Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change
In the UK The Guardian is reporting “Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say“. The scientists go on in fact to say:
“The impacts of climate change on the Amazon are much worse than we thought. As temperatures rise quickly over the coming century the damage to the forest won’t be obvious straight away, but we could be storing up trouble for the future.”
It’s like that song, Big Yellow Taxi where she says Don’t it always seem to know, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
We didn’t so much as pave paradise for a parking lot, as for high salt, high fat, hormone pumped burgers, and all their attendant horror.
Tim Lenton, a climate expert at the University of East Anglia, called the study, presented at a global warming conference in Copenhagen today , a “bombshell”. He said: “When I was young I thought chopping down the trees would destroy the forest but now it seems that climate change will deliver the killer blow.”
The study, which has been submitted to the journal Nature Geoscience, used computer models to investigate how the Amazon would respond to future temperature rises.
It found that a 2°C rise above pre-industrial levels, widely considered the best case global warming scenario and the target for ambitious international plans to curb emissions, would still see 20-40% of the Amazon die off within 100 years. A 3C rise would see 75% of the forest destroyed by drought over the following century, while a 4°C rise would kill 85%. “The forest as we know it would effectively be gone,” Pope said.
Killing the Amazon could trigger an unstoppable warming process that only levels out when the Earth reaches about 400°C, and we can’t live in that. Is it worth the risk?
REDD projects need to be seriously considered as an urgent climate change mitigation tool and to do it properly they need to be folded into the compliance markets. Australia and the USA have the chance to lead the world at last and incorporate REDD into their strategic carbon planning. Before there are nno forests left to save. Don’t think it could happen? Who cut down the last tree on Easter Island? — DS