As bad as the predictions are, they're actually optimistic,' says Gatti. And that's not something our climate models have taken into account. Home to more than three million species, the rainforest bursts with lush vegetation, which absorbs huge amounts of carbon through photosynthesis-a key fact as humankind struggles to stop heating the planet with greenhouse gases.Īs carbon dioxide emissions have surged by 50 percent in 60 years, to nearly 40 billion tonnes worldwide, the Amazon has absorbed a large amount of that pollution-nearly two billion tonnes a year, until recently.īut humans have also spent the past half-century tearing down and burning whole swathes of the Amazon to make way for cattle ranches and farmland.Īn employee of the Sao Felix do Xingu environment department talks to a farmer to find out who is behind an illegal fire in a nearby area of Amazon rainforest. Splashed across South America in an exuberant blob of deep green, the Amazon basin is one of the world's great wildernesses, a place where life teems in the heat of the tropics, fed by the myriad rivers criss-crossing the jungle like blue blood vessels. Holed up in her lab, Brazilian atmospheric chemist Luciana Gatti crunches her numbers again and again, thinking there is a mistake.īut the same bleak conclusion keeps popping up on her screen: the Amazon, the world's biggest rainforest-the 'lungs of the Earth,' the 'green ocean,' the thing humanity is counting on to inhale our pollution and save us from the mess we've made of the planet-is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs.

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