Environment

What if the Amazon rainforest disappeared?

world without amazon
Photo: Mayke Toscano/Gcom-MT

With the concern raised by the boom in forest fires earlier this year linked to deforestation, the environmental contribution of the Amazon to our planet has been widely debated. World leaders expressed their worry, repeating the hackneyed and incorrect maxim that the forest is “the lungs of the world” and that it produces 20 percent of the oxygen found on Earth.

Members of the Jair Bolsonaro government, however, went in the opposite direction. Addressing deforestation figures, the Head of Institutional Security, General Augusto Heleno declared that statistics on the disappearing Amazon were “manipulated.” Showing a basic lack of understanding of mathematics, Gen. Heleno claimed that “if you added up all the percentages they’ve announced until today on deforestation, the Amazon would be a desert already.”

But, what would actually happen if the Amazon rainforest simply disappeared? In a recent study, a pair of scientists from Princeton University modeled the effects...

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