Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire, taking a serious as well as entertaining world of possibilities for the world and the human race. He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book.”

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RALEIGH – In last week’s column we discussed the massive risk that the Thwaites glacier presents for the global human population. It turns out that thousands upon thousands of people read that column, and many were hearing about this threat for the first time. It’s a horrible situation all the way around if this glacier fails. Therefore, humanity as a global species must prevent it from happening.

Now let’s turn to another global tragedy that is also on the horizon: rainforest collapse. Why must humanity be doing everything possible prevent the rainforests from collapsing?

Photo courtesy of Marshall Brain

Here is the rainforest problem in a nutshell. If the Amazon rainforest collapses, it will release hundreds of gigatons of new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Humanity is already releasing gigatons of carbon dioxide every year by burning fossil fuels. But with rainforest collapse we are talking about a new burst of hundreds of gigatons. This new carbon dioxide will turbocharge global heating and climate change – it will cause our warming planet to warm even faster. The ice and glaciers in Antarctica will therefore melt even faster, raising sea levels ever higher.

In addition, the resulting heat wave could make a big swath of the planet uninhabitable to humans. In these places it will simply be too hot to go outside unprotected. All things considered, allowing the collapse of the rainforests is an amazing recipe for disaster at a planetary scale.

The good news, as we will see below, is that humanity can prevent the collapse of Earth’s rainforests if we take action now.  In fact, we can expand the rainforests and, in the process, extract significant amounts of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere rather than releasing it. But first let’s look at a little context.

Understanding Earth’s Rainforests

Although few of us have been there, chances are that we have all heard of the Amazon rainforest. Let’s look at a few quick facts to get a feeling for the place:

  1. The Amazon rainforest is gigantic, at about 2.6 million square miles. It is roughly the same size as the 48 contiguous United States, which is roughly the same size as the continent of Australia.
  2. The majority of the Amazon rainforest exists in Brazil, but it also stretches into Bolivia, Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, etc.
  3. The Amazon rainforest contains approximately 390 million trees.
  4. The Amazon rainforest contains an amazing diversity of life on Earth: 16,000 species of trees, 24,000 species of other plants, and millions of insect species.
  5. There are other rainforests on Earth including Central America, the Congo, and Southeast Asia. The Amazon rainforest is about as big as all the other rainforests combined.

The thing to focus on is this enormous number of trees. Each tree is about 50% carbon and large trees can weigh many tons. When a tree burns or decays, most of this carbon turns into carbon dioxide and ends up in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, humans are burning and chain-sawing the rainforest at an alarming rate right now. You can watch a time-lapse video like this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4eLTYUcj7k – to see how quickly and massively the destruction is occurring. Much of this pillaging happens in the name of agriculture. For example, farmers will burn acres of rainforest to plant soybeans which are then exported to China. It is an insane practice given that these activities will eventually cause the rainforest to collapse.

Slap yourself and pay attention: The Doomsday Glacier is a global risk

Why will the rainforest collapse? Because the rainforest depends on a repeating cycle that goes like this:

  • Rain falls in the rainforest
  • All of the trees soak up the rain and transpire the water back into the air through their leaves
  • This transpired moisture turns back into clouds, and we return to #1.

Once humans cut down too many trees, this cycle breaks. The rain will stop and the rainforest will die. In the worst-case scenario, we end up with another Sahara Desert instead of a rainforest. In the next worst-case scenario, the rainforest turns into a grassy savannah. In either case, hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide end up in the atmosphere and the planet warms up even more.

Solutions to Rainforest Collapse

How can humanity solve this problem? How can the global human population prevent the rainforests from collapsing?

The most obvious solution is for humanity, as a global species, to declare these essential rainforests to be Earth’s first global parks. In the United States, Yellowstone was the world’s first national park in 1872. Now, 150 years later, it is time for gigantic global parks that protect the rainforests (and other important ecosystems) from collapse.

Under the global park model, humanity would declare the Amazon rainforest and other rainforests to be essential, lifesaving global protectorates.

  • We would remove destructive human activity from these rainforests.
  • We would convert all the agricultural fields and human developments back into rainforest.
  • We would expand these rainforests as much as we can.

In the process we would A) prevent rainforest collapse, and B) absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere as the rainforests heal and regenerate.

This global park system, with its goal of protecting, healing and increasing the world’s rainforests, is an obvious and rational step for the global human species to take. Every human being on the planet will suffer significant harm from the collapse of the world’s rainforests. Even so, there are people who argue the opposite – who try to promote the burning and destruction of rainforests. Their thinking is along the lines of this:

“Who are you to stop Brazil from exploiting its natural resources? If Brazil wants to burn down every inch of the Amazon rainforest and farm it all, that is their right.”

The problem with this thinking is that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest will harm every living thing on planet Earth. In addition, there are a great many activities that were once legal but are now illegal because human beings have learned and advanced over the years. Slavery is an example – it was once legal but is illegal now. Leaded gasoline is another. Freon-12 as a refrigerant is another, banned globally in the 1980s and 1990s by the Montreal Protocol. All are illegal today. We now understand that these practices pose significant threats to humanity even though they were once ubiquitous. Rainforest destruction now falls into the same category – it must completely stop and be reversed. In order for the global ecosystem to survive, the rainforests cannot collapse. We must make development in the rainforests illegal to avoid a global catastrophe that we know will soon be here otherwise.

Will humanity as a whole be able to do anything to prevent the planet’s rainforests from collapsing? Hopefully the human species can come together and make this goal a reality. If not, when the rainforests collapse, we will have a true global catastrophe on our hands and billions of people will be crushed by the effects.

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