Rains Are Scarce in the Amazon. Instead, Megafires Are Raging

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/climate/amazon-rainforest-fires.html

By Ana Ionova and Manuela Andreoni, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: By this time of the year, rain should be drenching large swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rains at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of the rainforest that do not usually burn. ...The fires in the Amazon, which reaches across nine South American nations, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts said. ...If deforestation, fires and climate change continue to worsen, large stretches of the forest could transform into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades. That, scientists say, would trigger a collapse that could send up to 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere, an enormous blow to the struggle to contain climate change.... 

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