Posted on 06/08/2005 4:11:04 PM PDT by Coleus
REMANSO TALISMA, Brazil — The death of a myth begins with stinging eyes and heaving chests here on the edge of the Amazon rain forest.
Every year, fire envelops the jungle, throwing up inky billows of smoke that blot out the sun. Animals flee. Residents for miles around cry and wheeze, while the weak and unlucky develop serious respiratory problems.
When the burning season strikes, life and health in the Amazon falter, and color drains out of the riotous green landscape as great swaths of majestic trees, creeping vines, delicate bromeliads and hardy ferns are reduced to blackened stubble.
But more than just the land, these annual blazes also lay waste to a cherished notion that has roosted in the popular mind for decades: the idea of the rain forest as the "lungs of the world."
Ever since saving the Amazon became a fashionable cause in the 1980s, championed by Madonna, Sting and other celebrities, the jungle has consistently been likened to an enormous recycling plant that slurps up carbon dioxide and pumps out oxygen for us all to breathe, from Los Angeles to London to Lusaka.
Think again, scientists say.
Far from cleaning up the atmosphere, the Amazon is now a major source for pollution. Rampant burning and deforestation, mostly at the hands of illegal loggers and of ranchers, release hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the skies each year.
Brazil now ranks as one of the world's leading producers of greenhouse gases, thanks in large part to the Amazon, the source for up to two-thirds of the country's emissions.
"It's not the lungs of the world," said Daniel Nepstad, an American ecologist who has studied the Amazon for 20 years. "It's probably burning up more oxygen now than it's producing."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
'Rampant burning and deforestation, mostly at the hands of illegal loggers and of ranchers, release hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the skies each year.'
uhhhh...That's what the environmentalists are trying to stop. You're not exactly making your case.
Yea, that line makes the case much better. Saying the forests are consuming oxygen when we burn them is not a good point to argue when trying to support the idea the forest isn't sacracent.
I always found it hard to belive [sic] that forests in one part of the world were supplying oxygen for the rest of the planet.
Perhaps you're implying that some people hold the view that the rain forests are responsible for a very large portion of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and this you find hard to believe. If so, I apologize for supposing that you were overlooking an aspect of physical chemistry.
"Perhaps you're implying that some people hold the view that the rain forests are responsible for a very large portion of the oxygen in the atmosphere"
Yes, that has been what I've been hearing from environmentalists. Perhaps you have been spared this.
"Yea, that line makes the case much better. Saying the forests are consuming oxygen when we burn them is not a good point to argue when trying to support the idea the forest isn't sacracent."
True, but even if the rainforest consumes most of the oxygen it produces, that's not the same as pouring tons of CO2 into the atmosphere as a result of burning it.
Can we burn them before the flood?
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