Tales of a vagrant ant

I got this in a newsletter I receive, and it’s a bit long, but
this is one of the scariest/most depressing things i’ve read in a while, if it’s true, this is one of the scariest/most depressing things i’ve read in a while… eep. woo, global warming.

Subject: Amazon rainforest ‘could become a desert’
From: Scott Sinclair
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:56:47 -0700

This is seriously scary.

Scott

ITEM #1: Amazon rainforest ‘could become a desert’
ITEM #2: Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon

ITEM #1
Title: Amazon rainforest ‘could become a desert’
And that could speed up global warming with ‘incalculable
consequences’, says alarming new research
Source: Copyright 2006, The Independent
Date: July 23, 2006
Byline: Geoffrey Lean and Fred Pearce

The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into
desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate,
alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be
irreversible, could begin as early as next year.

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out
in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand
more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking
down.

Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern
hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate
global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of
control, a process that might end in the world becoming
uninhabitable.

The alarming news comes in the midst of a heatwave gripping
Britain and much of Europe and the United States. Temperatures
in the south of England reached a July record of 36.3C on
Tuesday. And it comes hard on the heels of a warning by an
international group of experts, led by the Eastern Orthodox ”
pope” Bartholomew, last week that the forest is rapidly
approaching a ” tipping point” that would lead to its total
destruction.

The research ­ carried out by the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole
centre in Santarem on the Amazon river ­ has taken even the
scientists conducting it by surprise. When Dr Dan Nepstead
started the experiment in 2002 ­ by covering a chunk of
rainforest the size of a football pitch with plastic panels to
see how it would cope without rain ­ he surrounded it with
sophisticated sensors, expecting to record only minor changes.
The trees managed the first year of drought without difficulty.
In the second year, they sunk their roots deeper to find
moisture, but survived. But in year three, they started dying.
Beginning with the tallest the trees started to come crashing
down, exposing the forest floor to the drying sun.

By the end of the year the trees had released more than two-
thirds of the carbon dioxide they have stored during their
lives, helping to act as a break on global warming. Instead they
began accelerating the climate change.

As we report today on pages 28 and 29, the Amazon now appears to
be entering its second successive year of drought, raising the
possibility that it could start dying next year. The immense
forest contains 90 billion tons of carbon, enough in itself to
increase the rate of global warming by 50 per cent.

Dr Nepstead expects “mega-fires” rapidly to sweep across the
drying jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the
sun and the rainforest could become desert.

Dr Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the
world’s top forest ecologists, says the research shows that “the
lock has broken” on the Amazon ecosystem. She adds: the Amazon
is “headed in a terrible direction”.

Fred Pearce is the author of ‘The Last Generation’ (Eden Project
Books), published earlier this year

ITEM #2
Title: Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon
Source: Copyright 2006, The Independent
Date: July 23, 2006

Deep in the heart of the world’s greatest rainforest, nine days’
journey by boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously
watching the soft waters of the Amazon drain away. Every day
they recede further, like water running slowly out of an
unimaginably immense bath, threatening a global catastrophe.

He pointed out what was happening on Wednesday, standing on an
island in a quiet channel of the giant river. Just a month ago,
he explained, it had been entirely under water. Now it was
jutting a full 15 feet above it.

It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for
a second successive year. And that would be ominous indeed. For,
as we report on page 12 today, new research suggests that just
one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest
into a cycle of destruction.

Just the day before, top scientists had been delivering much the
same message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio
Negro, on whose strange black waters this capital city of the
Amazon stands. They told the meeting - convened on a flotilla of
boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox
Church, dubbed the “green Pope” for his environmental activism -
that global warming and deforestation were rapidly pushing the
entire enormous area towards a “tipping point”, where it would
irreversibly start to die.

The consequences would be truly awesome. The wet Amazon, the
planet’s greatest celebration of life, would turn to dry
savannah at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the
world - including Europe - to become hotter and drier, making
this sweltering summer a mild foretaste of what is to come. In
the longer term, it could make global warming spiral out of
control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.

Nowhere could seem further from the world’s problems than the
idyllic spot where Otavio Luz Castello lives. The young
naturalist’s home is a chain of floating thatched cottages that
make up a research station in the Mamiraua Reserve, halfway
between here and Brazil’s border with Colombia.

Rare pink river dolphin play in the tranquil waters surrounding
the cottages, kingfishers dive into them, giant, bright
butterflies zig-zag across them and squirrel monkeys romp in the
trees on their banks. And an 18ft black caiman answers,
literally, to the name of Fred; gliding up to dine abstemiously
on sliced white bread when called. There is little to suggest
that it may be witnessing the first scenes of an apocalypse. The
waters of the rivers of the Amazon Basin routinely fall by some
30-40 feet- greater than most of the tides of the world’s seas -
between the wet and dry seasons. But last year they just went on
falling in the worst drought in recorded history.

In the Mamiraua Reserve they dropped 51 feet, 15 feet below the
usual low level and other areas were more badly affected. At one
point in the western Brazilian state of Acre, the world’s
biggest river shrank so far that it was possible to walk across
it. Millions of fish died; thousands of communities, whose only
transport was by water, were stranded. And the drying forest
caught fire; at one point in September, satellite images spotted
73,000 separate blazes in the basin.

This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is draining away
even faster than the last one - and there are still more than
three months of the dry season to go. He adds: “I am very
concerned.”

It is much the same all over Amazonia. In the Jau National Park,
18 hours by boat up the Rio Negro from here, local people who
took me out by canoe at dawn found it impossible to get to
places they had reached without trouble just the evening before.
Acre, extraordinarily, received no rain for 40 days recently,
and sandbanks are already beginning to surface in its rivers.
Flying over the forest - with trees in a thousand shades of
green stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can see
- it seems inconceivable that anything could endanger its
verdant immensity. Until recently, scientists took the same
view, seeing it as one of the world’s most stable environments.
Though they condemned the way that, on average, an area roughly
the size of Wales is cut down each year, this did not seem to
endanger the forest as a whole, much less the entire planet. Now
they are changing their minds in the face of increasing evidence
that the deforestation is pushing both the Amazon and the world
to the brink of disaster.

Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian
Research, told the floating symposium - whose delegates ranged
from politicians and environmentalists, to Amazonian Indian
shamans and Roman Catholic cardinals - of unpublished research
which suggests that the felling is both drying up the entire
forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been
battering the United States and the Caribbean.

The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast
amounts of water, which rise high into the air as if in an
invisible chimney. This draws in the wet north-East trade winds,
which have picked up moisture from the Atlantic. This in turn
controls the temperature of the ocean; as the trade winds pick
up the moisture, the warm water that is left gets saltier and
sinks.

Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian
evaporation which drives the whole process. One result is that
the hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the
hurricanes. Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade
winds, intensifying drought in the forest. “We believe there is
a vicious cycle” says Dr Nobre.

Marina Silva, a fiery former rubber-tapper who is now Brazil’s
environment minister, described how the Government was finally
cracking down on the felling by seizing illegally cut logs,
closing down illicit enterprises and fining and imprisoning
offenders. As a result, she says, it dropped by 31 per cent last
year.

But even so, it has only returned to the levels it was in 2001,
still double what it was 10 years before. And it has reached far
into the forest after the American multinational Cargill built a
huge port for soya three years ago at Santarem, some 400 miles
downriver from here.

This encouraged entrepreneurs to cut down the trees to grow the
soya.

The symposium flew down en masse to inspect the damage this had
caused - vast fields of beans destined to feed supermarket
chickens in Europe, where until recently there had been lush,
trackless forest.

Priests and community leaders who were campaigning to protect
the forest told us how they had received repeated death threats.

So far about a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed
completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging,
allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor drying it out.
And if you add these two figures together, the total is growing
perilously close to 50 per cent, which computer models predict
as the “tipping point” that marks the death of the Amazon.

The models did not expect this to happen until 2050. But, says
Dr Nobre, “what was predicted for 2050, may have begun to happen
in 2005.” Nobody knows when the crucial threshold will be
passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is
coming ever closer.

One of Dr Nobre’s colleagues, Dr Philip Fearnside, puts it this
way: “With every tree that falls we increase the probability
that the tipping point will arrive.”

Brazilian politicians say that the country has so many other
pressing problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought
under control, unless the world helps to pay for the survival of
the forest on which it too depends. Calculations by Hylton
Philipson, a British merchant banker and rainforest campaigner,
reckon that it will take $60bn (£32bn) a year, less than a third
of the cost of the Iraq war.

The scientists insist there is no time for delay. “If we do not
act now”, says Dr Fearnside, “we will lose the Amazon forest
that helps sustain living conditions throughout the world.”