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https://freedium.cfd/https://medium.com/the-environment/what-is-the-amazon-tipping-point-exactly-9ef88eeaafca>
'At 6.7 million square kilometers in size — an area about twice the size of
India — the Amazon Rainforest accounts for half of the remaining rainforest on
Earth. It is the largest swathe of contiguous forest left on the planet, and it
is home to more than 10 percent of the world's terrestrial biodiversity: 2.5
million species of insects; 40,000 species of plants; 2,500 species of trees;
1,300 species of birds; hundreds of species of mammals, reptiles, and
amphibians. The trees of the Amazon store between 15 and 20 years worth of
global carbon dioxide emissions, and the rainforest has a "net cooling effect
that helps to stabilize the Earth's climate," to borrow the words of a recent
Nature paper, largely thanks to the volumes of water that these trees absorb
from the soil and evapotranspire into the atmosphere.
"For 65 million years, Amazonian forests remained relatively resilient to
climatic variability," the recent
Nature study states. "Now, the region is
increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme
droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the
system."
The Amazon Basin has been warming at an average of 0.27 degrees Celsius per
decade since the 1980s. The forest's central and southern regions have been
warming even faster, at a rate of 0.6 degrees Celsius per decade. Today, dry
season temperatures in the Amazon Basin are, on average, 2 degrees Celsius
warmer than they were 40 years ago. The dry season has grown longer, too. "It
used to be three to four months," Carlos Nobre, a senior researcher at the
Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, a member
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and co-author of the
recent
Nature paper, told me. "Now, it's four to five months."'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
