Deforestation is partly to blame for Amazon's worst-ever drought

It appears someone is running around with a match and apologists talk about the weather rather than policy.

obviously not good and sooner than later, everyone will have bto work at properly rebuilding an open groomed woodland that sustains cattle and humanity and the Amazon.  now you know how we ended up with the Sahara which should look like the Amazon.  And CAN.

It is nonsense like this that the Rule of Twelve easily defuses.

Deforestation is partly to blame for Amazon's worst-ever drought

Forest loss is thought to have played a part in record low rainfall across South America this year, in a sign that environmental destruction is accelerating climate collapse

By Luke Taylor

20 September 2024

A fire rages in the Brazilian rainforest on 4 September

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2448887-deforestation-is-partly-to-blame-for-amazons-worst-ever-drought/

Climate change, deforestation and unusual weather phenomena are driving the worst drought in Brazil since records began seven decades ago and the highest number of forest fires seen in 14 years.

More than 191,000 blazes have been recorded in Brazil so far in 2024 – more than double the 94,829 recorded for the same period in 2023.

Wildfires in biodiversity hotspots including the Amazon, the Pantanal wetlands and the Cerrado savanna are accelerating climate change, undoing conservation progress under Brazil’s new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They have choked major Brazilian cities with smoke, grounding flights and closing schools.

Some 418,000 square kilometres of forest have been burnt so far in 2024, according to the Global Wildfire Information System’s (GWIS) thermal satellite imaging, an area about twice the size of Britain.

Most of the fires are started deliberately, as criminal organisations torch vast lots and then lay claim to the land, Brazil’s minister of the environment and climate change Marina Silva has said.

Farmers and criminal networks usually take advantage of the dry season to clear forest, but the damage has been particularly high this year due to an extreme drought in which some regions have not seen rainfall in five months.

Extreme weather phenomena associated with climate change have severely reduced rainfall, making Brazil’s forests a tinderbox, says Ana Paula Cunha at Brazil’s National Centre of Natural Disaster Monitoring and Alerts.

Major rivers in the Amazon have reached all-time lows, isolating indigenous communities and causing food and energy prices to increase.

The Branco river in Brazil in March 2024

Droughts and heatwaves have repeatedly broken records across South America since June 2023, when the El Niño weather phenomenon began. When water temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean rise with El Niño, it generally causes less rainfall across South America.

Heatwaves have been more extreme this El Niño cycle due to the world’s warming climate, the World Meteorological Association says.

The end of El Niño and the beginning of La Niña were expected to bring rain in June 2024, but this has not happened due to the North Tropical Atlantic ocean growing unusually warm, Cunha says.

“This warming has altered atmospheric circulation patterns, resulting in more rain in Central America and less rain in the central-north region of Brazil,” she says.

The warming of the Atlantic is unrelated to El Niño, but similarly, it is more likely to occur due to climate change, Cunha adds.

Deforestation in the Amazon is also thought to be contributing to droughts and fires, as forest loss reduces rainfall.

One study by Luciana Vanni Gatti at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and her colleagues found in the southeastern Amazon, a deforestation hotspot where 37 per cent of the forest has been lost in the last 40 years, there is now 34 per cent less rainfall during the dry season.

The fires are a symptom of an accelerating climate feedback loop, says Gatti. Fewer trees leads to less water evaporating into the atmosphere and less rainfall. Less rainfall means more trees are lost to fires, which in turn reduces rainfall. “This is the acceleration of climate collapse,” Getti says.

The dry season in the southern Amazon, which makes up a third of the rainforest, now lasts four to five months, five weeks longer than it did in 1999, says Carlos Nobre at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

“These record fires show we need to halt deforestation, but at the same time it is absolutely necessary to restore large areas of forest to recycle water and reduce temperatures,” Nobre says.

Forecasts suggest the situation is unlikely to improve soon. “The situation in the central-north of the country is expected to remain quite critical for the next three months, with rainfall still below average in these regions,” Cunha says.