Here It Is Folks: "Amazon rainforest 'could become a desert' "

[leftchick]

:cry: I feel so helpless with a governement that is actually HELPING GLOBAL WARMING HAPPEN!

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10392615

:argh:

<snip>

It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second successive year. And that would be ominous. New research suggests that one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.

The day before, top scientists delivered much the same message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on the strange black waters beside which Manaus, the capital city of the Amazon, stands.

They told the meeting - convened on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, dubbed the "green Pope" for his environmental activism - that global warming and deforestation were pushing the entire enormous area towards a "tipping point", where it would start to die.

The consequences would be awesome. The wet Amazon Basin would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the world to become hotter and drier.

In the long term, it could send global warming out of control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.

[mom cat]

1. If we don't put out the effort to radically change how we treat the

earth, we will deserve our fate.
Start conserving as if your life depended on it.