Brazilian Trump (Jair Bolsonaro) is hurtling Humanity towards "a doomsday bomb of stored carbon"

[CousinIT]

...This epochal deforestation — matched by harder to quantify but similar levels of forest degradation and fragmentation — has caused measurable disruptions to regional climates and rainfall. It has set loose so much stored carbon that it has negated the forest’s benefit as a carbon sink, the world’s largest after the oceans. Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky.

The catastrophic loss of another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest could happen within one generation. It’s happened before. It’s happening now.

. . .

“The land grabs are not new, but it’s become a question of life and death.”

. . .

As it did then, today’s reignited arc of fire signals the advance of an agribusiness frontier dominated by cattle and soy. Bolsonaro and his allies in Congress and Amazonian state governments vow to accelerate this advance in the name of progress. Doing so will require eliminating the young laws and agencies established to protect the rainforest, its supernova of life that accounts for most of the planet’s species, and its traditional Indigenous inhabitants, whose very existence Bolsonaro and his ministers have cursed and denied, and whose moral and spiritual challenge they fear but do not comprehend.

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/06/brazil-amazon-rainforest-indigenous-conservation-agribusiness-ranching/