Amazon Rainforest dumps 3 billion tons of CO2 into atmosphere

Eric Frei · 6th March 2009, 07:38 PM

Drought affected in 2005 caused a reversal of carbon dioxide productivity.

Revenge of the rainforest - Climate Change, Environment - The Independent

Quote:

for a period in 2005, the Amazon rainforest actually slipped into reverse gear and started to emit more carbon than it absorbed.

Four years ago, a sudden and intense drought in the Amazonian dry season created the sort of conditions that give climate scientists nightmares. Instead of being a net absorber of about two billion tons of carbon dioxide, the forest became a net producer of the greenhouse gas, to the tune of about three billion tons.

Eric Frei · 14th February 2011, 08:15 PM

Oh, the 1 in a 100 year drought of 2005 has popped up again in 2010. Imagine the Amazon jungle turning into a carbon source not sink.

We also have a thread running on global warming here.

Do note that at the same time a La Nina weather event happened in northern Australia (Queensland) with record rain and floods. Often when it's like that here it's a drought there and vice versa, meteorologist know of these and call it El Nino and La Nina.

Climate change | Amazon drought to speed global warming

Quote:

February 5, 2011
SCIENTISTS fear billions of tree deaths in the Amazon caused by drought could turn the forest from a carbon sink to a carbon source.

Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the basin last year, raising fears the vast forest is on the verge of a tipping point, where it will stop absorbing greenhouse gas emissions and instead increase them.

The Amazon rainforest soaks up more than a quarter of the world's atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming.

A switch from a carbon sink to a carbon source could prompt further droughts and mass tree deaths, creating a feedback loop that may cause runaway climate change.

''Put starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest forest,'' said Simon Lewis, a tropical forest researcher at the University of Leeds, England, who led the research, published in the journal Science.

Dr Lewis was careful to note that scientific uncertainty remained and that the 2005 drought - thought then to be of once-a-century severity - and the 2010 drought might yet be explained by natural climate variation.

''We can't just wait and see because there is no going back,'' he said. ''We won't know we have passed the point where the Amazon turns from a sink to a source until afterwards, when it will be too late.''

Alex Bowen, of the Grantham research institute on climate change at the London School of Economics, said huge emissions of carbon from the Amazon would make it even harder to limit global greenhouse gases enough to avoid dangerous climate change. ''It therefore makes it even more important for there to be strong and urgent reductions in man-made emissions,'' Dr Bowen said.

The revelation of mass tree deaths in the Amazon is a blow to efforts to reduce the destruction of the world's forests, one of the biggest sources of global carbon emissions.

The recent use of satellite imagery by Brazilian authorities has drastically cut deforestation rates. Replanting in Asia had slowed the net loss.

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