Less Air Pollution Killing Amazon Rain Forest

LONDON (Reuters) - Cleaner air due to reduced coal burning could help destroy the Amazon this century, according to a finding published on Wednesday that highlights the complex challenges of global climate change.

The study in the journal Nature identified a link between reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from coal burning and increased sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic that boosts the drought risk in the Amazon rainforest.

With the rainforest already threatened by development, higher global temperatures could tip the balance, they said.

"Generally pollution is a bad thing but in this case improving the air may have ironically led to a drying of the Amazon," said Peter Cox, a researcher at the University of Exeter in Britain, who led the study.

The Amazon -- the world's largest tropical rainforest -- plays a critical role in the global climate system because it contains about one tenth of the total carbon stored in land ecosystems.

The researchers used a climate-carbon model to simulate the impacts of future climate change on the Amazon and compared it to data from a 2005 drought that devastated a large chunk of the rainforest.

They estimated that by 2025 a drought on the same scale could happen every other year and by 2060 such a crisis could hit nine out of every ten years -- enough to turn the rainforest into savannah grassland, Cox said.

Source: Reuters

Commentary

So, the very efforts of Liberals to 'save the earth' are actually contributing to ever worsening conditions, both on a planetary scale, and in what were formerly Free Markets.

I think Quinn's First Law sums this up quite nicely:

Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. Similarly, government bureaucracies never solve problems, they manage them and exacerbate the ones they created by interfering with market forces and processes.

They say that there used to be an advanced civilization in the Sahara region thousands of years ago, and the area used to be lush, and green. If this is so, then we need to consider the possibility that liberals just might be responsible for creating the Sahara Desert. It's something to think about.