Thursday, March 05, 2009

Feedback loop

A Drying Amazon Could Speed Climate Change

Co-author Dan Nepstad, a forest ecologist from the Moore Foundation in San Francisco, suggests that it may be climate warming that's causing the Amazon to dry up. He says some climatologists think "the warming of the northern tropical Atlantic of 2005 may have been more intense because of global warming." And that warming is believed to have shifted hotter, drier air over the Amazon.

(Via The Keyhoe Report.)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I wish that I was born a 100 years into the future, to be able to experience all this new technogy that's on the horizon.
Then I read reports like this and I'm thinking; maybe this is it, it's not gonna get any better, we're at the height of our civilization, future archaeologists will pick through our remains trying to figure out how we could not have seen it coming.

Mac said...

@Anon.

I know what you mean. We seem poised for a grueling downhill run. On one hand, I'm not a huge fan of our current way of life and would love to see it replaced. But at what cost?

We seem genuinely incapable of forethought; our empathy extends only to our most immediate acquaintances, woefully excluding future generations (however much we feign concern for the world of our children and grandchildren).

Anonymous said...

Luckily we have the luxury of pontificating about these things from our privileged positions, not having to worry where our next meal is going to come from for example. I dunno, If everybody in the world really cared about everybody else, the world wouldn't be in the state it is now to begin with. It's human nature; we are egotists.
(Hence: we are fucked?)
(Not that I care btw.)
(Oops.)

Anonymous said...

This is ugly news...

I think our kids are going to have a whole lot of hate built up for Gens "X" & "Y". I just hope they understand that the way the system was/is structured, we really couldn't do much to affect change (and that it was really gen "W" that royally fucked things up).

Can we reach the golden singularity in time? That starts with real attempts at mass environmental engineering. For better or for worse.

-Denny