Amazon drought ‘severe’ in 2010, raising warming fears
But it’s cold outside!!11! Climate change fake!!11!
Researchers report in the journal Science that the 2010 drought was more widespead than in 2005 - the last big one - with more trees probably lost. The 2005 drought had been termed a “one in a century” event.
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Both droughts were associated with unusually warm seas in the Atlantic Ocean off the Brazilian coast.
Warmer oceans = very bad things happening in places where the potential for damage is greatest:
“If events like this do happen more often, the Amazon rainforest would reach a point where it shifts from being a valuable carbon sink slowing climate change to a major source of greenhouse gases.”
How?
CO2 emissions = warming = droughts = turning CO2 sinks into CO2 smokestacks. A positive feedback loop whose consequences are anything but.In the Amazon, the principal mechanism is simply that trees die and then rot; in addition, those trees are then not available to absorb CO2 from the air.
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In an average year, the basin absorbs about 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. By contrast, the impact of the 2005 drought, spread over a number of years, was calculated as a release of five billion tonnes. The new paper calculates the figure for 2010 as about eight billion tonnes, as much as the annual emissions of China and Russia combined