The World's Largest Environmental Experiment

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Amazon in South America is more than a forest or an habitat. It's a climate regulator which has to absorb between 200 and 300 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions produced by the 8,000 square miles of destroyed forests every year. In 1998, the Brazilian community, helped by many international institutions, launched the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment (LBA). The LBA Experiment is made up of 120 projects, 61 of which are already complete. The status of these projects is currently being reviewed by 800 delegates from 170 Brazilian and foreign institutions at the III LBA Scientific Conference held in Brasilia between July 27 and 29. NASA says it plays a key role in the LBA experiment through the use of its satellites and its computer scientists. But Inter Press Service reports that the Mega-Amazon Research Project Holds Surprises -- Good and Bad: good because it provides opportunities for 400 researchers to work on postgraduate studies in the area, bad because it's still not known if the forests absorb enough carbon to compensate the emissions caused by deforestation, therefore contributing to global warming. Please read this overview for more details, references and a map of the LBA sites spanning the Amazon."

Comments

Forests

[bartok]

I'm always amazed at the hypocrisy of north american countries when they denounce the deforestation in the south. It's not like we haven't been doing the exact same thing with our own forests.

This is a classic case of "Do like I say, not like I do".

Plankton

[kippy]

I was under the impression that the oceans are overwhelming larger carbon sinks than surface forests. Wasn't that part of the reason that carbon credit trading was scoffed at by some scientists?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that the sheer volume of the oceans supports the idea. Between the plant life filling that volume and the fact that the water itself dissolves a good deal of CO2, it seems like promoting artificial blooms of plankton and algae would sink a lot more carbon.