There where the wind bends

The next time you watch the Jornal Nacional news program, pay attention to the weather forecast. If the satellite image features that boomerang-type circulation transversally crossing the continent, then thank the heavens. And you can thank your lucky stars if you live in the Southeast of Brazil or in Argentina. According to researcher Antonio Donato Nobre, from the National Amazon Research Institute (INPA), if it weren’t for the rainfall that these clouds bring, especially in the summer, the entire quadrilateral delineated by Cuiabá, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and the Andean mountain ridge would almost certainly become a desert.

According to Nobre, there are only two factors preventing this from happening: the presence of the Andes, whose height redirects the steam coming from the Atlantic to the Southeast (forming this boomerang shape), and the evaporation caused by the Amazon rainforest trees, which feeds this humidity, enabling it to reach the Andes and beyond without dissipating on the way. “The Amazon is an impressive water pump”, says Nobre, who spent 22 years in the region. “Each day, it launches 20 billion tons of water into the atmosphere, ensuring the irrigation of an area responsible for 70% of South American GDP.” The advance of the deforestation process, according to Nobre, doesn’t just imminently endanger this system that gives South America its welcome climatic peculiarity. “Deforestation is responsible, alone, for 20% of all human emissions of carbon gas”, he states. We are thus talking about a global threat. International entities recommend that 2% of global GDP be immediately invested in anti-global warming measures. “If this doesn’t happen”, says Nobre, “in 2020, 30% of global GDP will be needed just to cover the costs of the losses related to environmental disasters.” Despite this grim outlook, Nobre says that nothing is effectively being done. “The preservation of the Amazon rainforest shouldn’t be subordinated to the interests of development and of the economy, but vice-versa”, states the researcher.

“Without the maintenance of this delicate but powerful system of global equilibrium, the entire economy is doomed.” Working at the National Space Research Institute (INPE) in São José dos Campos, Nobre (50), with a degree in agronomy, specialized in tropical biology and a doctorate in biogeochemistry from the University of New Hampshire, gave a lengthy interview to PIB (the main excerpts are featured below). In the interview, Nobre explains the singularities of our climatic regime, analyzes the importance of the Amazon in terms of how it functions, condemns the autistic mentality of agribusiness and, further more, the passivity of governments. And he adds a caveat: “By deforesting the Amazon, we aren’t burning trees, but instead a living library of the highest technology and incalculable value”

Life regulates the climate

Today, science is starting to accept the fact that the biological system conditions the atmosphere. This is a new development. Meteorology has always considered the biosphere to be a secondary factor and the atmosphere to be the primary factor. But all the oxygen we breathe came from the plants; we don’t have toxic gases in the atmosphere thanks to the innumerous organisms that remove them; and the balanced maintenance of the water cycle in the continents depends directly on the organisms. We know that, in a highly sophisticated process that occurs on a nanoscale, at molecular level photosynthesis is the primordial mechanism of the Earth’s climatic stabilization. In photosynthesis, solar energy is captured and, via chemical reactions, it removes the carbon gas from the atmosphere and releases oxygen. It was this exchange of gases that molded life and the evolution of the environments in the planet over the last 4 billion years. In this period, the concentration of carbon gas in our atmosphere fell from 95% to 0.039%. Where did all this CO2 go? What happened in this period? Without a powerful regulation mechanism, it would have been impossible for the earth to have, today, liquid water on the surface and for the Earth’s temperature to maintain a comfortable variation for life a rarity in cosmological terms.

The only explanation for this phenomenon is life. All living organisms have a sophisticated system of equilibrium and self-regulation. If the temperature rises externally, the living organisms cool down; and vice-versa. Only life has this capacity. And forests exert a crucial role in the planetary system. They are the largest terrestrial regulator. They have highly complex and efficient systems that other human systems, such as agriculture, are incapable of emulating. That said, let’s look at a map of the world. The map shows the deserts, always on the same line at 30 degrees latitude, in both hemispheres. The Sahara, the Sonoma, the Kalahari, the Atacama, the deserts of Namibia and Australia. Why? This fact is due to a phenomenon called the Hadley Circulation. The equatorial part of the planet receives more solar radiation, is hotter, evaporates a lot of water and causes rainfall. In other words, the air rises on the Equator line, loses humidity and rains. When it descends on the 30 degree latitude line, the air (already dry) consumes the humidity of the surface and helps form deserts. There are only two exceptions to this rule: Southern China, in a region close to the Himalayas, and the meridian part of South America.

The green radiator

South America is different for two reasons: the Andes and the Amazon rainforest. The air, which in the equatorial zones always flows from east to west, encounters the Andean barrier, a wall 6,000 meters high that prevents the air (full of evaporation coming from the Atlantic) from continuing to move forward. This humid air then turns towards the Southeast and, in the summer, it pours its humidity over these regions – which, without the Andes, would be desert-like, with no economic life.

The second factor, forests, is even more important. This wind can only travel for almost 5,000km over South America, with sufficient humidity to form clouds and rainfall, because the Amazon rainforest trees receive their water, in the form of rainfall, but return the bulk of this water back into the atmosphere via transpiration. The Amazon transpires 20 billion tons of water per day – a huge amount. The Amazon River, the largest in the world and responsible, alone, for 20% of all the fresh water that reaches the oceans, launches 17 billion tons of water into the Atlantic each day.

It is this vapor created by the forest that accentuates and prolongs the humid circulation in South America. The forest functions as an optimized evaporator, since its leaves form an evaporation area much greater than that of the surface itself on the soil. We are talking about 10 square meters of leaves for each square meter of soil. The leaves act as a radiator in dispersing the humidity. Without this help from the forest and from its transpiration, the air mass coming from the ocean would be unable to maintain its humidity from the Atlantic to the Andes and further forward.

If the Amazon was an entirely agricultural region, the air mass would enter into the continent and it would rain. As there wouldn’t be sufficiently dense vegetation, since the agricultural soil is thinner and more exposed, this water wouldn’t return to the atmosphere. Instead, it would be absorbed by the earth or, more likely, it would descend into the rivers, returning to the Atlantic. The winds would become increasingly dry inside the continent, rainfall levels would progressively diminish and a process of desertification would occur in the interior.

From barn to desert

The influence of this transpiration of the forest, combined with the presence of the Andes, shows up in the quadrilateral between Cuiabá, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and the Andes. Without the Amazon region, this region, responsible for 70% of South American GDP, would very likely become a desert. But this wouldn’t occur immediately. The first effect of deforestation is a disequilibrium that causes alternated excess of rainfall and droughts. This is already happening. Santa Catalina is a good example. In the valley of Itajaí, rainfall caused the deaths of thousands by drowning or landslide. Simultaneously, the west of Santa Catarina was in the midst of a severe drought. The northwest of Rio Grande do Sul and the humid Argentinean pampas, two extremely rich agricultural rgions, are already suffering from production shortfalls. The lack of equilibrium in the regulator system is one of the causes of the current Argentinean agricultural crisis. The country has suffered from an atypical drought, which also led to a lack of water at its hydroelectric plants and, as a result, an energy shortage. If, for South America, the Amazon is a heart that pumps humidity, for the world it is a heart and also a liver, since it processes and filters the atmosphere’s air on a planetary scale. Studies show that the forest absorbs a significant part of the abuses in the gas emissions that are at the root of global warming. The Amazon region is a type of humanity insurance policy against these abuses, but isn’t used as such.

Agricultural autism

Our agriculture doesn’t seem capable of interacting socially. It is reminiscent of an autistic savant, who has an extraordinary ability to develop a single capacity – while all the other capacities are affected. Here we can draw a parallel to the robust and dazzling soybean fields, achieved at the expense of the entire surrounding biological equilibrium. Our system stimulates this autism; it boosts it. Economic exploitation is the name of the game. The rest is an obstacle. Blairo Maggi (state governor of Mato Grosso and one of the world’s largest soybean producers) once said: “People need to decide if they want to eat food or trees”. This is a false dilemma, since, without trees, you don’t have water, and, without water, there’s no food. “Thinkers” such as Maggi believe the forest merely takes up space, which in my opinion is utter ignorance. A cancerous tumor does the best it can in its desperation to grow, it doesn’t know it is malignant – and this mentality of agribusiness in Brazil is a tumor that needs to be removed.

Economy and ecology aren’t two different things. It is important to explain that, if the forest is chopped down, an entire giant and delicate equilibrium system will be destroyed and, with it, economic activity. Brazilians need to know that, if the water supply ends in the forest, it will shortly dry up in other places as well, such as São Paulo or Buenos Aires. This warning is the role of science, which we cannot relinquish.

Biomimetics

Ecology is the economy of nature. Its principles and technological possibilities can provide a massive boost to the human economy. The Amazon rainforest is home to one of the largest sources of high technology known to man. There is a new frontier of engineering called biomimetics, which seeks to take inspiration from natural processes, in order to copy them and implement them in industrial solutions.

Nature has incredibly sophisticated technological solutions. A study of the wing of the morpho butterfly (that large, iridescent metallic blue, butterfly) discovered that it manipulates light with an organic crystal, which is also an optical amplifier. The same principle of this crystal can be copied and implemented in optical fibers to enhance data transmission. The vehicle industry is studying the coating of tree leaves, with the aim of creating new inks to make self-cleaning cars.

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