In Brazil, extreme weather stokes climate worries

A bout of extreme weather has reignited a debate about how climate change is affecting Latin America’s largest country, home to most of the world’s biggest rain forest and one of the world’s bread baskets.

Unusually heavy rains in the north and northeast have made hundreds of thousands of people homeless and killed about 45. Meanwhile, southern Brazil has been hit by a series of droughts, devastating farmers and cutting by a third the flow of water over the famed Iguacu waterfalls.
While the exact effect of climate change is hard to measure due to a lack of historical data, it appears to be a factor in the extreme droughts and floods of recent years.

“We are seeing the warming and we are seeing conditions in many parts of the country that appear to be associated,” said Carlos Nobre, a senior climate scientist at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research.

Southern states have suffered droughts in seven of the past 11 years and the first hurricane recorded in Brazil hit the southern coast in 2004. The Amazon area had its worst drought in decades in 2005.

Warming also plays a key role in models of a so-called “tipping point” in which drier weather and deforestation combine to turn much of the Amazon forest into a savanna and possibly cut the flow of rain to southern farming states.

Planet Ark