Sink out of commission
The Amazon is no longer a carbon sink.
The Amazon rainforest is emitting a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to a study. The giant forest had been absorbing the emissions driving the climate crisis but is now causing its acceleration, researchers said.
Most of the emissions are caused by fires, many deliberately set to clear land for beef and soy production. But even without fires, hotter temperatures and droughts mean the south-eastern Amazon has become a source of CO2, rather than a sink.
Growing trees and plants have taken up about a quarter of all fossil fuel emissions since 1960, with the Amazon playing a major role as the largest tropical forest. Losing the Amazon’s power to capture CO2 is a stark warning that slashing emissions from fossil fuels is more urgent than ever, scientists said.
But are we doing that? No.
Luciana Gatti, at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil and who led the research, said: “The first very bad news is that forest burning produces around three times more CO2 than the forest absorbs. The second bad news is that the places where deforestation is 30% or more show carbon emissions 10 times higher than where deforestation is lower than 20%.”
Fewer trees meant less rain and higher temperatures, making the dry season even worse for the remaining forest, she said: “We have a very negative loop that makes the forest more susceptible to uncontrolled fires.”
Which, it turns out, isn’t even good for farming.
“The worst part is we don’t use science to make decisions,” she said. “People think that converting more land to agriculture will mean more productivity, but in fact we lose productivity because of the negative impact on rain.”
Research published on Friday estimated that Brazil’s soy industry loses $3.5bn a year due to the immediate spike in extreme heat that follows forest destruction.
Land cleared for farming is useless for farming because the clearance made the rain go away.
We can send Elon Musk to the edge of space, but we can’t stop torching the planet we depend on.
Bolsnaro has been encouraging clearing of the rainforest.
This is reminiscent of the clearing of the forests and plains in North America. Early settlers thought rain followed the plow, so they kept pushing further west. Surprise! We now get even less rain than before.
And the soils in the rainforest are thin and nutrient poor. They aren’t good for farming.
Coming soon to a planet, globe, atlas and map near you: the Amazon Desert.
How do we let the likes of Trump or Bolsanero any where near the levers of power, let alone hand them over to them? We are too fucking stupid to deserve to survive.
I’m beginning to think that everything after the Agricultural Revolution was a mistake. As egalitarian hunter-gatherers, humans were a lot fewer and a good deal less destructive (unless you were a large, flightless bird living on an island without terrestrial, mammalian predators). Sure, there was fire clearing of land, but our impact then was more akin to the landscape-altering activities of beavers, or elephants, rather than asteroids and comets. With agriculture we get the beginnings of human attempts to monopolize ecosystem production, state formation, wealth inequality, priesthoods and monarchies, and many of the other “advances” that have brought us and the other inhabitants of our world to the brink of disaster.
Stupid apes…
…in space.
YNNB:
“I’m beginning to think that everything after the Agricultural Revolution was a mistake”
Yep!
The worst mistake in human history.
The planet appears to be on course to become something for which the bizarre history of Easter Island was a curtain-raiser. Q: What went through the mind of the man who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island? A: ‘Jobs, not trees!’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Easter_Island
Maybe this explains why Bolsonairo can’t shake the hiccups.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/14/bolsonaro-hospitalized-hiccups/
An economics of perpetual growth can’t help but catalyze and exacerbate a tragedy of the commons.
Definitely a major reason I’d like to go to war with Brazil but it’s not exactly a sensible desire.