Amazon Forest Fires Alter Weather Patterns, Further Speed Forest Collapse

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BRASILIA, Brazil - "Burning of the Amazon jungle is changing weather patterns by raising temperatures and reducing rainfall, accelerating the rate at which the forest is disappearing and turning into grassland, scientists said yesterday.

Wide-scale burning by loggers and farmers of the Amazon has risen sharply over the past two decades, changing the region's cloud cover and reducing the amount of rain in some deforested areas that are turning into grassland or savanna. "All the models indicate the same thing, 'savannization,"' Pedro Leite Silva Dias of the University of Sao Paulo said at a conference on research on Amazon deforestation.

Silva Dias said the worst-case scenario for the Amazon, a continuous tropical forest larger than the continental United States, is that at current burning and deforestation rates, 60 percent of the jungle will turn into savanna in the next 50 to 100 years. The most likely outlook is that 20 to 30 percent will turn into savanna, according to forecasting models.

Destruction of the Amazon, home to up to 30 percent of the globe's animal and plant species, reached its second-highest level last year. An area of 5.9 million acres, bigger than the state of New Jersey, was destroyed as loggers and farmers hacked and burned the forest in 2003."

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