AMAZON RAINFOREST CATCHES FIRE, 2 MIL SQ KM THREATENED! "SUICIDE NOTE OF MANKIND" - PREZ CANDIDATES?

I've got a bad feeling about this. 10,000 points ablaze over 2 million square kilometers! One researcher is predicting "maga-fires" because of drought and now this...

We really have been DISTRACTED BY IRAQ AND BUSH'S SHENANIGANS. We need to focus on Brazil, not Iraq and get some attention and action on this PRONTO. We cannot afford to lose the Amazon.

Worst of all, the expanision of cattle ranching leads ranchers to slash and burn forest, which this year spread fire into the surrounding rainforest because of a multi-year drought caused by global warming and the melting of glaciers in the Andes -- and this is all funded by the fucking World Bank!!



Why have the Presidential candidates been silent on this? We need them to speak up and propose action!

Please recommend if you care about the Amazon catching on fire at 10,000 points.

UPDATE: Libertypirate has a satellite image posted downthread!

...This is due to the folly of man!

But Chimpy won't do anything!

* represents the arsonists. :think:

Seeing as how the earth is six billion years old and all, and that man's presence has only been felt for a relatively short while.

observation, or can scientists make a determination if it had burned, say, in the last 10,000,000 years or so.

Which I think they can. I seem to remember something about the Amazon in Al Gore's Earth in the Balance which seemed to suggest that one key difference in NA taiga forests vs. the rainforest was that the NA taiga forests had been demolished by glaciers and reduced to nothing, then grown back again, were destroyed and grew back again and again, while the rainforest having never been destroyed by advanced glaciers and I presume large scale fires, evolved in place for millions of yeasrs without disturbance.

Is has been a long time since I read the book, so I am not 100% in my assertions (more like 80% certain), but you made the correct point that this was an impossible question to answer, so hee are two questions that can and probably have been answered.

BIG MACS...:9 :sarcasm:

that the amazon can only sustain four years of drought before it dies and I think this is the fourth year. bye, humanity. good bye all who call the amazon home. I am sorry we are all so fucked up.

,

Amazon rainforest fires date back thousands of years
Rhett Butler, mongabay.com
March 14, 2007




Fires are nothing new to the Amazon reports a study published in the journal Biotropica.

Analyzing soils in the interior of Guyana, South America, a team of scientists led by David S. Hammond of NWFS Consulting, has found evidence of forest fires dating back thousands of years. While the origin of these fires is unclear, the authors propose intriguing scenarios involving pre-Colombian human populations and ancient el Niño events which could have so dried rainforest areas that they became more prone to forest fires.

"Ubiquitous charcoal from numerous sites indicates that closed canopy forests throughout the Guiana Shield region have been subject to fire events of unknown intensity over the last several millennia," the authors wrote. "Pre-Colombian land-use, climate-induced drought, or a combination of these factors must be responsible."

Were indigenous populations responsible for large-scale rainforest burning?

Noting that the incidence of fires appears to peak between 1000 and 1250 years before present -- a time when indigenous populations are believed to be near their highest levels, Hammond told mongabay.com that "one scenario explaining the abundant charcoal from this period may be much greater human activity, and thus significantly larger native populations. With larger populations, a larger agrarian food system must be in place. Consequently, more forest would have been rotated through a process of clearing and burning."

more:
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0314-hammond.html

due to global warming and Andean glaciers drying up.

They somehow think that just barking about global warming rather than giving up beef or their SUVs or their homes in those bedroom communities is going to solve things. Hell, anything that doesn't personally incovenience them would be the ticket! Well, it's their kids who will pay the price for their short-sighted selfishness. Now toss abother steak on the grill, Bubba.

when will we wake up?

I stopped drinking milk too and the worst part I LOST WEIGHT!!!AAAHHHHH the horror!!!!

once corrected the problem comes into view.

The image at the link was taken yesterday... And like many other days this summer..

Every red mark is an independent fire.


Thumb of region



MODIS

Link to MODIS RAPIDFIRE images


Warning to Dial-up

as mankind it would seem is no smarter now than when we first got burned by fire? You cannot rape the earth and not expect a great big slap in return, just as you play with fire and you get burned.

Do I hear chimp?

I wonder how many of those fires were caused by lightning or some other natural cause and not man. Very few I suspect. :eyes:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=68&objectid=10468211

This is TRAGIC. The lungs of the world are on fire. And it is the WORLD BANK that is partly responsible for loaning the money that is leading to the expansion of cattle ranching and slaughterhouses in the Amazon that leads to slashing and burning. GD them!

Thought I'd tweak your hot button a little. :evilgrin: But I do understand your position.

"The Amazon rainforest, also known as Amazonia, is one of the world's greatest natural resources. Because its vegetation continuously recycles carbon dioxide into oxygen, it has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet". About 20% of earth's oxygen is produced by the Amazon rainforest."

Perhaps if people stopped looking above themselves they would have the answer. This is not a political issue... Now who has been saying that for the last few years?

I KNOW my carbon footprint has shrunk and need no sermon.

BUT we still need Political clout and power. I just don't understand why you deny governments do not have a big role in stopping the pollution and warming. :hi:

environmental issues, birds, kittys, and stuff like that? Anybody?!1

http://notexasborderwall.com/

:cry:

Drop massive amount of hemp seeds out of airplanes all across the globe, both northern and southern hemisphere.

No, this is not satire. When it takes in certain areas, which it will, it can be called Animal's savior, the annual droughtforest.

and it might be absolutely essential to our survival both physically and mentally.

Just do it!

Hellfire and damnation and God's wrath and all that. Problem is I don't think they ever saw it coming in the form of our own greed fueled by runaway captalism and over-population destroying the environment and therefore the earth's capacity to sustain life. Unfortunately for them, it's not going to be a sudden dramatic showing of God's wrath, but an agonizingly slow suffocation of society.

This is horrible...something needs to be done now! Where are our leaders on this? Oh yeah, pissing our billions away in Iraq so that we can get more oil to burn and make the situation worse.

Ironic, isn't it.:(

Who knows what impact a massive burn of the Amazon will have on the global climate, but it's can't be good.

they'd go here.

Thanks for posting this, DWW.

Yellowstone burned about 800,000 acres.

I just checked

www.megaconverter.com

That is ONLY 3,238 square kiolmeters. Now, even presuming only 10% of that 2,000,000 square KILOMETERS burns, that means the fire will burn roughly FIFTY TIMES the size of the Yellowstone Fire of 1988!

If only ONE percent of the area burns, it will still be FIVE times as large.

Yes, this is a mega-fire, likely of unprecendented magnitude.

to see how it would react to drought. If anyone can find that, please link that here. That is the study predicting Mega-Fires.

sadly the wealthy have their bunkers and their armies--- they really have no problem with the end of (your) time...

survival of the fattest, and baby you're looking a little thin in the wallet...

BUT DON'T WORRY...

the wealthy own land in these countries, slave labor everywhere, and they don't mind shitting where they live, because they will just buy another house in a non-shitted area

THE GREAT EQUALIZER...

is that eventually they will rule a barren planet

------------------do not worry my friends, we are all more of a custom to suffer where the planet is headed
...the paris hiltons of the world will crumble when they see where this has lead

Things like this, combined with what's happening in our oceans, can turn life's chances on earth into a crapshoot of mammoth proportions.

We'd find a reason to do it. So, if it happens today, or tomorrow, how big of a difference is that?

After that, it's on to another six weeks of $400 haircuts, then "The Cackle" - why are you wasting our time with foolish issues like the Amazon burning down?

Is it because you hate Freedumb?

This is frightening.

after a massive auto pile up caused by the blinding smoke.

He's star struck on the "Dallas" set. Ooh, aah.

WTF has happened to us? I am sick of our stupid citizenry, our mindless consumerism, and our infotainment media. And I see very little hope in our youth of today....please tell me otherwise if you can.

I'm ever so glad and relieved that I didn't reproduce...I would probably be insane by now if I had children to worry about.

The only hope I have is that other cultures and nations are more aware and enlightened than our citizenry. And of course, what Margaret Mead said about a small group of dedicated and committed people can have an enormous impact on change.

So we keep working to stop the train which is barreling out of control toward the oncoming slaughter of Mother Nature.

Happy fucking Monday.

and was very disappointed that Kerry didn't pound on gwb for his horrid environmental record. The environment was never discussed in the debates.

If we can get Gore to run, that would change.

to be lush forest, until we got in there.

Perhaps you have confused the Sahara with southern Iraq?

Water is present at or just below the surface gravel in wadis (intermittent streams) that radiate from the mountain massifs, in scattered oases where the water table comes to the surface, and at greater depths in huge underground aquifers. The aquifers are believed to be filled with water dating from the Pleistocene epoch, when the Sahara was much wetter than it is today.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Sahara.html

Recent Interesting Short From NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14296635

Southern Iraq had forests, but they're gone.

Humans didn't make the monsoon belt move south, but they did cut down a hell of a lot of trees building their first cities.

So the Sahara wasn't our fault, but the expansion of the Arabian desert was. That was my only point.

We are already far behind where we need to be to meet this challenge; we should have already implemented a carbon economy, alternative energy sources, reduction of consumerism, etc. These are huge issues, but the Gore film showed there is a window of opportunity here. Dear Leader has gutted the environmental issue just like all the others. It will take the new administration an entire term just to get us back to zero. That would put us at 12 years behind when every month counts.

.

:cry:

:cry: I sure wish he would run!

Maybe if we had a news media and a society just a little bit interested in what was happening in the world, there would be some hope that the citizenry would demand action.

and it will happen. we'll destory our own resources beyond the ability to sustain the population as is.

I guess the Republicans and the rest of the Democratic leaders think they'll live forever. Assholes.

Thanks for posting this. It's extremely serious and nary a word form the morally bankrupt corporate
media.

:evilgrin:

Warning us:evilgrin:

<
"Disintegration of the Amazon forest, with release of the carbon stocks in the biomass and soil, would be a significant factor in pushing us into a runaway greenhouse." >


Sadly, I really feel that the MSM will only focus strongly on this when it's too late, and will keep pumping out 1 hr specials on britney spears' troubles, etc. When thousands start dying from heat in the US, THEN they'll say why aren't we addressing this, why did you President Edwards (Obama, etc) fail America on this?

where we open up the floodgates
freedom reigns supreme

fire on the hemisphere below

listen to me
listen to me
listen to me
listen to me!

like it or not, the usa is not in a position to tell brazil how to run their own country, and brazil will not tolerate it either


bolivia and the rest have to go along to get along, and if brazil wants to become a self sufficient ranching country, which they do, the usa will have fuck-all to say about it

we destroyed our forests already, noticed those wonderful hardwood forests running from the atlantic ocean to the mississippi river lately, oh that's right, you can't, they were cut down except for a few trees around the natchez trace before you were born

the usa is not and cannot be a leader, because we already destroyed our great forests -- the uneducated don't understand this, because they see hundreds of miles of paper trees and don't realize that pine tree desert doesn't support life and isn't real habitat

but brazil knows, they've seen where destroying the forests got us (rich), and we can't exactly sit there and tell them otherwise

it's about the hypocrisy

it's up to brazil to lead in south america, not up to us

our presidential candidates would just be pandering to have an opinion on this, since they are not going to be able to do anything much about it even when they do become president

"the world bank controls this"

that's funny, i thought brazil's president lula was considered quite a bit more liberal than mr bush and you can bet your ass that mr bush does not control president lula, if anything lula looks for ways to poke a stick in bush's little bicycle wheel

are you serious, do you really not know how estranged the gov'ts of lula and bush are?

brazil is independent of our wishes and they will remain so

maybe we need to get our own crap in order first, before trying to tell the amazon basin what to do?

Much of the Amazon is in a 3rd year of drought, which is dangerous for the world, and may not last much longer. The Amazon rainforest contains 10% of the carbon that is trapped in ecosystems on this planet. That's a minimum of at least 1.1 x 10^11 metric tonnes of Carbon that would be released. This would greatly accelerate Global climate change, creating Gods knows how many disasters the world over. In addition to this, the Amazon Rain forest is a nicknamed the "lungs of the world", for while it doesn't produce most of the oxygen on the planet, Phytoplankton in the ocean account for about 50% of that, it does still produce a significant percentage of oxygen for our atmosphere.

Am I saying that human beings will suffocate to death if the Amazon goes up in smoke? No, but let's just say that life will be harder for us overall, at least for another 2 generations. Let's just say you would be able to tell that something bad is happening, on a personal level, when you start wheezing from extraneous activity near sea level. I'm also not saying that the United States should do anything at all, especially on a unilateral level. This is a global problem, and should be treated as such, no single nation can solve it, yet all are affected, so they should all chip in to solve it.

Of course, this is assuming we CAN solve it in the first place, Global Climate Change may have already caused the death knell for the rainforest anyways, without a large amount of rain, it will dry up, and humans aren't necessarily needed to start forest fires when the forest itself is a tinderbox. But we should, at the very least, try to find a way to preserve it, its simply too important for every single ecosystem on this planet.

we didn't seem to much care about that when we destroyed the eastern hardwood forests, did we?

we are not in a real good position to police brazil, and we're not going to be able to do diddly about the issue because we have no moral standing, we have no leadership in the area of preserving the forests -- that's the issue, maybe we wouldn't be so dependent on south america now if we had not destroyed our own forests and also a great deal of the life in the oceans

the OP was "what can our presidential candidates do?" well my answer is, basically, what they can do is allow brazil and the other countries that are affected FIRST to take leadership in that area, since it's on their land

not sure what else they CAN do

relations between the usa and brazil are terrible in part thanks to bush and his apparent belief that brazil is a hotbed of terrorists that need to be especially screened before entering the usa, perhaps if we want relations to improve, as far as the election goes, working to get a democrat in that office (any democrat, frankly) would be better than any republican

other than that, i have no suggestion, i think at some point matters are out of our control since we don't have any effective world gov't

I'm sorry, can I laugh? We were dependent on South America before the first Native Americans even traveled there almost 50,000 years ago now. We, and our civilizations, require diverse and robust ecosystems to survive, that's all I'm saying, since this is a global issue, then it should be dealt with globally.

"Only creatures who are on their way
Poison their own wells
But we still have time to hate
And there's still something we can sell"
-- Lindsay Buckingham, "Peacekeeper"

Not a mention of anything major happening in the amazon. I will check Brazilian press, but from the headlines, looks like nothing. I would take this with a grain of salt. It is not easy to keep a fire going up there. It pours rain at least 3 or 4 times a day.

huge fires in Los Angeles, which are the usual ones we have every year here. I don't know who wrote the original article you link to, but I don't think it is as dramatic as it appears to be. If at all. Also bear in mind that almost all of the "rainforest environmental groups" who go there from the US and other countries are scammers. A select few are real scientists and/or people doing serious work.

/

first time in history, last month, the northwest passage opened up completely. means the ice is melting in the arctic much faster than predicted.
but, that doesn't make that particular story true. I found it odd; I've spoken with brasil 3 times this week, and someone would have mentioned it.

be that as it may, brazil is a sovereign nation and it is not the place of the usa to attack and control another sovereign nation

ww3 is not real good on the environment either


we have to get over our need to dictate to south america

Major sigh of relief here.

A disaster to take everyone's breath away

"MANAUS - Deep in the heart of the world's greatest rainforest, a nine-day journey by boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft waters of the Amazon drain away.

Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an immense bathtub, threatening a worldwide catastrophe.

Standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river, he points out what is happening. A month ago, the island was under water. Now, it juts 5m above it.

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..."

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10392615&pnum=0

according to the League of Conservation Voters.
Obama thinks using water with col to 'clean it' is a great idea, here in NM we don't have that much water, also for each barrel of crude one barrel of water is used.

And hunger for beef is a great cause (DK is a vegan, I can't go that far yet but I don't eat meat every day):

Mr Smeraldi was clear on who was to blame for this year's fires: "They are mainly, I would say more than 90 per cent, the result of expanding cattle ranching." The first rains have arrived but they are weaker than usual in most areas and have been useless against the fires.

In the past three years Brazil's National Development Bank and the World Bank have poured funds into the southern Amazon, fuelling the expansion of the cattle industry with new slaughterhouses and four million additional head of cattle arriving in exactly the areas where the fires are now. Conservationists have said that while governments insist they are doing their utmost to stop deforestation they have been putting in place incentives for the destruction of the forest. "It is taxpayers' money fuelling these fires," said Mr Smeraldi.

The World Bank should be elimated or its mission changed to help people not corporations and the rich.

I had not seen this thread before, and I wasn't aware of this happening.

Some people say we can't tell others what to do because we've had our industrial revolution and that wasn't clean. So other countries are going to want theirs. That's the problem. This really is the ultimate test for the human race, because there is no them and us now. What happens in China winds up affecting the global climate. We desperately need leaders who have the ability to forge alliances rather than the Josh Boltons, who stick the middle finger to everyone else. America is a major player, and if we set an example it can have a huge impact on how other nations approach their own environmental policy.

well, we haven't even taken that first step

i remember visiting in kenya, people were tsk tsking that the masai had slipped in some cows and the cows were grazing on public lands

well, hello, go out into the usa west and everywhere you look there's a cow grazing on public lands -- and it's usually LEGAL! -- so we're tsking at kenya, for at least having some laws and occasionally dealing with an issue, that we don't trouble to deal with in our own country at all

in the usa we simply have no leadership and no standing to speak out, we haven't even taken the first step to clean up our own messes

until then, if we speak, it's just protectionism for our own cattle industry or our own soybean industry and brazil and everybody else will rightfully laugh in our faces