Among the top Google News search results today for “climate change” is an article by the UK Guardian claiming climate change is drying out the Amazon rainforest and pushing it to a “tipping point,” after which it will irreversibly become a grassland savannah.
In reality, objective data show rainfall is increasing in the Amazon rainforest as the word modestly warms, making the rainforest less likely to become savannah.
The Guardian article, titled “Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah — study,” asserts:
Rainforests are highly sensitive to changes in rainfall and moisture levels, and fires and prolonged droughts can result in areas losing trees and shifting to a savannah-like mix of woodland and grassland. In the Amazon, such changes were known to be possible but thought to be many decades away
New research shows that this tipping point could be much closer than previously thought. As much as 40% of the existing Amazon rainforest is now at a point where it could exist as a savannah instead of as rainforest, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.
The Nature Communications study asserts that tropical regions with sufficient rainfall become and remain rainforests. Tropical regions with substantially less rainfall become and remain savannah.
In between those two rainfall levels, tropical regions will sustain whichever type of ecosystem – rainforest or savannah – that preexists.
The Nature Communications study applies dubious predictions of declining Amazon rainfall to claim the Amazon may begin turning to savannah within decades.
Fortunately, scientists have access to actual rainfall data that are more authoritative than speculative models that depend on dubious assumptions.
The real-world data show Amazonian rainfall is increasing rather than declining as the Earth continues its modest warming.
In 2018, scientists published a study in the peer-reviewed Environmental Research Letters, examining rainfall trends in the Amazon.
Looking specifically at rainfall during the Amazon’s wet season, the researchers reported, “tropical Amazonian precipitation has significantly increased by∼180 to 600 mm(in different datasets)in the wet season during the satellite era from 1979 to 2015.”
Importantly, the scientists determined warming temperatures were the catalyst for more rainfall. “Results show that the multi-decadal warming of the tropical Atlantic has contributed more than half of this precipitation change over the past three decades….”
To be sure, there are many pressures on the Amazon rainforest, including deliberate deforestation to enable more farms and agriculture.
The clear, objective data, however, show climate change is strengthening the Amazon rainforest against such pressures.
Read more at Climate Realism
The U.K. Guardian is as bad as the NYT’s in giving out its Fake News their all about the same Propaganda not news
The phrase “tipping point” is well past it’s use by date. Can anyone please tell me just one of their “tipping point” predictions over the past decade that has come true?
Just leftie loonies fantasies on the mythological climate change
A fair chunk of the Amazon basin has soils which were highly modified by pre-Columbus indigenous agricultural civilisation.
The reality, therefore, is that a fair chunk of the Amazon rainforest is regrowth that followed the collapse of this civilisation.
Therefore, it follows once again that the Amazon rainforest actually expanded in size after European colonisation.
It has since been threatened by modern agricultural expansion. Some of this threat is both directly and indirectly caused by bio-fuels such as ethanol which take up farmland which could be used for food production.
This means that the Amazon is actually threatened, in part, by the rush away from fossil fuels. On the other hand, releasing carbon dioxide through fossil fuel use promotes the growth of plants and, consequently, increases rainfall.
The Amazon, one should conclude, is not threatened by fossil fuels at all. Indeed, the economic activity resulting from fossil fuel use may be harnessed to fund conservation works.
But don’t let this get in the way of a good green scare story.
Save the Amazon forests!! Stop Green energy!!
I agree . Right from the start on this global warming scam my mate who studies stars and planets told me look at Milinkovitch Cycles as climate is controlled by the earths elliptical cycle round the sun and the earths changing axis which was at 24% at the time and will change when the Artic ice melts and the Antarctic ice expands which will change the earths axis . I know who i would believe . This nonsense was designed to put up our power prices so the industries would go to the third world cheaper fossil fuel power which is what has been happening and world governments are up to their necks in it obeying their socialist bosses in the UN .
agree with the essence of this post but it may be a little more complicated than yes it’s drying, no it aint. Here are some data.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/07/amazonia-lungs-of-the-earth/
It was back in the 1990’s they were doing this SAVE THE RAIN FORESTS campaign and all this Rain Forests the Lungs of the Earth It was Scam just lik this Global Warming/Climate Change load of Malarkey