Brazil rides again- and we all suffer....

[TwoTankAmin]

Not content to trash the rivers in the Amazon and all the bad things this has done, now the Amazon rain forests are burning at an unprecedented rate. Much of this is exacerbated by the "non-existent" climate change. Who needs living rivers, who need rain forests, who needs native peoples, who needs functioning ecosystems?

If you are not yet aware of what is going on in Brazil these days or if you think it is not a real issue, go spend some time in São Paulo which at 4 in the afternoon looks like its night.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather- ... s/70009133

[Yams]

Just imagine breathing that air in Sao Paulo. It's so strange to me that so many people, including prominent individuals who have repeatedly been told otherwise, just don't believe that climate change is real and/or caused in part by human activity. But with the Amazon, it goes beyond the climate; it goes to the impacts on the native peoples and the waterways, the dense, rich rainforest, and every one of the heck-knows-how-many species actually reside within it - so many that we have trouble counting and even finding them all.

[bekateen]

[TwoTankAmin]

The Brazilian rain forests have been referred to as lungs. If I have it correct, all the co2 produced in Brazil has historically been consumed within Brazil and did not contribute to global warming. Additionally, about 20% of the worlds oxygen is produced there as well. There is a massive amount of captured CO2 in the forest system.

The fires are doing three things. the first is the air pollution created by the fires. But this is the least of the damage. There are also massive amounts of co2 being released and this does exacerbate global warming. And then there is the final damage, the loss of the oxygen production from the destroyed forest.

Unfortunately, the one thing the human race seems to have in excess is stupidity.

[Narwhal72]

The Amazon does not produce 20% of the world's oxygen. Only a tiny percentage because so much of what is produced is used up in photorespiration and animal and microbe respiration.

The rainforest does adsorb a tremendous amount of CO2 which is stored in the massive tree and plant growth. Eventually most is released back into the atmosphere as microbes consume the wood and break it down. A percentage will be buried in sediments or swept out to sea to sink to the bottom and be sequestered for millenia. That's how coal and oil came to be after all.

The fires will release the CO2 at a much faster rate so that less will be sequestered. So the net effect will be an increase in CO2, not a drop in O2.
The other and perhaps more serious negative effect is that without the forest canopy, the land will lose humidity and become drier and drier. The rainforest will cease to be and a savannah will take it place. If the rainfall decreases (as it likely will and probably already has) then the savannah will eventually become desert. The loss to the future of humankind of the animals and plants of the rainforest could be catastrophic in the long term. Who knows, the cure for cancer may have been burned away forever last week.

[bekateen]

The Amazon does not produce 20% of the world's oxygen. Only a tiny percentage because so much of what is produced is used up in photorespiration and animal and microbe respiration.

Agreed. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/no ... -heres-why

Not to say the fires aren't an ecological catastrophe, but on an oxygen loss basis, probably not.

But still, God take care of us. We're a bunch of planetary idiots. (we being human beings)

Cheers, Eric

[TwoTankAmin]

I stand corrected re the oxygen part of things. However, I am not sure that I have the co2 part that wrong?

What makes things different now than in the past decades isn't that there have not been more acres burned in past years, but that those burned acres are becoming and increasing percent of the total acres that remain forested. How many years does it take a tree to grow from seed to adult tree size? Compare that with how much time it takes to disappear in a wildfire.

The problem is not limited to the Amazon basin. Consider Mongolia and the Arctic:

The worst fires move north of forests and impact Arctic tundra and permafrost layers, which accumulate organic matter over thousands of years, Parrington said. When those areas are burned, it releases thousands of years worth of carbon and methane into the atmosphere.

from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/17/arctic- ... -year.html

I may have it wrong again, but my understanding is that methane release is much worse than co2. My understanding is also that the elevated co2 levels in the atmosphere are changing the pH in the oceans. Unlike our fw fish which can tolerate some degree of pH shift, marine animals cannot do so nearly as well.

The surface oceans have recorded about 0.1 pH unit drop since the start of the Industrial Revolution—a blink of the eye in geologic or evolutionary time. While 0.1 units might not sound like much change, it’s significant: Because the pH scale is logarithmic (like the Richter Scale for earthquakes), that small shift actually means that the water is about 28 percent more acidic than it was before.

from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envi ... ification/

I am not a big believer in divine intervention. It seems to me that the way any supreme being would protect what he had created on Earth would be to prevent these sort of disasters from happening rather than fixing them. But I am just a mere mortal, so what do I know?

[Narwhal72]

You are absolutely right about the CO2. The fires are releasing decades worth of sequestered CO2 in a matter of days. The result will increase our greenhouse gas level and continue to warm the planet. The oceans will acidify affecting coral growth which in turn will reduce productivity of the tropical oceans. Surges of microalgae (many of them toxic to marinelife) will bloom due to the excess nutrients (not just CO2 but also nitrogen and phosphate from agricultural runoff) and further reduce ocean productivity. This will spoil our summer beaches and affect our seafood supply.

Mother Nature isn't here to protect us. She will overcome and adapt. We may not be around to see it though.

[TwoTankAmin]

Mother Nature isn't here to protect us. She will overcome and adapt. We may not be around to see it though.

As far as I am concerned this is not a question of "may." For some time I have believe that the human race is doomed to extinction as species on this planet. From the dawn of life on the planet, natural events have cause extinctions. Early live was anaerobic and the creation of an oxygen rich environment killed many of them off. Several natural events have cause mass extinctions throughout time.

The difference today is that the extinction of homo sapiens will be self induced. The only hope is off planet. So the question of how humanity might survive is if we can go off world before it is too late. The time is rapidly approaching when the insects and bugs become the dominant life form on the planet (assuming we don't kill them off first).