A Record Amazon Drought, and Fear of Wider Ills

The Amazon River basin, the world's largest rain forest, is grappling with a devastating drought that in some areas is the worst since record keeping began a century ago. It has evaporated whole lagoons and kindled forest fires, killed off fish and crops, stranded boats and the villagers who travel by them, brought disease and wreaked economic havoc.

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"There have been years before in which we've had a deficit of rainfall, but we've never experienced drops in the water levels of rivers like those we have seen in 2005," said Everaldo Souza, a meteorologist at the Amazon Protection System, a Brazilian government agency in Manaus, the nine-state region's main city. "It has truly been without precedent, and it looks like it is only going to be December or January, if then, that things return to normal."

Scientists say the drought is most likely a result of the same rise in water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean that unleashed Hurricane Katrina. They also worry that if global warming is involved, as some of them suspect, it may be the beginning of a new era of more severe and frequent droughts in the region that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world's fresh water.

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"We have no idea of the game we have played into by running this worldwide experiment of pumping so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," Mr. Nepstad said. Even more than in other parts of the world, people who live in the world's largest rain forest depend on water for transportation, food, sewage removal - in short, just about everything, so the drought has touched nearly every aspect of their lives.



http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/international/americas/11amazon.html

might hint at part of the problem.

Pandora's Box. We (meaning Americans) bear a greater responsibility for this mess.

We comprise about 3.8% of the world's population. And yet we burn through about 25% of the world's natural resources. If everyone wanted to live like we do, we would need 4 planets to sustain it.

Too many people on earth + too much consumption of non-renewable resources = disaster.

havoc!!!

I somehow doubt that their drought is because of the burning. I would guess it is a contributing factor but not the cause. Trees in the tropics grow back almost overnght...

50% of the Amazon is GONE. Areas that were once rain forest are now PRARIE. Other areas are actually turning into semiarid DESERT. These lands are not being cut and abandoned, they're being cut and turned into farms, cattle range, and urban areas. The forest can't grow back. The only areas it grows back are the areas deforested for logging. Even in those areas it takes CENTURIES for a proper multi-tier rainforest to regenerate.

The problem Brazil is facing is partially of their own making. Large rain forests are self sustaining...the canopy is so thick and has so many layers that rain falling from the sky can take hours to actually reach the floor below. A huge amount of water evaporates before making it all the way down, raising the humidity, generating more clouds, and allowing more rainfall to come down elsewhere. Thick forests also impede the outflow of water by backing it up in bogs, marshes, and loamy earth. That gives the water even more time to evaporate back up and rejoin the water cycle as rain elsewhere.

When you deforest an area, rainwater that falls on it soaks into the earth instantly or runs off quickly into streams and creeks. The local weather cycle is violently disrupted, and the areas downwind...even areas that are untouched by roads or loggers...are badly disrupted as their rain levels drop.

The Brazilians have allowed half of the forest to be removed, and with it went half of the evaporation area for the Amazon forest. Scientists have been complaining for decades that the Amazon will eventually hit a tipping point where it will no longer be able to sustain its own water cycle and maintain itself as a true rainforest, and it's possible that this point has finally been reached.

And here in Amerika, we are going back to the 1890s...or perhaps the 1590s. Is it too late to right the ship?

I believe it is too late to "right the ship".

Many historians say this country is on its way out - that we're going to be like Rome. (Now all I have to do is go re-read about how Rome fell.)

As documented in Kevin Phillips book Wealth and Democracy.

I'll check that book out.

It will be helpful to prepare for what's inevitable.

It would too heartbreaking to watch them die in the eco-econocataclysm.

to get the point that every year will be a Katrina machine gun pointed at them, what will they ever care about brief reports on the fate of the rest of the world?

The one idea that rarely surfaces is the fairly pertinent inevitability of annual disasters that make our current shock and dismay this year look foolishly innocent. The smart people are moving out and no one wants to upset the economic applecart by pointing it out. So the other nations are totally on their own since it might remind our locals of their own future.