The Amazon is on fire, and so are we By Katie King-Miaow & Jennifer Pannell
You may have noticed a little thing in the news recently – the Amazon is on fire. One of our biggest terrestrial carbon sinks is being deliberately burned to clear land for agriculture, which could lead to accelerated climate breakdown. If you’re worried about global warming, you’re not alone – and your voice is needed to drive change.
What does the science say? If fossil fuel burning continues to increase, we are likely to see temperature rises of 2.6 – 4.8oC by 2100. Such rapid warming will have catastrophic effects. Lethal temperatures, for at least 20 days a year, would occur for 74 percent of the global population, rendering huge parts of Earth’s equatorial and southern regions uninhabitable. Rainfall is predicted to become more variable and exacerbate droughts in already drought-prone regions. Each 1oC temperature increase will reduce crop yields by up to 7.4 percent, jeopardizing two thirds of the world’s calorific intake. Ocean acidification is highly likely to lead to coral reef extinction and risks collapse of marine ecosystems including commercial fisheries. Tipping points, such as ice melt reducing reflection of solar energy, can rapidly accelerate warming and they are very hard to model. This means that the temperature increase estimates above from the IPCC (the UN body for assessing climate change science) may well be too low.
