The Amazon releases more carbon than it can hold, and scientists call this a new and worrying sign that the planet is approaching a turning point in climate change.
The carbon released by the Amazon exceeds its storage capacity, and scientists call this a disturbing new sign that the planet is approaching a turning point in climate change.
The impact of changes in the Amazon region extends far beyond South America. For generations, rainforests have accumulated large amounts of carbon in the soil and huge trees, and have played an important role in the stability of the global environment.
"If this study shows that the carbon footprint of an area thought to be absorbing carbon is actually a source of 300 million tons of carbon per year, then this sounds like a problem," environmental scientist and co-author Lucas Dominguez Say. The author of the article.
"We need to rethink the global strategy to combat climate change and effectively accelerate action," added a researcher at the GNS Institute of Science in New Zealand.
In the past ten years, researchers have collected hundreds of air samples at an altitude of 14,800 feet using small airplanes and found that not only the carbon emissions in the eastern part of the Amazon are higher than in the west, but also the carbon emissions in the hotspots in the southeast. It is more like a source of carbon emissions in the atmosphere than a carbon sink.
The number of fires in the Amazon region in 2020 exceeded the total number of fires in the previous year, when a smoky rainforest occupied the news for several weeks, triggering a global call for urgent action. Between August 2019 and July 2020, Amazon lost the equivalent of two Delaware states. Forest, as the Washington Post previously reported.
Scientists and environmental activists warned that if the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, who is close to agribusiness, continues to serve as President of Brazil, the Amazon rainforest will collapse.
"The worst nightmare of climatologists seems to have been confirmed," the Brazilian Climate Observatory's network of activists tweeted in response to the latest research.
The Brazilian Ministry of Defense described the government's actions — deploying troops to extinguish fires, imposing fines and arrests in the Amazon region — as "unprecedented" and rated the results as "impressive."
The revelation that parts of the Amazon are becoming a source of emissions is not new, but previous studies have been carried out using satellite data that can be affected by cloud cover and ground measurements from trees in a smaller area. Use direct atmospheric measurements that cover a wide area.
David Bowman, a professor of fire geography and fire science at the University of Tasmania in Australia who was not involved in the study, said that if the Amazon and northern forests are irreversibly damaged, it means "you lose control of the climate. ". "If [climate change] is a nuclear reactor, we are a bit like the people of Chernobyl, where we conduct some stress tests that may be beyond our control. This is a problem."
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