Is the Amazon the lungs of the earth? Emphatically no!

IS THE AMAZON ‘THE LUNGS OF THE EARTH’?

Moreover, claims that the Amazon is the source of 20 percent of the world’s oxygen are baseless. In a 2014 in the New York Times, Nadine Unger, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at Yale, dismissed the popular myth.

“The Amazon rain forest is often perceived as the lungs of the planet,” she wrote. “In fact, almost all the oxygen the Amazon produces during the day remains there and is reabsorbed by the forest at night. In other words, the Amazon rain forest is a closed system that uses all its own oxygen and carbon dioxide.”

The fires pose no danger to global oxygen levels or atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. They also can’t influence global temperatures. Despite the more severe Amazon fires in the first decade of this century, global warming slowed.

That is good news for a rainforest enthusiast like me.

In fact, we are fortunate to live when the tropics are covered with rainforests. Before the Holocene Era (8,000 B.C. to the present), “There were no rain forests in the Malay Peninsula and much of Amazonia, and, despite the increasing human development of forest space, there are still more rain forests persisting than existed then,” says Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of BioGeography at the University of London.

The fires are a common and necessary agricultural practice. “I think the media focus on this is misplaced and exaggerated,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, a climatologist and former NASA scientist who consults on global crop-market forecasting. “The driest years in Brazil will have the most fires set by farmers. … It is normal agriculture in a country where 50 million people living in poverty are trying to survive.”

So the fires are not unprecedented. They’re not caused by climate change. And they don’t threaten to suffocate everyone.

The two-week long media bombardment created unnecessary hysteria. It also undermined trust in reporting. We deserve better.

This article was originally published at The Stream.  and also by the Cornwall Alliance