writeaboutwarming

August 23, 2019 The Amazon is an enormous rainforest in South America. It covers forty percent of the South American continent, and can be found in eight countries. If it were laid over a map of the 48 contiguous states of the United States, it would encompass nearly two-thirds of it. Because trees breathe in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, it is essential that we protect them, wherever they grow. In Brazil, where much of the Amazon is located, the president of that country has been encouraging farmers, ranchers, and loggers to exploit the riches that can be found there. That means clearing away the trees by incinerating them. So hellbent are farmers on enlarging their holdings and growing more food, they organized a "fire day" last week. In order to accommodate them, President Bolsonaro of Brazil has weakened regulations intended to protect forests and indigenous lands. His failure to halt deforestation, in keeping with the Paris Climate Accords, has caused Germany and...

I like Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General.   He doesn’t just talk about doing things; he makes things happen.   I refer specifically to a new collaboration between the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).   These two organizations intend to restore at least 150 million hectares of forest by 2020 (a hectare is slightly more than 2 acres).   Their joint effort will be announced at the Secretary-General’s Climate Summit on September 23, 2014. Restoring 150 million hectares of forest, an area about the size of Alaska, would sequester roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide and/or the equivalent thereof every year, reducing the current emissions gap by 11 – 17 percent.   The target date of 2020 is ambitious, but would generate US$85 billion per year in ecosystem services that would benefit the rural poor all  over the world. The rate of global deforestation has slowe...