Rains Are Scarce in the Amazon. Instead, Megafires Are Raging.
Rains Are Scarce in the Amazon. Instead, Megafires Are Raging.
Hundreds of square miles of the rainforest have burned as countries in the region battle a record number of fires fueled by extreme weather.
The fires in the Amazon, which reaches across nine South American nations, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts said.
The region has been feeling the effects of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which can worsen dry conditions that were intensified this year by extremely high temperatures.
That has made the rainforest more vulnerable to fast-spreading blazes, said Ane Alencar, the science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil.
“The climate is leaving forests in South America more flammable,” she said. “It’s creating opportunities for wildfires.”
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Fire control is going to be a major engineering challenge on a civilization scale in the upcoming centuries if we want to preserve our carbon sink forests. Should be an interesting challenge, politically, to direct money into it. It's large scale geoengineering...
For the Amazon, there's one big trick: don't cut it down, and restore areas which have already been cut down. Then it stays a lot moister, and you don't lose the entire thing.
Human life needs to be more valuable than money before anything like that can be implemented.
Hopefully not too depressing of a take, but:
On the scale of the planet as a whole system (looking at the forest, and not the trees): humans are commodity -- there are billions upon billions of humans. But there is only one planet, with one atmosphere. If we wait for every human life to have unlimited value in every jurisdiction on earth -- we will wait forever. And then it will be too late and we're all going to fry in our utopian hell on earth.
In whatever jurisdiction you're in, you should be pushing for large scale planet-affecting changes to how the civilization behaves with regard to our stewardship of the planet.
And yes, you can do both at the same time.
(I'm a huge fan of Iain M Banks's Culture series. There is a Utopian future that is possible, where everything is simultaneously carefully managed, but individual freedom and prosperity coexists.)
Maybe if we survive the decade we can talk about maybe starting to look into maybe doing something about it. Maybe.
If we survive 20 years I'll see to it personally that we'll consider the matter.
Sheeit, consider it considered!
I mean, no one here is doing anything about it.
Good, hopefully we permanently erase humanity.