As a nineteen-year-old college student I traveled during the summer break between my sophomore and junior years in the Andes and on the Amazon with friends Frank and Kenny. We had little money, travel was rugged, and I got very sick during an eight-day barge ride from Pucallpa to Iquitos on the Peruvian Ucayali tributary of the Amazon River. The Amazon basin that I traveled may not be there very much longer with dire consequences for the indigenous people of the region and human civilization.
A study by scientists from Brazil, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States found that climate change fueled a devastating drought in the Amazon basin in 2023 as dry conditions persisted into the region’s rainy season, the first time that has happened. It caused major rivers to dry up and fish to die, led to extensive wildfires, and threatened the lives and livelihoods of the people of the Amazonas. Power plants along the river and its tributaries were forced to close or reduce production of electricity leading to power outages in parts of Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
Several Amazon tributaries were at their lowest level in record history. The scientists concluded that a cyclical El Niño effect caused by shifting Pacific Ocean currents did contribute to a reduction in rain, but that the increase in temperatures caused by human action, especially the burning of fossil fuels over the last 250 years, made the devastating drought 10 times as likely to occur as it would have otherwise. They attribute the dehydration of soil and plants and reduced river flows to global warming.
The Amazon River is the world’s largest by volume and twenty percent of Earth’s freshwater flows through the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon basin is about the same size as the continent of Australia. Because of drought, some parts of the Amazon basin are in the process of transforming from rainforest that stores heat-trapping gases into drier regions releasing the gases into the atmosphere. In addition, because of deforestation, the rainforest has shrunk in size by about 20% since I visited the region in 1969. Even with the deforestation, the Amazon is still the world’s largest carbon sink storing more than 150 billion tons of carbon that could end up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, further increasing global warming and climate change. The Amazon’s trees hold about 20% of all the carbon storied in the Earth’s vegetation.
Climate change is not just impacting the Amazon basin. Unprecedented ocean surface temperatures are destroying coral reefs in the Caribbean. Coral reefs play a similar role as the Amazon rainforest as the home to biodiversity on the planet. About one-fourth of marine species depend on coral reefs for survival during their life cycles. They also help protect coast regions from storms. The world’s oceans have lost 50% of their coral since the 1950s. In the southern Mexico states of Tabasco and Chiapas, howler monkeys are dying from dehydration caused by extreme heat and are falling out of trees where they live.
Last year, Canada had its worst fire season ever. Forests the size of the state of North Dakota burned and the smoke traveled south enveloping U.S. cities in orange haze. In June and July, air quality in New York was so bad that emergency room visits caused by asthma rose by 40%. A once in a lifetime experience caused by climate change and record forest fires may now be the new normal as the fire season in Canada restarts and smoke will probably again blanket northern U.S. cities. Worse, the fire activity in Quebec just north of New York is expected to double by 2050.
At the same time, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predict that the Eastern Coast of the United States will have more intense hurricane activity this summer and fall partly because of warming oceans. NOAA forecasts that there will be between 17 and 25 named storms, between 8 and 13 with hurricane level winds, and between 4 and 7 major hurricanes with winds of 111 mph or higher. Expect flooding and interruptions in electrical service.
The Earth’s environment well almost definitely deteriorate more rapidly if Donald Trump is elected President in November. Trump recently met with a group of over twenty fossil fuel company executives including Exxon and Chevron and demanded that they contribute one billion dollars to his election campaign. In exchange, Trump promised, as President, to maintain tax breaks for fossil fuel companies, remove barriers to drilling in new fields for oil and gas, end restrictions on the export of natural gas, and eliminate restrictions on automobile and truck pollution. The fossil fuel industry was a major contributor to Trump’s previous presidential campaign.