The Forest Baseline Hypothesis: A Framework for Understanding Forest-Climate Teleconnections

Paper 3 updated version: Hypothesis paper on forests as a preindustrial CCN reference and on regional forest–water transition signals. It combines Ecuadorian, Amazon and European observational analyses, including CALIPSO, GRACE, AERONET and ERA5. The findings are regional and exploratory: the glacier regression is an equivalence metric with factor-of-two uncertainty, and no universal or formally irreversible tipping threshold is claimed.