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Greenhouse gas emissions have already caused the Amazon to dry Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com February 27, 2008
Analyzing a decline in SPI, a widely used drought index, since 1970 and comparing it with climate simulations from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Report, researchers led by Wenhong Li of the Georgia Institute of Technology report that climate models that exclude recent emissions of greenhouse gases cannot explain declining precipitation levels in the Amazon. The results suggest that the "observed SPI trend exceeds the range of the natural climate variability", implying that the recent towards a drier climate is part of the result of anthropogenic emissions. Looking towards the future, Li and colleagues forecast increasing incidence of drought in the region. "For the twenty-first century, those models realistically simulating the changes of the SPI in the twentieth century suggest an overall shift of the SPI towards more frequent and/or intense dry events, and probably stronger extreme dry events over the Amazon as anthropogenic forcing continues to increase," the authors conclude. Wenhong Li et al. (2008). Observed change of the standardized precipitation index, its potential cause and implications to future climate change in the Amazon region [FREE OPEN ACCESS]. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2007.0026 Amazon rainfall linked to Atlantic Ocean temperature (2/25/2008) Climate models increasingly forecast a dire future for the Amazon rainforest. These projections are partly based on recent research that has linked drought in the Amazon to sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic. As the tropical Atlantic warms, the southern Amazon -- the agricultural heartland of Brazil -- may see higher temperatures and less rainfall. Global warming - not el Niño - drove severe Amazon drought in 2005 (2/20/2008) One of the worst droughts on record in the Amazon was caused by high temperatures in the Atlantic rather than el Niño. The research, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, suggests that human-driven warming is already affecting the climate of Earth's largest rainforest. Fire policy is key to reducing the impact of drought on the Amazon (2/19/2008) Gaining control over the setting of fires for land-clearing in the Amazon is key to reducing deforestation and the impact of severe drought on the region's forests, write researchers in a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
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