As Brazil's rain forest burns down, planet heats up

[babylonsister]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/19533.html

As Brazil's rain forest burns down, planet heats up
By Jack Chang | McClatchy Newspapers



Slash and burn agriculture is denuding the Amazon. | View larger image

TAILANDIA, Brazil — For more than a decade, Vigilio de Souza Pereira has carved his living out of the thick Amazon rain forest around his ranch in northern Brazil.

When Pereira needs more land for his crops and cattle, he cuts more virgin jungle and sets the vegetation ablaze. When the nutrient-poor soil has been depleted, he moves on and cuts down more jungle.

Such slash-and-burn agriculture has helped the 51-year-old Pereira and millions of other farmers and ranchers scratch out a living from the forest, but it’s put Brazil at the heart of the environmental challenge of the century.

As vast tracts of rain forest are cleared, Brazil has become the world’s fourth-largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, after the United States, China and Indonesia, according to the most recent data from the U.S.-based World Resources Institute.

And while about three-quarters of the greenhouse gases emitted around the world come from power plants, transportation and industrial activity, more than 70 percent of Brazil’s emissions comes from deforestation.

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/19533.html

[dipsydoodle]

1. Equally significant

is the lost of the root systems of those trees. The roots retain water from rainfall and help perpetuate the weather cycles. Loss of the roots causes rainfall to run into rivers and out to the ocean. As the forest turns to savanna the whole issue worsens further.

[NMDemDist2]

2. and

less trees mean less CO2 to Oxygen conversion

we are killing ourselves by choking out the available O2 in the air

The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet" because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest.

http://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm