The news articles all agree that the Amazon Rainforest is near a "tipping point."
That's when the world's lungs will hit code red. Tipping point seems a droll term to describe the impending death of the rainforest.
The Amazon’s demise is one of the many threats to humanity caused by climate change. Some enterprising journalist should compile a summation of all of them.
A recent avalanche of doomsday climate-change alarms agree that emissions must be radically reduced if humankind has any hope of avoiding extreme devastation.
When the Amazon’s point of no return arrives in the next few decades, the rainforest's disappearance into savannah will be irreversible, according to a new study.
Instead of absorbing carbon, the changing rainforest will release tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The grasslands replacing the forest will no longer act as a carbon "sink."
Based on monthly satellite observations from 1991 to 2016, 75 percent of the rainforest has lost the ability to recover from drought, fire, deforestation and climate change, according to the study published in Nature Climate Change. The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Technical University of Munich, according to a BBC report.
The Amazon’s loss of resilience is higher near areas of deforestation for agriculture, encouraged by the Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro.
Poet Joyce Kilmer in a much ridiculed poem said that only God can make a tree.
Only God, or nature, can make a rainforest. Once it's gone, it's lost forever. And the world will shuffle closer to doom.
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