To TreeHugger : ” Last year, the Amazon rainforest experienced the worst drought on record, reducing normally flowing rivers to sun-baked stretches of dried mud and pushing the fragile ecosystem to the brink. “
” (…) As a result of 2010’s Amazon drought, experts say, some 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere — more than is produced by India’s entire population in a year. “
The more we put greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the more our Planet answers back and carbon reserves like the Russian permafrost or the Amazon Rainforest start emitting even more…
Here is another extract from the original article :
And even more troubling than the crippling drought itself was the notion that human caused global warming was a contributing factor, and that without reductions in CO2 emissions, such extended dry seasons would become common in the future.
But now, according to a recent study, the outlook for the world’s largest rainforest may be even more dire still.
(…) Using a carbon cycle simulation model, NASA researcher Christopher Potter applied data gathered from last year’s Amazon drought, namely measures of the forest’s ‘greenness’ levels which serve as an indicator of the plants’ photosynthetic efficiency, to assess what impact the lack of rainfall had on carbon dioxide emissions, and the findings were troubling.
While drought is largely considered a ‘natural’ disaster, researchers suspect that the effects of global climate change may have contributed to its severity — which resulted in a greater release of CO2 than did deforestation in the Amazon over the same period.
The situation is already close to get out of control, but such mechanisms could make it even harder to keep a relatively cool Earth in a near future.
The potential of these positive (*) feedback mechanisms is just awfully dreadful.
Besides the aforementioned Russian permafrost and Amazon rainforest other large carbon reserves are the Arctic, the world’s oceans and other forests around the world…
If we don’t act quickly enough and massively enough, it won’t matter anymore, because these mechanisms will clearly become unstoppable, and we would clearly go extinct…
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(*) positive as it increases climate change, not as it could bring us to our extinction…