Amazon hit by climate chaos of floods, drought
BY ALAN CLENDENNING SAO PAULO — Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 44 people and left 376,000 homeless. Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving fruit trees entirely submerged. Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud. Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency. It’s ”the $1 million dollar question,” says Carlos Nobre, a climatologist with Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. While a definitive answer will take years of careful study, climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the years ahead. Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall elsewhere, from Brazil’s agricultural heartland to the U.S. grainbelt, as rising ocean temperatures and rain forest destruction cause shifts in global climate patterns. ”It’s important to note that it’s likely that these types of record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the near future,” Nobre said. “So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future: It’s not for the next generation.” The immediate cause of the unusually heavy rains across northern Brazil is an Atlantic Ocean weather system that usually moves on in March, but stayed put until May this year. Almost simultaneously, southern Brazilian states far from the Amazon have suffered from an extended drought, caused by La Nina — a periodic cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean. And La Nina alternates with El Nino, a heating up of Pacific waters that is blamed for catastrophic forest fires plaguing the Amazon in recent years. …
