Post date: Nov 28, 2010 12:49:45 PM
The extreme droughts that hit the Amazon through November cause a network of rivers to dry up, leaving about 60,000 people short of food and raising concerns about the future of the world's biggest rainforest.
AMAZONAS, BRAZIL. REUTERS - The river loops low past bleached-white banks, caimans basking in the fierce morning sun and houseboats stranded at precarious angles.
Ahead, the end of the line -- a hulking barge beached with its load of eight trucks and a crane, its owners caught out long ago by the speed of the river's decline.
The world's greatest forest is thirsty.
The intense months-long drought through November drained the mighty Rio Negro to its lowest since records began in 1902, drying up the network of rivers that is the lifeblood of Brazil's Alaska-sized Amazonas state. About 60,000 people went short of food and many lacked clean drinking water as millions of dead fish contaminated rivers.
It came as little surprise to Erli Perreira, a skinny 19-year-old who was fishing for his family's dinner in the shadow of the barge, which lay on a tributary of the Solimoes river about 100 km ( miles) from the central Amazon city of Manaus. The sun has been getting hotter for years, he said, making it impossible to work in the fields after mid-morning and causing his fish catch to plunge during the annual "burning season" when farmers take advantage of the dry conditions to clear the forest with fire.
"I think prophecies are being fulfilled, like the end of the world. We have seen many signs around the world, like the sun here; now it is much hotter. No one can stand working past 11 am anymore because it is too hot," he said.
About 1,400 km (870 miles) southeast of Manaus, the north of Brazil's Mato Grosso state is a window on that dry new world. Here the country's expanding cattle and soy farming frontier collides with the forest, often with fiery consequences.
This year's drought turned the region around the huge, protected Xingu indigenous Indian park into a tinder box as fires, often set by smalltime farmers to clear their land, raged indiscriminately through farmland and forest. The number of fires in Mato Grosso -- which means thick forest -- surged to nearly 19,000 this year from 5,000 last year, razing cattle pasture, killing livestock and often jumping into the region's remaining pristine forest. A NASA satellite image from the period shows a huge pall of smoke blanketing central Brazil.
For Edimar Abreu, it was an exhausting few months. As chief of a new six-member fire brigade trained by the U.S. Forest Service's elite "smokejumper" firefighters, he was in charge of putting out the blazes across the sprawling region.
"We would get home from firefighting only to leave again to put out another blaze. This year was quite busy," he said.
One of the 32 fires they tackled this year lasted 9 days, he said. And unlike in the past, fires that spread to the forest continued to burn at night -- a stark sign of the drier conditions.
John Carter, a Texan who has been a rancher in the region for 15 years and who set up the brigade, is no bleeding-heart environmentalist.
But he says the warming of the region since he arrived is striking and increasingly threatens farm production as well as the forest.
"I think the Amazon... I don't have any doubt it is going to change. I don't have any doubt that if we don't get our act together in the next five years -- we might be a little bit too late -- because of the drying out effect of logging and further deforestation and these wildfires. It is going to degrade the whole thing. By 2030 or 2040 we're going to have just a big brush pile on our hands," he said.
For many climate scientists and ecologists, the drought has rung alarm bells on a different but barely less worrying prediction just as leaders gather for a new round of global climate talks in Mexico. Coming five years after another severe Amazon drought and devastating floods last year, it fits with chilling accuracy a pattern of more extreme weather that climate models predict for the region this century.
In one scenario that gains credence with every year like this one, the forest will by mid-century suffer years-long "mega-droughts" that kill trees en masse. That in turn reduces rainfall over the remaining forest in a vicious cycle that turns much of the Amazon into a savannah-like state by 2100. Ecologists and climatologists say there may come "a tipping point" after which the death of the forest becomes self-sustained by higher temperatures, dwindling rain levels, and destructive fires.
The Amazon -- the world's greatest cauldron of biodiversity -- is expected to heat up this century faster than since before the last Ice Age. Depending on greenhouse gas emissions, climatologists say a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius is likely.
Greenpeace climate expert in Brazil, Sergio Leitao, said scenarios predicted for the next 20 or 30 years in the Amazon are happening now.
"In the Amazon this year we have seen droughts, fires and floods all in a single year. This is not anywhere near the normal environmental pattern in the region. So now we have a dire scenario that was predicted for the future and which has become reality now. Climate change is a reality and Brazil and the world needs to take urgent action to fight this," he said.
Among fields whose blackened fence posts betray the fires that raged here weeks earlier, chief Damiao Paridzane leaned on his hoe and spoke wistfully of a youth spent under trees and fruit before the "white man" made contact with his Xavante (Warrior) tribe.
Now, his around 1,000 people live on a reserve east of Mato Grosso's Xingu park that has been almost totally deforested and widely invaded by land-grabbers.
The 58-year-old said he was afraid his manioc plantation would be fruitless.
"Today I am planting manioc. We don't know if it will grow. If there is a good rain it will grow, if not, it will fail. So it is the same for us and we will either away.
Why? Because the climate is getting worse," he said.
In a forest patch the size of a city block in Mato Grosso, Paulo Brando's boots crunch through brittle leaves and twigs among scorched tree trunks.
Every three years, the patch is burned as part of an experiment to compare its resilience to an untouched plot of forest next to it. The result is a sad scene of what Brando, an ecologist with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, calls an "impoverished" ecosystem.
Brandao said grasses have invaded the sun-exposed forest floor, providing kindling for future fires, and temperatures are a full 5 degrees Celsius higher than in the patch that still has its cooling green canopy.
"If wetter forest becomes flammable during droughts, either because of tree mortality, because of drier air conditions, lower relative humidity, and fires can really spread, then those fires are likely to be very intense because you have lots of fuel and it usually happens during drought periods. If you start having a source for ignition to fire in dry years, then you are likely to get to this point very quickly," he said.
In the town of Caapiranga, which was mostly cut off from boat transport by the drought, residents complained that many foods had doubled in price and that their crops had yet to recover from the devastation caused by 2009's floods.
From his shack by the side of a dried-out lake, Manuel Ferreira de Matos squinted through a pair of battered spectacles at the distant water that glistened like a mirage more than a kilometer away.
"Today it is hotter than when I was 18 years old. It's frightening. I went out there and it was so hot and I just can't stand it anymore. It seems like the sun is closer now," he said.
A large-scale Amazon "dieback" is among a handful of potential events that could drastically intensify climate change, along with the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and the breakdown of the Gulf Stream ocean current.
In some ways, it is the most worrying of all because of the speed it could occur at and the huge amount of carbon it could pump into the atmosphere as trees die - estimated at about 15 years worth of human-caused emissions.