Weird weather leaves Amazon thirsty

[FourScore]

Special Report: Weird weather leaves Amazon thirsty
Reuters
By Stuart Grudgings Stuart Grudgings – Mon Nov 29, 2:06 pm ET



CAAPIRANGA, Brazil (Reuters) – The river loops low past its bleached-white banks, where caimans bask in the fierce morning sun and stranded houseboats tilt precariously. Nearby sits a beached barge with its load of eight trucks and a crane. Its owners were caught out long ago by the speed of the river's decline.

This is what it looks like when the world's greatest rainforest is thirsty. If climate scientists are right, parched Amazon scenes like this will become more common in the coming decades, possibly threatening the survival of the forest and accelerating global warming.

The environmental and economic consequences could be huge -- for Brazil, for South America, for the planet.

An intense months-long drought through November drained the mighty Negro river -- a tributary of the Amazon -- to its lowest since records began in 1902, drying up the network of water that is the lifeblood of Brazil's huge Amazonas state. More than 60,000 people went short of food and many lacked clean drinking water as millions of dead fish contaminated rivers...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101129/ts_nm/us_amazon_drought

[Divine Discontent]

1. not good. meanwhile, some wearing 'blinders' up in the freezing parts of the country mock the

scientific findings about global warming (even though the avg temps keep going up), and fail to realize it's about Climate Change, and there's going to be all types of weather problems caused from that...

[Whoa_Nelly]

2. The Lung of our planet has been destroyed

The deforestation has so greatly altered this very important part of keeping our planet green. The weather patterns have shifted so greatly, the amounts of rain over what is remaining of this earth gem are becoming rapidly depleted. This drought has been the prediction for a couple of decades because of all this.


:cry: