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Regulating Greenhouse Gases Transcript V IDEO TRANSCRIPT – REGULATING GREENHOUSE GASES Watch the video online at http://www.kqed.org/education/educators/clue-into-climate/greenhouse-gases.jsp Video length: 5 minutes, 25 seconds NARRATOR: The application of science is also at work high in the Amazon treetops to solve another problem -- that of climate change. Dr. Philip Fearnside of the National Institute of Amazonian Research has spent 30 years here studying long term changes, like those investigated in the LBA project. HOLLY LOHUIS: Wow. Wow, this is spectacular. PHILLIP FEARNSIDE: The LBA project is the large scale atmosphere biosphere experiment. It's a huge project in cooperation with Brazil, United States through NASA, and the European Union. So there are hundreds of scientists who have been working here for several years. And the main reason for doing this -- there are many kinds of research going on, but what really started the whole thing was that right there, which measures the flux -- that is the movement of carbon dioxide coming out of the forest and going back into the forest. This is measuring the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And you can hear the pump running that's sucking CO2 or the air down through these tubes. And they're two different sets of tubes measuring around 402 parts per million by volume, which is more than the global average. The global average is 380 now. And it's gone up from 280 before the Industrial Revolution and it's still going up. It's going up at faster and faster rate, now about 2.6 parts per million by volume per year. So if you come back next year, there will be more. And of course that is the main cause of global warming. Global warming has taken up most of my time. I've been studying emissions from deforestation, and various processes also that cause deforestation -- highways, dams and so forth. Dams have tremendous impacts. For one thing, you have to build a road to every dam that you build unless it happens to have one right there. So you have deforestation from that. You also flood large areas of forest with many dams, such as the Balbina Dam north of Manaus, which is over 3000 square kilometers of forest. NARRATOR: Brazil has heavily invested in dams, with more than 600 generating about 90 percent of the country's electricity. But dams depend on rainfall, and half comes from moisture from trees. So ironically, dams reduce rainfall. Since the forest also absorbs carbon dioxide, it actually slows global warming. So while it's not immediately apparent, because dams result in the loss of forests, they are directly implicated as a cause of climate change. BRUCE FORSBERG: But there are -- there are other problems with reservoirs. One of the easy things to understand is that you stop the migrations of many fish. In river systems like the Amazon, we have many species that migrate long distances to feed or to reproduce. 1 Some of the big catfish -- river channel cats -- they can migrate up to 4000 kilometers. And they lay their eggs in the headwaters, and those eggs are just washed downstream, carried by the currents. And those pass through the turbines if you build a dam. So I mean that's really what's going to destroy the populations of catfish. PHILLIP FEARNSIDE: And you also have a contribution of greenhouse gases themselves. It's one of the things I've been working on. That you have methane forming in the bottom of these reservoirs. As leaves and soil carbon and anything that's dead decays, it forms methane. BRUCE FORSBERG: There was an estimate made in 2000 that 20 percent or so of the - - of the methane -- actually it's a little less than that -- that's generated and goes to the atmosphere globally comes from reservoirs. But they're -- they were looking mainly at the upstream part. What we've found is that there's a lot of methane that comes out the bottom of the reservoir too as it goes -- as the water goes through the turbines because the water in the bottom of reservoirs is supersaturated in methane and also under a lot of pressure. And when it comes out of the turbine, that pressure is released almost immediately, like opening up a bottle of Coca-Cola. PHILLIP FEARNSIDE: And when that methane gets out to the atmosphere, it has a much greater impact on global warming than CO2 does. Using the conversions that were adopted by the Kyoto Protocol, for example, every ton of methane has as much impact on global warming as 21 tons of CO2. JOSE ALVAREZ ALONSO: We know very well that the climate change is the worst threat now for the humanity, no? Everyone is saying this. And the Amazon has the power to contribute to the global warming, or the power to restrain the global warming. And it's a kind of buffer for the global climate because the size of the Amazon basin is the biggest tropical forest in the world. JEAN-MICHEL COUSTEAU: So there's a direct link between climate and the Amazon. JOSE ALVAREZ ALONSO: For sure. The rain of the Amazon is one fifth of the world. 2.
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