The Sunday Read: ‘Has the Amazon Reached Its “Tipping Point”?’

The Daily

The New York Times

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4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

In the past half-century, 17 percent of the Amazon — an area larger than Texas — has been converted to croplands or cattle pasture. Less forest means less recycled rain, less vapor to cool the air, less of a canopy to shield against sunlight. Under drier, hotter conditions, even the lushest of Amazonian trees will shed leaves to save water, inhibiting photosynthesis — a feedback loop that is only exacerbated by global warming. According to the Brazilian Earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent of the original area, “flying rivers” — rain clouds that recycle the forest’s own moisture five or six times — will weaken enough that a rainforest simply will not be able to survive in most of the Amazon Basin. Instead it will collapse into scrubby savanna, possibly in a matter of decades. Losing the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, would be catastrophic for the tens of thousands of species that make their home there. What scientists are most concerned about, though, is the potential for this regional, ecological tipping point to produce knock-on effects in the global climate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Amazon has been called the lungs of the Earth.
0:07.1	It's the world's largest rainforest, where 400 billion trees constantly remove carbon
0:13.5	dioxide from the atmosphere as part of the process of photosynthesis.
0:19.1	But there's this theory that's been around for the last few decades, that if enough
0:23.9	of the Amazon is cut down, it could cross a tipping point and start to collapse into
0:29.7	a degraded kind of savanna, a patchwork of grasslands, stunted little forests and scrub.
0:36.3	It would be an ecosystem that does very little to compensate for the emissions created
0:41.4	when we burn fossil fuels.
0:43.9	And in the last few years, scientists have observed strange transformations in the rainforest.
0:50.8	Signs that may be this tipping point is now being reached.
0:56.8	My name's Alex Quadros.
0:58.9	In this week's Sunday read, you'll be hearing my story about the Amazon's tipping point
1:03.9	that I wrote for the New York Times magazine.
1:08.9	So in 2022, I spent a couple of weeks following two scientists to see how the Amazon is changing.
1:26.1	Luciana Gacci is an atmospheric chemist.
1:29.7	She flies in bush plains over the forest to sample the air.
1:34.1	And she has discovered that there's way, way too much carbon above the Amazon, that actually
1:39.9	parts of the rainforest are emitting more carbon than they're absorbing, which may be the
1:44.7	most disturbing sign that the ecosystem is malfunctioning.
1:54.1	Together we met Erica Beringer, a biologist who's studying the effects of agriculture and
1:59.1	wildfires on the rainforest.
2:01.9	But Erica also led us through what she called the David Attenborough Amazon.
	...

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