Amazon Fires "Worst I've Ever Seen" Says Rancher - Potentially 50% Of Basin Cleared In 20 Yrs

[hatrack]

Fires continue to rage in the Amazon, according to local reports. John Cain Carter, a rancher who runs Aliança da Terra, an environmental accountability group for agricultural operators, says that the fires are the worst he has ever seen in the region. "I have never seen fires this bad," he told mongabay.com. "The fires are even worse than in 1998´s El Niño event."

NASA satellite images released at the end of September confirm widespread burning in the Amazon state of Mato Grosso.



EDIT

Fires in the Amazon are usually the product of human activity. Generally, fires are set to clear land for agriculture, though in dry years fires may escape agricultural areas and burn widely through forest area. For example, during the record drought of 2005-2006, thousands of square kilometers of land burned for months, releasing more than 100 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Scientists are concerned that continued burning in the Amazon could cause the world's largest rainforest to tip towards large-scale ecosystem change, whereby tropical forest is replaced by savanna.

"The threat of a 'permanent El Niño' is therefore to be taken very seriously," said Dr. Philip M. Fearnside of the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA) in an interview with mongabay.com last year. "Disintegration of the Amazon forest, with release of the carbon stocks in the biomass and soil, would be a significant factor in pushing us into a runaway greenhouse." "It's not out of the question to think that half of the basin will be either cleared or severely impoverished just 20 years from now," added Dr. Daniel Nepstad, head of the Woods Hole Research Center's Amazon program. "The nightmare scenario is one where we have a 2005-like year that extended for a couple years, coupled with a high deforestation where we get huge areas of burning, which would produce smoke that would further reduce rainfall, worsening the cycle. A situation like this is very possible. While some climate modelers point to the end of the century for such a scenario, our own field evidence coupled with aggregated modeling suggests there could be such a dieback within two decades."

EDIT/END

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1016-amazon.html

[gulfcoastliberal]

1. Out of control wildfires, huge droughts, melting tundra/arctic/Greenland, oceans not absorbing co2

Sounds like a bad scene bro.

Amazon on fire: