"Like The Sun Got Closer" - Record Amazon Drought Surpasses Its 2005 Predecessor - 4X Jump In Fires

[hatrack]

The river loops low past its bleached-white banks, where caimans bask in the fierce morning sun and stranded houseboats tilt precariously. Nearby sits a beached barge with its load of eight trucks and a crane. Its owners were caught out by the speed of the river's decline. This is what it looks like when the world's greatest rainforest is thirsty. If climate scientists are right, parched Amazon scenes like this will become more common in the coming decades, possibly threatening the survival of the forest and accelerating global warming.

The environmental and economic consequences could be huge -- for Brazil, for South America, for the planet. An intense months-long drought through November drained the mighty Negro river -- an Amazon tributary -- to its lowest since records began in 1902, drying up the network of water that is the lifeblood of Brazil's huge Amazonas state. More than 60,000 people went short of food and many lacked clean water as millions of dead fish contaminated rivers. It was a once-in-a-century weather event. The weird thing is, it came just five years after another severe Amazon drought that meteorologists had described in the same way. Last year, massive floods in the region killed dozens and made hundreds of thousands homeless, fitting a pattern of more extreme weather that climate models forecast for this century.

Years like this add credence to predictions that, by the middle of this century, the forest will suffer "mega-droughts" lasting years, killing trees en masse. That, in turn, would reduce rainfall over the remaining forest, creating a vicious cycle that would turn much of the Amazon into a savannah-like state by 2100. Ecologists and climatologists say there may come "a tipping point" after which the death of the forest becomes self-sustained by higher temperatures, dwindling rain levels and destructive fires.

EDIT

In the smaller town of Caapiranga, which was mostly cut off from boat transport by the drought, residents complained that many foods had doubled in price and that their cropland had yet to recover from the devastation caused by 2009's floods. From his shack next to a dried-up lake, Manuel Ferreira de Matos, 57, squinted through battered spectacles at the distant water glistening like a mirage more than a kilometre away. "By the time I get back home from the fields, I'm dying of thirst," said the father of seven. "Before I could walk all day, no problem, but now I can't stand it -- it's like the sun got closer."

EDIT/END

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Amazon%20thirst%20alarming%20Earth/3903904/story.html

[guardian]

1. Wow! A bad drought. That never happened before

Except for

* when Mesopotamian society collapsed after a severe 200-year drought about 3,400 years ago, or
* when civilizations collapsed after droughts in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and West Asia about 2,300 B.C., or
* when a prolonged drought caused the collapse of the Mayan civilization, or
* when severe droughts devastated the Chumash people on California's Channel Islands
* or any number of instances throughout history

But of course, any drought today HAS to be caused by AGW. It was those damn Mesopotamian SUVs. Bastards.