Amazon Fires on the Rise: A Cautionary Tale - Article Example

Each year farmers and ranchers in the Amazon slash and burn hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest to open up additional land areas for agricultural usage, the resultant man-caused fire event releases massive amounts of bio-mass particulates and aerosols into the atmosphere above Amazon.  The pressing concern is how this pollution is affecting cloud formations and how the loss of those clouds may be causing a shift in the weather patterns that could threaten the entire Amazonian ecosystem.

Scientists Ilan Koren and Lorraine Remer from the Weizmann Institute collaborated with Karla Longo from the Brazilian Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies to construct a research model to better understand how smoke changes clouds in the Amazon. Smoke changes the size and number of cloud droplets, which affects the cloud density and the visual “brightness” of cloud formation. In theory, this smoke layer stabilizes and creates layers within an atmosphere that directly suppresses updrafts that fuel cloud formation. Clouds are better at reflecting sunlight back into space than smoke, the scientist’s hypothesis considers that fires in the Amazon likely allow more solar energy than normal to enter the Earth’s climate system and are contributing to far-reaching examples of climate change.

The research initially focused on how smoke influenced clouds on a day-to-day basis. But, as the study progressed the scientists noted that since 2000, there were large fluctuations in the density and proliferation of smoke between the years. Some years were relatively clean, and in other years the atmosphere was being highly polluted by the smoke from the man-caused fires. When this was noted the scientists bi-furcated the research and looked at additional MODIS data from AVHRR (Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer) to look at the daily and monthly averages in the number of fires and the amount of smoke. They compared the average of the dry season—August to November and ascertained a static constant variable of smoke pollution during each dry season then they applied the constant to each dry season between 1998 and 2006. When the data was calculated the scientists discovered that since 1998, the number of fires in the dry season had nearly doubled and smoke aerosols had increased by almost 60 percent.

The Research findings detailed an urgent situation within the ecosystem of the entire Amazonian River Basin. With each dry season, unregulated and controlled fires produced higher levels of aerosol smoke that directly retarded the beneficial cloud formation above the rainforest.  The circumstances became dire in 2005 when an unprecedented drought occurred that spiked both the number of fires and the amount of aerosol smoke. Faced with irrefutable data Brazilian bearcats and politicians were spurred into an unprecedented collaboration between government agencies, civil organizations, and scientists to identify and control the deforestation fires.

The success of this initiative may have directly resulted in a substantial drop in both fires and aerosol smoke detected in the study year 2006. However, a side note of the research correlated a link between the deforestation process and the global marketplace.  Amazon deforestation rates and the price of global commodities, such as soybeans and beef are directly tied. The resultant proves that as commodity prices rise farmers and ranchers start more fires to clear more rainforest to produce the profitable commodities that can be sold on the world marketplace.  Regulation for controlling fires may have stepped up in 2006, but the price of soybeans was down, directly reducing the incentive to clear more rainforest for soybean acreage.

As future commodity prices rise the demand for increased farmlands in the Amazon may prove to entice to prevent as more profitable and destructive crops such as sugar cane are introduced to the environment.  As pressure mounts on all fronts, Brazil and other Amazon countries must act to improve their economies without sacrificing a crucial ecological and climate-stabilizing resource.  Simple regulation may not be enough to preserve Amazon and its life-giving cloud base unless a long-term strategy based on this research is developed. The continuation of this research and its environmental modeling must be a global priority to help moderate and strike a balance between economic drivers and sound environmental policy.