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The Amazon and global warming


lemit

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I think you folks are making this way way too complicated.

 

Look at it this way - if every bit of animal life disappeared, and the plants remained, we would still scrub about the same amount of CO2 from the air. With no animal life, the carbon from the dead plants would just sit in the soil once the plant decayed, and become coal or petroleum or whatever.

 

Certainly there is life in Antarctica, and in deserts - but that is irrelevant to this thread. My point is that over 97% of all plant life is in the oceans, not on the land - and that the Amazon forest makes up a small percentage of that even smaller percentage of land plant life. Thus, variances in thickness of the Amazon would have a negligible effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.

 

No, like Freeztar mentioned, the situation is complex. Our knowledge of it is vast and ever growing, because we learn more and more and understand how things interact. This is where the complications of the complicated arise. If you take some time to study biology or ecology, you will see that even simple interactions and processes can lead to very complex results.

 

If every animal in the world died, so would a great deal of plant species dependent on animals and many types of forest would change, shrink, or disappear. Fruit bats, birds, insects, and countless other species help out plants. This obviously would affect carbon fixation and sequestration rates. Once plants are dead, they'd be decomposed by fungi, bacteria, and protists. Most would probably not become coal, petrol, or whatever. These nutrients are recycled and returned, and in decomposing, CO2 would be released back into the air. Plants aren't little algae floating in the seas or cyanobacteria out there. They are different organisms. Photosynthetic organisms are everywhere, even in the driest or harshest of places, which is why I brought up deserts and Antarctica. And can be abundant in such places. You can't wave a magic wand and make these disappear or subtract them from the equation. They are a part of it.

 

You've simplified and mischaracterized the entire thing to the point of absurdity and produced absurd conclusions. Reductio ad absurdum. It's a common logical fallacy. Sorry if I have to be blunt. I think the 50/50 figure that NASA gives is more reasonable than a magical 97%, which doesn't jibe at all with the evidence or common sense.

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If we assume the biomass makes The Amazon more like another ocean than like another pole, is there any other land area that affects the climate as much as The Amazon?

 

For example, what about the boreal forests that mass along the continents at the border of the Arctic? What about the other major river basins, such as the Yangtze or the Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio? (Other examples?)

 

Living in the lee of a major mountain range, I know our local microclimate is different from our region's climate. In the summer, I love to lie in my backyard and watch mesocyclones wax and wane, and to see the supercells that form over my head and create tornadoes 50-200 miles to the east. Any suggestions about the influence of mountain ranges on the global climate?

 

(As an addendum to that, last spring I watched--from inside--as a tornado went over my house. I didn't know what I was watching at the time; I just suddenly had the wash from a helicopter in my backyard. A friend called later to ask how much damage I'd had from the tornado. That's how I found out.)

 

So anyway, what are the major land-based, non-polar influences on our climate? How would you rank them?

 

Please do not assume that I'm abandoning the original concept that The Amazon is the major land-based, non-polar influence on our climate and that the historical record might support that position. It's just that now I want people to try to persuade me I'm wrong in a couple of ways.

 

--lemit

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