Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Death Spiral for the Amazon?
The Amazon rainforest is truly a
wonder of the natural world. It is so big that it creates its own
weather, from winds that affect currents in both oceans to rainfall
which gathers and is dropped within its boundaries. It is the
world's largest source of fresh water and biodiversity. It is by far
the biggest land-based carbon sink. As increasing areas have been
cut in recent years, the rainfall has been disrupted. The deforested
areas do not produce as much moisture when the air moves over them.
At a certain point, this will lead to insufficient replacement of
lost trees, and those areas will transition to savanna rather than
rainforest.
Now the Amazon is burning, tens of thousands of fires, some of them
started by government operatives pouring gasoline from planes, have
raged unabated for a month. There have been significant fires due to
drought twice before this millennium, but this is far worse. Not only
are some of the fires deliberate, the government/farming interests
are murdering tribal leaders who are the beating heart of those
remnant first peoples who are the frontline in protecting the
rainforest. These courageous tribal people, shrunk to tiny bands, are
the conscience and very soul of global protection of this precious,
critical forest. A thousand miles away, in Sao Paolo at
mid-afternoon, the skies are dark, blackened by smoke.
The Economist recently ran a
cover article ("Deathwatch for the Amazon"), detailing
how close we are to losing this critical resource. It reviews the
research and the politics involved in the current resurgence in
deforestation, due to non-compliance with laws under Dilma Rouseff
and now, collusion between Bolsonaro's right-wing government and the
cattle industry. On top of Bolsonaro's blatant invitation to loggers
and refusal to enforce existing laws to protect the Amazon, these
fires are the worst threat yet to the biggest carbon sink on Earth
outside the oceans. the pace of Amazon deforestaion, which has almost
doubled since Bolsonaro's election, represents an existential threat
to life as we know it.
As soon as I read the Economist
article and absorbed the news about the fires, I remembered the
chapter in Mark Lynas' gripping "Six Degrees" detailing the
death of the Amazon. "Three Degrees" (chapters detail what
the world looks like with each degree C increase in average
temperature) is the point where the earth system goes into multiple
runaway feedback loops. It is the point of no return, insuring at
least the 6 degrees warming in the book's title. I did
not have the heart to read Lynas any further after that chapter.
Lynas summarized then-current
climate science to predict such a threshold by 2050, but, reading the Economist cover, I
immediately knew that the earth system was right on the brink of
catastrophic disequilibrium. Correct, we are nowhere near three
degrees C of warming. We are closing in on 1.5, with another one
degree already pumped into the carbon cycle, and protected a degree
by industrial atmospheric sulfites, which will rapidly disappear once
global heavy industry ceases. Once again, we are reaching a threshold
frighteningly early.
As Lynas details, a study in
2000 by the Hadley Centre reckoned that the limit beyond which the
Amazon could not recover was 40% deforestation. However, the
Economist article cites a 2018 study by M. Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy
of George Mason University which has revised that figure to 20-25%,
which would throw the whole vast region irrevocably towards savanna,
eventually worse. Their study takes into account climate change and
fire, as well as deforestation itself. The level of rainforest
destruction currently stands at 17%, perilously close to the
threshold. These fires, on top of the huge increase in
deforestation, put the final slide squarely within Bolsonaro's
tenure, a chilling thought.
I write at the close of the G-7
summit, at which Emmanuel Macron dramatically called for the rich
nations to stand up to Brazil (by toughening their trade stance with
Brazil under the Mercosur agreement). Bolsonaro criticized the
stance, saying it was yet another colonialist ploy, and refused the
$20 million offered to help fight the fires. But crucially, he also
seemed to bow to the pressure, calling in the Brazilian military to
take on the task.
Before this latest response, I
was feeling incredibly helpless, imagining an armada of water tankers
sweeping into the Amazon with a fighter jet escort, supported by
world powers. Today I learned that Brazil has agreed to accept the
G7 money, which is a tiny step towards achieving a complex "Climate
New World Order," which I will discuss in the next post on possible solutions to the current mess. The deforestation and subsequent
burning to clear new fields to pasture cows serves to feed North
American burger hunger. This is about opening rainforest to farming,
rather than something like California wildfires, which are much harder
to contain. The fires themselves have been overdramatized, it
appears. But the drama is necessary to awaken the world from its
torpor with respect to climate disruption and the crucial role
rainforests play in it. What should an awakened world do now?
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