing burps.