Feacturing Aileen Garoutte
This blog (UFOexperiences) has been created to inform the public about the UFO subject. It also contains peripheral phenomena. Created by Aileen Garoutte, previously Director of The UFO Contact Center International.
tUESDAY, JULY 25, 2006
THE AMAZON - SOMETHING IMPORTANT TODAY
Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon
Time is running out for the Amazon rainforest. And the fate of the 'lungs of
the world' will take your breath away
Report by Geoffrey Lean in Manaus Published: 23 July 2006
Deep in the heart of the world's greatest rainforest, nine days' journey by
boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft waters of
the Amazon drain away. Every day they recede further, like water running slowly
out of an unimaginably immense bath, threatening a global catastrophe. He
pointed out what was happening on Wednesday, standing on an island in a quiet
channel of the giant river. Just a month ago, he explained, it had been
entirely under water. Now it was jutting a full 15 feet above it.
It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second
successive year. And that would be ominous indeed. For, as we report on page 12
today, new research suggests that just one further dry year beyond that could
tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.
Just the day before, top scientists had been delivering much the same message
at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on whose strange black
waters this capital city of the Amazon stands. They told the meeting - convened
on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek
Orthodox Church, dubbed the "green Pope" for his environmental
activism - that global warming and deforestation were rapidly pushing the
entire enormous area towards a "tipping point", where it would
irreversibly start to die.The consequences would be truly awesome. The wet
Amazon, the planet's greatest celebration of life, would turn to dry savannah
at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the world - including Europe
- to become hotter and drier, making this sweltering summer a mild foretaste of
what is to come. In the longer term, it could make global warming spiral out of
control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.
Nowhere could seem further from the world's problems than the idyllic spot
where Otavio Luz Castello lives. The young naturalist's home is a chain of
floating thatched cottages that make up a research station in the Mamiraua
Reserve, halfway between here and Brazil's border with Colombia. Rare pink
river dolphin play in the tranquil waters surrounding the cottages, kingfishers
dive into them, giant, bright butterflies zig-zag across them and squirrel
monkeys romp in the trees on their banks. And an 18ft black caiman answers,
literally, to the name of Fred; gliding up to dine abstemiously on sliced white
bread when called. There is little to suggest that it may be witnessing the first
scenes of an apocalypse.
The waters of the rivers of the Amazon Basin routinely fall by some 30-40 feet-
greater than most of the tides of the world's seas - between the wet and dry
seasons. But last year they just went on falling in the worst drought in
recorded history.In the Mamiraua Reserve they dropped 51 feet, 15 feet below
the usual low level and other areas were more badly affected. At one point in
the western Brazilian state of Acre, the world's biggest river shrank so far
that it was possible to walk across it. Millions of fish died; thousands of
communities, whose only transport was by water, were stranded. And the drying
forest caught fire; at one point in September, satellite images spotted 73,000
separate blazes in the basin.This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is
draining away even faster than the last one - and there are still more than
three months of the dry season to go. He adds: "I am very
concerned."It is much the same all over Amazonia.
In the Jau National Park, 18 hours by boat up the Rio Negro from here, local
people who took me out by canoe at dawn found it impossible to get to places
they had reached without trouble just the evening before. Acre,
extraordinarily, received no rain for 40 days recently, and sandbanks are already
beginning to surface in its rivers. Flying over the forest - with trees in a
thousand shades of green stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can
see - it seems inconceivable that anything could endanger its verdant
immensity. Until recently, scientists took the same view, seeing it as one of
the world's most stable environments.
Though they condemned the way that, on average, an area roughly the size of
Wales is cut down each year, this did not seem to endanger the forest as a
whole, much less the entire planet. Now they are changing their minds in the
face of increasing evidence that the deforestation is pushing both the Amazon
and the world to the brink of disaster.
Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, told
the floating symposium - whose delegates ranged from politicians and
environmentalists, to Amazonian Indian shamans and Roman Catholic cardinals -
of unpublished research which suggests that the felling is both drying up the
entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been battering the
United States and the Caribbean.The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally
evaporates vast amounts of water, which rise high into the air as if in an
invisible chimney. This draws in the wet north-East trade winds, which have
picked up moisture from the Atlantic. This in turn controls the temperature of
the ocean; as the trade winds pick up the moisture, the warm water that is left
gets saltier and sinks. Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the
Amazonian evaporation which drives the whole process. One result is that the
hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes.
Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying drought
in the forest. "We believe there is a vicious cycle" says Dr Nobre.
Marina Silva, a fiery former rubber-tapper who is now Brazil's environment
minister, described how the Government was finally cracking down on the felling
by seizing illegally cut logs, closing down illicit enterprises and fining and
imprisoning offenders. As a result, she says, it dropped by 31 per cent last
year.But even so, it has only returned to the levels it was in 2001, still
double what it was 10 years before. And it has reached far into the forest after
the American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three years ago
at Santarem, some 400 miles downriver from here. This encouraged entrepreneurs
to cut down the trees to grow the soya.
The symposium flew down en masse to inspect the damage this had caused - vast
fields of beans destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe, where until
recently there had been lush, trackless forest.
Priests and community leaders who were campaigning to protect the forest told
us how they had received repeated death threats.So far about a fifth of the
Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been
harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor drying it
out. And if you add these two figures together, the total is growing perilously
close to 50 per cent, which computer models predict as the "tipping
point" that marks the death of the Amazon.The models did not expect this
to happen until 2050. But, says Dr Nobre, "what was predicted for 2050, may
have begun to happen in 2005." Nobody knows when the crucial threshold
will be passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is coming
ever closer.One of Dr Nobre's colleagues, Dr Philip Fearnside, puts it this
way: "With every tree that falls we increase the probability that the
tipping point will arrive."Brazilian politicians say that the country has
so many other pressing problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought
under control, unless the world helps to pay for the survival of the forest on
which it too depends.
Calculations by Hylton Philipson, a British merchant banker and rainforest
campaigner, reckon that it will take $60bn (£32bn) a year, less than a third of
the cost of the Iraq war.The scientists insist there is no time for delay.
"If we do not act now", says Dr Fearnside, "we will lose the
Amazon forest that helps sustain living conditions throughout.
No comments:
Post a Comment