In other news, a new report says that the Amazon rainforest may be permanently damaged by ongoing droughts… *sobs uncontrollably*
Catastrophic floods, possible surges in COVID cases, and now… the Amazon Rainforest is apparently buckling under severe drought. I’ve got one word for you, humanity, FUCK!
A new study published in the Nature Climate Change journal on Monday reveals that the resilience of the Amazon to adverse conditions is “close to a critical threshold of rainforest dieback”, which basically means that the rainforest’s biodiversity is copping it hard. In other words, all that deforestation and climate change might be catching up to this ancient ecosystem.
Chris Boulton, one of the study’s primary authors from the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the sections of the rainforest that are closer to human intervention and those getting less rain are struggling the most.
“In areas that are closer to human land use, such as urban areas and croplands, they tend to be losing resilience faster”, Boulton stated.
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Scientists have warned that this could be the prelude to a tipping point where the Amazon’s landscape is irrevocably altered into a drier forest, with profound impacts on biodiversity.
There is an increased risk of the rainforest transforming into a savannah – a dehydrated expanse of land where the forest canopy no longer protects the undergrowth of flora.
What is responsible? You guessed it! It’s our old friend’s anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, removal of trees and increases in human land use. The problem is that flora cannot adapt from “drought-sensitive tree species” into “drought-resistant ones” fast enough to curtail forest resilience.
This means that the intergenerational Amazonian rainforest might no longer be a rainforest. It means we would lose a litany of species of creatures and vegetation and that the aptly named, “lungs of planet earth”, would no longer limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and would instead contribute by fuming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Dear god, if you exist, please put a lid on this shit.
