Subject:  Viridian Note 00031:  Self-destructive Jungles

Key concepts:  drought, dying forests, burning forests, El 
Nino, CO2 load in biosphere, Chiapas Smoke Plume

Attention Conservation Notice:  Confuses the issue.  
Oxymoronic.  Paradoxical.  Terrifying.  Hopefully, rather 
farfetched.

Links: http://www.goes.noaa.gov/mexicofires.html
http://pooh.esrin.esa.it:8080/ew/mexico.htm

Entries in the Viridian "Fungal Typography" Contest:
http://members.aol.com/stjude/
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~jtlin/viridian/
http://www.wenet.net/~scoville/Viridian/viridiantext.html

Sources:  Hanqin Tian, NATURE magazine 
(http://www.nature.com);
Article by Joseph B. Verrengia, Associated Press
Austin American Statesman, Dec. 17, 1998

"Forests add greenhouse gases during El Nino, scientists 
say"

By Joseph B. Verrengia

  "Instead of inhaling extra carbon dioxide, Brazil's rain 
forest does the opposite in an El Nino year, exhaling 
millions of tons of the heat-trapping gas and potentially 
adding to global warming, scientists say.

    "The rain forest, under normal conditions, acts as the 
'lungs' of the planet.  Its thousands of square miles of 
trees release oxygen and absorb as much as 700 million 
tons of carbon dioxide a year.

    "But when global climate conditions are scrambled by 
El Nino and the rain forest becomes parched, scientists 
from the Woods Hole Research Laboratory in Massachusetts 
determined, the Amazon Basin produces as much as 200 
million tons of excess carbon dioxide a year.  The 
calculation by Hanqin Tian and others are published in 
today's issue of the journal NATURE."  (...)

     "In the Amazon, it (((El Nino))) causes severe 
droughts.  Under such drought stress, the rain forest 
can't adequately photosynthesize and store carbon dioxide, 
Tian said."

(((This grim discovery makes perfect sense, once you think 
about it.  No water, no photosynthesis.   No rain, no 
green.  Simple as that. And what does the Amazon jungle do 
then?  It coughs up a couple of hundred million tons.

(((So much for the divine wisdom of Mother Nature.  Could 
it be that Gaia is even more wacky and shortsighted than 
we are?  Is she blindly willing to choke on her own spew 
just like the G-7 Advanced Industrial Nations?  Well, why 
not?  All the inhabitants of the biosphere have a perfect 
moral right to pitch right in and screw things up with us 
hominids.

    (((Upon digesting this appalling news, I suppose we 
could swiftly muster the Kevin Kelly Memorial Bulldozer 
Brigade (see Viridian Note 00024) and dash out there to 
saw the jungle down before it does us even more harm than 
Exxon-Mobil.  But (a) we'll lose the benefit we get if we 
ever get another year that isn't an El Nino, (b) we 
probably need the oxygen even more urgently than we don't 
need the carbon dioxide, and (c) we needn't bother, 
because a parched rain forest will spontaneously *burn.*   
Combustion is when forests really spew the soot, and they 
do themselves a level of harm that lumberjacks can only 
envy.  This blazing activity does not require any surprise 
discoveries by Woods Hole, and in fact it couldn't be more 
obvious, as the links in this Note suggest.

(((These links,
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/mexicofires.html
http://pooh.esrin.esa.it:8080/ew/mexico.htm

show writhing Mexican jungle smoke covering my home town, 
as revealed by both American and European satellite 
sensors.  I am looking for the *prettiest* and *most 
graphically compelling* online picture of the 1998 Chiapas 
smoke plume.  This is defininitely one of those core 
Viridian graphic documents that we Viridians need to be 
meditating upon, in our ivied, lingering, contemplative 
fashion.  Please send me the address of the "most 
Viridian-looking" plume map or photo you can find on the 
web, and you will receive a chevron.

(((What does this news mean?  Well, perhaps nothing much; 
it may be news to us humans, but El Nino is not an 
entirely new phenomenon, and presumably Brazil has been 
belching up natural carbon for millennia.  But not, 
perhaps, with today's unprecedented levels of psychotic 
enthusiasm, where vast swathes of dying jungle might 
conceivably auto-alter the planet climate, in a shrieking 
biofeedback, in a dysfunctional Gaian auto-da-fe'.  Let's 
just bookmark this one as a small but distinct 
possibility:  we could cease all human C02 emission 
tomorrow, and still find ourselves forced to spend the 
next thousand years trying to keep Mother Nature from 
ripping her hair out and immolating herself.)))