Rivers run dry as drought hits Amazon

Climate change has been on everyone's minds for much of the year, and not just because of the climate change conference in Cancun. In places like Vietnam, Colombia and Pakistan, it's a matter of battling unpredicatable, extreme weather everyday. Here is one of GlobalPost's greatest hits of 2010, a look at the droughts plaguing the world's largest rainforest.
MUTUM, Brazil — A motorboat barreling through the night up a shallow Amazon stream could only beat the odds for so long.
Just after 9 p.m., the aluminum canoe slammed to a halt with the sound of a thunderclap. Passengers and cargo lurched into the air. Shouts of surprise, profanity and a man-sized splash echoed in the dark.
A swift lesson on Newtonian physics and the risks of night boating had been delivered by a large, semi-submerged tree.
The mishap demonstrated what everyone in this remote corner of the Brazilian jungle had been saying for days.

The world’s largest rain forest was dangerously dry, and may well be drying out.
October marked the end of one of the worst Amazon droughts on record — a period of tinder-dry forests, dusty cropland and rivers falling to unprecedented lows. Streams are the highways of the deep jungle and they’re also graveyards for dead trees, usually hidden safely under fathoms of navigable water.
But not this year, and the drought’s significance extends far beyond impeded boats.
While the region has seen dry spells before, locals and experts say droughts have grown more frequent and severe. Scientists say there’s mounting evidence the Amazon's shifting weather may be caused by global climate change.

Climate Change

Climate Change

I intend to come back to this strip and rewrite some of the first half, in order to make the science clearer. I'm sure there will be a few spelling errors and suchlike. Feel free to point them out, but keep in mind that I've been staring at many of these pages for weeks, to the point where even the word 'and' looks funny to me. I shall be adding on references to this strip over the coming few days. Thanks to Albert the Knowledge Penguin for his help.





































A few references. More will be posted shortly.

Superb New Yorker piece about the Koch Brothers and their involvement with the far right.

That Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper, which I mention in the strip, on the numbers of climate researchers who believe that science points to the truth of man made climate change, compared to those researchers who don't.

Excellent book that does what it says on the tin. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.

NASA's climate change evidence page.

Wikipeadia entry on the the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scott Mandia's research into the media's deplorable Climategate coverage.

Deforestation: The hidden cause of global warming

The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth's equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.

The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists