20110205_SK

Source: Sky News

URL: N/A

Date: 05/02/2011

Event:CO2 Fears After Amazon Rainforest Droughts

People:

• Professor Mark Maslin: Director of the UCL Environment Institute and Head of the Department of Geography
• Lulu Sinclair: Sky News correspondent

Mark Maslin: Well, the problem is in a normal year then, rain forests grow, and they're very lush, and basically drag out CO2 from the atmosphere and produce beautiful plants, and lots and lots of wood. However, what we found last year is that the drought means that lost of trees are dying off and as they die they rot, and the CO2 is then released out. I think the shocking thing is, and the surprise for us was, in the last year we actually lost five years of carbon that the Amazon had been dragging out of the atmosphere.

Lulu Sinclair: Is there anything to expect that there's going to be more - we've had two droughts, two very serious droughts. But is there anything to expect that we're suddenly going to get loads more? I mean how big a problem is this in the future?

Mark Maslin: Well, had you asked me this after the 2005 drought, we actually turned round and said: well, we can't tell whether this is due to climate change. However, now we've had two with in five years. These are extreme events that we've never seen before in the historic record, suddenly starts to worry us, that actually the warmest year on record was 2010, and suddenly at the same time we have a drought.