Global Warming

Global Warming вЂ" Deforestation

The patient’s condition is serious. Symptoms are multiple, his breath is noxious. He has a fever, and the efforts to bring it down are not working. Poison has been found in body fluids. When symptoms are treated in one area, more pop up in other body parts. If this were a usual patient, doctors would be inclined to declare the multiple sicknesses as chronic and terminal. Not knowing what else to do, they would just take steps to make the patient as comfortable as possible until the end came. This is not a human patient. It is our home-the earth. The above scenario well illustrates what is happening to our planet, and the one of the main reason for our very ill earth is global warming caused by deforestation.

Most people assume that global warming is caused by burning oil and gas. However in fact between 25 and 30 percent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year-1.6 billion tons вЂ" is caused by deforestation. Trees are 50 percent carbon. When they are felled or burned, the CO2 they store escapes back into the air. According to FAO figures, some 13 million ha(32million acres, 50,000 square miles) of forests worldwide are lost every year, almost entirely in the tropics. The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a cooling band around the earth is now being

recognized as one of the main causes of global warming.

How severe are the effects of deforestation on the earth? In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. Carbon emissions from deforestation give far more damage than emissions caused by planes and automobiles and factories. According to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists, the rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases. Figures from the GCP, summarizing the latest findings from the United Nations, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 percent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 percent each and aviation makes up only 3 percent of the total.

Indonesia is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world by deforestation. Indonesia had the fasted pace of deforestation in the world between 2000 and 2005, with an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches destroyed every hour, according to Greenpeace. In fact, peat swamps in Indonesia store large amounts of carbon. The destruction of peat swamps is estimated to release 2 billion tons of carbon, about 8 percent of global emissions each year, according to Wetlands International. Much of this destruction is caused by conversion for oil palm plantations which produce palm oil, increasingly used as a bio-fuel.

The interesting thing is that Indonesia threatened by global warming and they are especially vulnerable to the impact of climate change as global warming. Global warming could increase temperatures, shorten the rainy season and intensify rainfall, leading to a significant fall in rice yields. The largest scale of deforestation gives an inability to deal with flood in Indonesia. The report issued ahead of World Environment Day said, “Indonesia is vulnerable to the impact of climate change including prolonged droughts and floods raising serious food security and health threats while endangering the habitats and livelihoods of coastal communities.” Furthermore, the report also stressed that Indonesia could lose 2000 small islands by 2030 due to a rise in sea levels as a result of climate change. Rising temperatures due to global warming would further dry up the rainforest and peat swamps, increasing the risk of even more intense fires.

In addition to Indonesia’s deforestation, Amazon deforestation also adds to warming trend. Amazon forest is also burning down and it was more than a sign of human encroachment. It was also the sight and dangerous chemistry, of tons of carbon dioxide transformed from wood and leaf- rising into an atmosphere already loaded with it. In fact, Amazon is the largest forest in the world. Burning trees in Amazon now account for 20 percent of manmade CO2. In cooler confines some days later, at an international climate conference in Argentina, British scientists told of a different, slow-motion kind of chemistry in the tropical forest. “In the Amazon, the vegetation dies back because there won’t be enough rain,” explained climatologist Vicky Pope, detailing on eof the most sophisticated studies by Britain’s Hadley Centre of what a warmer world would mean to Amazon.

For South America’s rain forests, such a dieback would mean steady decomposition of dead vegetation and the release into the atmosphere of massive amounts of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that itself is blamed for much of climate change. Whether it unfolds quickly by fire or slowly through global warming, the future of this forested river basin is a key to the future of Earth’s climate. Hundreds of scientists are working overtime to understand that critical relationship between the atmosphere and the region known as Amazon, more than 11 times the size of Texas and home to one-third of the world’s species. “Scientifically, the deforestation of Amazon is one of the key factors to cause the global warming.” said Brazilian physicist Paulo Artaxo, who has studied the Amazon for 20 years. Artaxo is a lead scientist among 1,7000 researchers from 200 universities, who have joined during the past six years in studying for Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazon. A Brazilian-U.S.-European scientists has been researching the unknowns of what some call the planet’s lung, the Amazon’s breathing green vastness.

Satellite showed that 600 fires were started in the region each day on average last year, the Brazilian government reports. The rate of destruction has almost doubled in the past decade, to 9,000 square miles over 12 months of 2003-2004- an area about the size of New Hampshire. Forest is being destroyed by cattle ranchers, by landless peasants slashing and burning to create cropland, by illegal lumbering, and increasingly by large agribusinesses planting lucrative soybean. The fires seen everywhere from the air outside Santarem, a rough-edged town 500 miles up the Amazon from Atlantic, were mostly set to create giant fields for soy. The government’s own plants to pave 2,100 miles of additional road through the Amazon could lead to clearing of up to 70,000 square miles of forest over 30 years, it was estimated