Discussion Question: How does the deforestation issue in the Amazon compare to the deforestation caused by the Palm Oil Plantation industry in Southeast Asia? Explain your answer. Minimum length shoul

Staggering Number of Fires Ravaging Amazon Rainforest

LESTER HOLT, anchor: 

Those massive wildfires in the Amazon are getting worse and climate experts are calling the situation dire saying the very air we breathe is in jeopardy. Anne Thompson now on how these fires are putting our planet in peril. 

ANNE THOMPSON, reporting: 

This is Brazil's dry season when wildfires doped the Amazon, but not like this. Three weeks of raging fires setting off alarm bells around the world. There's so much smoke NASA's satellites captured it from space. A cold weather system helped by changing winds pushing smoke into cities more than a thousand miles away. Brazil's space agency reporting a staggering number of fires, almost seventy-three thousand since January, an eighty-three percent increase over last year. Why the rise? Human activity is suspected, particularly burning to clear land for farming, ranching and mining, development encouraged by Brazil's president. 

MICHAEL MANN (Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University): The impact is devastating because it's destroying unique irreplaceable ecosystems and its worsening climate change at the same time. 

THOMPSON: The Amazon is the planet's biggest tropical forest, nicknamed the Lungs of the Earth, because it absorbs carbon dioxide, the gas fueling climate change, and releases twenty percent of the world's oxygen. The chief of this rainforest tribe fears if the land is not preserved, it will all disappear, a vital natural wonder going up in smoke. Anne Thompson, NBC News.

Climate in Crisis- Amazon Fires Are Leaving Global Consequences

KERRY SANDERS, reporting:

The Amazon rainforest covers more than 2 million square miles, representing over half of the planet’s remaining rainforests. This vast jungle is home to the largest collection of plants, animals and insects on earth. Of the world’s known species, one in ten lives here. But it’s how everything here in this rainforest works in concert that makes this part of the world so critical for everyone else. The lush plants here absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, an untouched environment with an impressive and telling nickname. The Amazon is often referred to as the lungs of the planet. What’s going on there?

CARLOS NOBRE (Climate Scientist at University of Sao Paulo): Well, the Amazon is very important for containing global warming because the Amazon holds so much carbon in the forest.

SANDERS: And as we saw while traveling the Amazon, so much of this is now threatened by man as profitable agriculture and cattle farming claims what was Amazon jungle. Smoke from fires intentionally set to clear the land is filled with the same problematic carbon emitted by cars and power plants. And the Amazon is burning at a record rate. Just this year, 2,472 square miles of the Amazon have been destroyed by fires, almost the size of Delaware. A 92% increase over last year.

NOBRE: It’s fast to disappear.

SANDERS: And that is not only a concern for you but for the world?

NOBRE: It’s a concern for the world, for all of us.

SANDERS: Scientists say once trees are gone, the rain cycle disappears and the land dries out. And on a scale the size of the Amazon, that shift impacts weather patterns worldwide.

PHILIP FEARNSIDE (Research Professor at National Institute for Amazonia Research): Changing air currents in the atmosphere and of course through greenhouse gases and global warming, this is a tremendous global problem.

SANDERS: Scientists say destruction like this here in Rondonia, Brazil have impacts far beyond the Amazon rainforest. In Iowa and across the Midwest, climate scientists say they’re already seeing changes in weather patterns, hurting corn and soybean farmers. And on the West Coast, it’s predicting we’ll see even more wildfires, a global cause and effect that traces back in part here to the vanishing Amazon. My colleague, Al Roker, was recently in Greenland and witnessed things melt, changes there, related to what’s going on here.

FEARNSIDE: Very much so because global temperatures are increasing and deforestation is one of the things that adds to that.

SANDERS: Another problem? When the trees are gone, so too is the shade, which means the Amazon River begins to heat up. Because the destruction of the rainforest has been happening for decades, scientists fear if just three percent more of the Amazon burns, it will reach a tipping point.

NOBRE: If we lose all that carbon into the atmosphere, it will be very hard not to let the planet warm up exceedingly.

Understanding the role of forests and deforestation on local, regional and global precipitations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_R4Sp_-Kfg&feature=emb_title

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYlnoxgqEWo&feature=emb_title