How have we come this close to killing one of EarthвЂ™s most vital resources - one our own survival may depend on? But GattiвЂ™s findings suggest we are teetering on the brink - if not tumbling over it already, at least in part of the Amazon. Scientists say it is impossible to be sure just how close the rainforest now is to the tipping point. Under Bolsonaro, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has surged from an average of 6,500 square kilometers (2,500 square miles) per year during the previous decade to around 10,000 - an area nearly the size of Lebanon. Since then, the destruction has accelerated - especially in Brazil, home to 60% of the Amazon, where far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019 with strong backing from the farm lobby, pushing to open protected lands and indigenous reservations to agribusiness and mining.

GattiвЂ™s is one of several recent studies to sound a blaring alarm on the Amazon. That means weвЂ™re going to reach the horror-show scenario way sooner, too.вЂќ вЂњThe Amazon has become a carbon source way sooner than anyone thought. As bad as the predictions are, theyвЂ™re actually optimistic,вЂќ says Gatti. And thatвЂ™s not something our climate models have taken into account. That part of the Amazon - the heart of cattle country in Brazil, the worldвЂ™s biggest producer and exporter of beef and soy - no longer needs our help to spew carbon into the air. Second: even subtracting emissions caused by fires, the southeastern Amazon is now a net carbon emitter. In July, she and her team published their grimmest findings yet, in the journal Nature.ДЇirst: the Amazon is now a net carbon source, mainly because of humans setting it on fire. | BRAZIL NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR SPACE RESEARCH / VIA AFP-JIJI The bespectacled 61-year-old, who needs motion-sickness pills before each flight, has watched those flasks tell a steadily worsening story over the past decade.Д«razilian atmospheric chemist Luciana Gatti has been tracking how much carbon the Amazon emits and absorbs, watching for signs of a looming nightmare.

When not in her lab outside Sao Paulo, Gatti can be found training bush pilots to collect her samples, by diving in a downward spiral from 14,500 feet, sucking up little flasks of air. Plummeting rainfall would cause its trees to die off en masse, releasing up to a decadeвЂ™s worth of worldwide carbon emissions back into the atmosphere - and dooming our efforts to hold global warming somewhere near a livable limit. Gatti, who works at BrazilвЂ™s national space agency, has been tracking how much carbon the region emits and absorbs, watching for signs of a looming nightmare: that the destruction could push the Amazon to a вЂњtipping pointвЂќ where much of the rainforest dries up and turns to savanna.Д¬limate scientists say passing that point would be catastrophic: instead of helping curb climate change, the Amazon would suddenly accelerate it. Home to more than 3 million species, the rainforest bursts with lush vegetation, which absorbs huge amounts of carbon through photosynthesis - a key fact as humankind struggles to stop heating the planet with greenhouse gases.ДЄs carbon dioxide emissions have surged by 50% in 60 years, to nearly 40 billion tons worldwide, the Amazon has absorbed a large amount of that pollution - nearly 2 billion tons a year, until recently.Д«ut humans have also spent the past half-century tearing down and burning whole swathes of the Amazon to make way for cattle ranches and farmland. Splashed across South America in an exuberant blob of deep green, the Amazon basin is one of the worldвЂ™s great wildernesses, a place where life teems in the heat of the tropics, fed by the myriad rivers criss-crossing the jungle like blue blood vessels.

But the same bleak conclusion keeps popping up on her screen: the Amazon, the worldвЂ™s biggest rainforest - the вЂњlungs of the Earth,вЂќ the вЂњgreen ocean,вЂќ the thing humanity is counting on to inhale our pollution and save us from the mess weвЂ™ve made of the planet - is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs.

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