The Amazon rainforest is on fire, and experts say this wildfire will affect climate change for many years to come.
CNN reported that The National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has said the fires are burning at the highest rate they’ve seen since tracking started in 2013.
Sao Paulo, 1700 miles away, is seeing smoke from the fire’s blazes.
Just a little alert to the world: the sky randomly turned dark today in São Paulo, and meteorologists believe it’s smoke from the fires burning *thousands* of kilometers away, in Rondônia or Paraguay. Imagine how much has to be burning to create that much smoke(!). SOS
— Shannon Sims (@shannongsims) August 20, 2019
Video shows heavy smoke and smog overcoming the city and creating black out conditions.
Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay, too, are seeing heavy, black smoke coming from the Brazilian fires.
The INPE also reported there were 72,843 fires in Brazil this year. More than half of those fires burned in the Amazon. This represents an 80 percent increase in the total number of fires over last year.
Photo Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
Natural disasters can spark flames when the area is dry, but these fires are also frequently started illegally by ranchers trying to clear out forest to create grazing land for cattle. Environmentalists are blaming Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, for relaxing laws limiting deforestation and underplaying the disaster in general to the rest of the world.
According to the BBC, the Amazon rainforest contributes 20 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. Plus, the rainforest is home to millions of species of plants and animals, as well as over one million indigenous people.
The rainforest is critical to millions of lives and to the Earth, itself.
Aerial footage shows the world's largest rainforest in flames. Brazil's Amazon is known as "the planet's lungs" for producing about 20 percent of the world's oxygen. This inferno threatens the rainforest ecosystem and also affects the entire globe. https://t.co/h01baMhEvn pic.twitter.com/8yWmTj7CO9
— CNN (@CNN) August 26, 2019
If the Amazon is destroyed, the World Wildlife Fund says the area will likely become a savannah, but inhospitable to people, animals or plants.
And instead of pumping out oxygen, the new savannah will be the Earth’s next major source of carbon emissions. Meaning, the Amazon will no longer serve as the lungs of the world, but will begin pump out enough carbon to actually drive the climate crisis.
This is bad news, folks. Bad news indeed.
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