ARGUABLY, the most important meeting I participated in last year was the October conference at Canning House, in London’s Belgrave Square, on “Climate and the Amazon: Consequences for our planet”. According to experts at Britain’s Met Office’s Hadley Centre, the rainforest is likely to vanish within a few decades if greenhouse emissions continue to rise.
Lost forest cover, decaying vegetation and overheated soils are expected to release as much as 77 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. This will raise global temperatures significantly more than the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts to date. This would swamp the benefits…
