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Atlantic Ocean circulation nearing ‘devastating’ tipping point, study finds
Atlantic Ocean circulation nearing ‘devastating’
tipping point, study finds
Collapse in system of currents that helps regulate
global climate would be at such speed that adaptation would be impossible
Jonathan
Watts
@jonathanwatts
Fri 9 Feb
2024 20.00 CET
The
circulation of the Atlantic Ocean is heading towards a tipping point that is
“bad news for the climate system and humanity”, a study has found.
The
scientists behind the research said they were shocked at the forecast speed of
collapse once the point is reached, although they said it was not yet possible
to predict how soon that would happen.
Using
computer models and past data, the researchers developed an early warning
indicator for the breakdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation
(Amoc), a vast system of ocean currents that is a key component in global
climate regulation.
They found
Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for
more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the
world.
Amoc, which
encompasses part of the Gulf Stream and other powerful currents, is a marine
conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards
the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean. This churning
helps to distribute energy around the Earth and modulates the impact of
human-caused global heating.
But the
system is being eroded by the faster-than-expected melt-off of Greenland’s
glaciers and Arctic ice sheets, which pours freshwater into the sea and
obstructs the sinking of saltier, warmer water from the south.
Amoc has
declined 15% since 1950 and is in its weakest state in more than a millennium,
according to previous research that prompted speculation about an approaching
collapse.
Until now
there has been no consensus about how severe this will be. One study last year,
based on changes in sea surface temperatures, suggested the tipping point could
happen between 2025 and 2095. However, the UK Met Office said large, rapid
changes in Amoc were “very unlikely” in the 21st century.
The new
paper, published in Science Advances, has broken new ground by looking for
warning signs in the salinity levels at the southern extent of the Atlantic
Ocean between Cape Town and Buenos Aires. Simulating changes over a period of
2,000 years on computer models of the global climate, it found a slow decline
can lead to a sudden collapse over less than 100 years, with calamitous
consequences.
The paper
said the results provided a “clear answer” about whether such an abrupt shift
was possible: “This is bad news for the climate system and humanity as up till
now one could think that Amoc tipping was only a theoretical concept and
tipping would disappear as soon as the full climate system, with all its
additional feedbacks, was considered.”
It also
mapped some of the consequences of Amoc collapse. Sea levels in the Atlantic
would rise by a metre in some regions, inundating many coastal cities. The wet
and dry seasons in the Amazon would flip, potentially pushing the already
weakened rainforest past its own tipping point. Temperatures around the world
would fluctuate far more erratically. The southern hemisphere would become
warmer. Europe would cool dramatically and have less rainfall. While this might
sound appealing compared with the current heating trend, the changes would hit
10 times faster than now, making adaptation almost impossible.
“What
surprised us was the rate at which tipping occurs,” said the paper’s lead
author, René van Westen, of Utrecht University. “It will be devastating.”
He said
there was not yet enough data to say whether this would occur in the next year
or in the coming century, but when it happens, the changes are irreversible on
human timescales.
In the
meantime, the direction of travel is undoubtedly in an alarming direction.
“We are
moving towards it. That is kind of scary,” van Westen said. “We need to take climate change much more seriously.”
A critical ocean system may be heading for collapse due to climate change, study finds
CLIMATE AND
ENVIRONMENT
A critical ocean system may be heading for
collapse due to climate change, study finds
‘The consequences of a collapse would likely be
far-reaching’
By Sarah
Kaplan
August 5,
2021 at 11:01 a.m. EDT
An aerial
view of Rhode Island shorelines. A weakening of the Atlantic Meridional
Overturning Circulation could bring extreme cold to Europe and parts of North
America, raise sea levels and disrupt seasonal monsoons. (Salwan Georges/The
Washington Post)
Human-caused
warming has led to an “almost complete loss of stability” in the system that
drives Atlantic Ocean currents, a new study has found — raising the worrying
prospect that this critical aquatic “conveyor belt” could be close to collapse.
In recent
years, scientists have warned about a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional
Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which transports warm, salty water from the
tropics to northern Europe and then sends colder water back south along the
ocean floor. Researchers who study ancient climate change have also uncovered
evidence that the AMOC can turn off abruptly, causing wild temperature swings
and other dramatic shifts in global weather systems.
Scientists
haven’t directly observed the AMOC slowing down. But the new analysis,
published Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change, draws on more than a
century of ocean temperature and salinity data to show significant changes in
eight indirect measures of the circulation’s strength.
These
indicators suggest that the AMOC is running out of steam, making it more
susceptible to disruptions that might knock it out of equilibrium, said study
author Niklas Boers, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research in Germany.
If the
circulation shuts down, it could bring extreme cold to Europe and parts of
North America, raise sea levels along the U.S. East Coast and disrupt seasonal
monsoons that provide water to much of the world.
“This is an
increase in understanding … of how close to a tipping point the AMOC might
already be,” said Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at Maynooth University who
was not involved in the study.
Boers’s
analysis doesn’t suggest exactly when the switch might happen. But “the mere
possibility that the AMOC tipping point is close should be motivation enough
for us to take countermeasures,” Caesar said. “The consequences of a collapse
would likely be far-reaching.”
The AMOC is
the product of a gigantic, ocean-wide balancing act. It starts in the tropics,
where high temperatures not only warm up the seawater but also increase its
proportion of salt by boosting evaporation. This warm, salty water flows
northeast from the U.S. coastline toward Europe — creating the current we know
as the Gulf Stream.
But as the
current gains latitude it cools, adding density to waters already laden with
salt. By the time it hits Greenland, it is dense enough to sink deep beneath
the surface. It pushes other submerged water south toward Antarctica, where it
mixes with other ocean currents as part of a global system known as the
“thermohaline circulation.”
This
circulation is at the heart of Earth’s climate system, playing a critical role
in redistributing heat and regulating weather patterns around the world.
As long as
the necessary temperature and salinity gradients exist, AMOC is
self-sustaining, Boers explained. The predictable physics that make dense water
sink and lighter water “upwell” keep the circulation churning in an endless
loop.
Tens of
millions of people have been moving into flood zones, satellite imagery shows
But climate
change has shifted the balance. Higher temperatures make ocean waters warmer
and lighter. An influx of freshwater from melting ice sheets and glaciers
dilutes North Atlantic’s saltiness, reducing its density. If these waters
aren’t heavy enough to sink, the entire AMOC will shut down.
It’s
happened before. Studies suggest that toward the end of the last ice age, a
massive glacial lake burst through a declining North American ice sheet. The
flood of freshwater spilled into the Atlantic, halting the AMOC and plunging
much of the Northern Hemisphere — especially Europe — into deep cold. Gas
bubbles trapped in polar ice indicate the cold spell lasted 1,000 years.
Analyses of plant fossils and ancient artifacts suggest that the climate shift
transformed ecosystems and threw human societies into upheaval.
“The
phenomenon is intrinsically bi-stable,” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
President Peter de Menocal said of the AMOC. “It’s either on or it’s off.”
But is it
about to turn off now?
“That’s the
core question we’re all concerned about,” said de Menocal, who was not involved
in Boers’s research.
In its 2019
“Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate,” the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that the AMOC would weaken
during this century, but total collapse within the next 300 years was only
likely under the worst-case warming scenarios.
The new
analysis suggests “the critical threshold is most likely much closer than we
would have expected,” Boers said.
The
“restoring forces,” or feedback loops, that keep the AMOC churning are in
decline, he said. All the indicators analyzed in his study — including sea
surface temperature and salt concentrations — have become increasingly
variable.
It’s as
though the AMOC is a patient newly arrived in the emergency room, and Boers has
provided scientists with an assessment of its vital signs, de Menocal said.
“All the signs are consistent with the patient having a real mortal problem.”
Physical
oceanographers like him are also trying to confirm the AMOC slowdown through
direct observations. But the AMOC is so big and complex that it will probably
take years of careful monitoring and data collection before a definitive
measurement is possible.
“Yet
everyone also realizes the jeopardy of waiting for that proof,” de Menocal
said.
Virtually
all emperor penguin colonies doomed for extinction by 2100 as climate change
looms, study finds
After all,
there are plenty of other indications that Earth’s climate is in unprecedented
territory. This summer, the Pacific Northwest was blasted by a heat wave
scientists say was “virtually impossible” without human-caused warming. China,
Germany, Belgium, Uganda and India have all experienced massive, deadly floods.
Wildfires are raging from California to Turkey to the frozen forests of
Siberia.
The world
is more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was
before humans started burning fossil fuels, and it’s getting hotter all the
time.
And the
apparent consequences of the AMOC slowing are already being felt. A persistent
“cold blob” in the ocean south of Greenland is thought to result from less warm
water reaching that region. The lagging Gulf Stream has caused exceptionally
high sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast. Key fisheries have been upended
by the rapid temperature swings, and beloved species are struggling to cope
with the changes.
If the AMOC
does completely shut down, the change would be irreversible in human lifetimes,
Boers said. The “bi-stable” nature of the phenomenon means it will find new
equilibrium in its “off” state. Turning it back on would require a shift in the
climate far greater than the changes that triggered the shutdown.
“It’s one
of those events that should not happen, and we should try all that we can to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible,” Boers said. “This is a
system we don’t want to mess with.”
What
questions do you have about climate change? Ask The Post.
Brady
Dennis contributed to this report.
Has the Amazon Reached Its ‘Tipping Point’?
Has the Amazon Reached Its ‘Tipping Point’?
Some Brazilian scientists fear that the Amazon may
become a grassy savanna — with profound effects on the climate worldwide.
By Alex
Cuadros
Published
Jan. 4, 2023
Updated
Jan. 27, 2023
One of the
first times Luciana Vanni Gatti tried to collect Amazonian air she got so woozy
that she couldn’t even operate the controls. An atmospheric chemist, she wanted
to measure the concentration of carbon high above the rainforest. To obtain her
samples she had to train bush pilots at obscure air-taxi businesses. The
discomfort began as she waited on the tarmac, holding one door open against the
wind to keep the tiny cockpit from turning into an oven in the equatorial sun.
When at last they took off, they rose precipitously, and every time they
plunged into a cloud, the plane seemed to be, in Gatti’s words, sambando —
dancing the samba. Then the air temperature dipped below freezing, and her
sweat turned cold.
Not that it
was all bad. As the frenetic port of Manaus receded, the canopy spread out
below like a shaggy carpet, immaculate green except for the pink and yellow
blooms of ipê trees, and it was one of those moments — increasingly rare in
Gatti’s experience — when you could pretend that nature had no final border,
and the Amazon looked like what it somehow still was, the world’s largest
rainforest.
This
article was written with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis
Reporting.
The Amazon
has been called “the lungs of the earth” because of the amount of carbon
dioxide it absorbs — according to most estimates, around half a billion tons
per year. The problem, scientifically speaking, is that these estimates have
always depended on a series of extrapolations. Some researchers use satellites
to detect changes that indicate the presence of greenhouse gases. But the
method is indirect, and clouds can contaminate the results. Others start with
individual tree measurements in plots scattered across the region, which allows
them to calculate the so-called biomass in each trunk, which, in turn, allows
them to work out how much carbon is being stored by the ecosystem as a whole.
But it’s hard to know how representative small study areas are, because the
Amazon is almost as large as the contiguous United States, with regional
differences in rainfall, temperature, flora and the extent of logging and
agriculture. (One study even warned of the risk of “majestic-forest selection
bias.”)
Gatti’s
solution was to measure the carbon in the air directly. Which led to the least
pleasant part of the flight. The pilot had removed the plane’s back seats to
make up for the weight of a special silver “suitcase” donated by the U.S.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Inside, a thick layer of foam
cradled 17 glass flasks with valves that opened and closed at the flick of a
switch. Each one was supposed to capture a liter and a half of air from a
different altitude, starting at 14,500 feet and going down to 1,000. To ensure
that collection always took place above the same point on the map, the pilot
had to descend in tight spirals, banking so hard that the horizon went
near-vertical.
In a
healthy rainforest, the concentration of carbon should decline as you approach
the canopy from above, because trees are drawing the element out of the
atmosphere and turning it into wood through photosynthesis. In 2010, when Gatti
started running two flights a month at each of four different spots in the
Brazilian Amazon, she expected to confirm this. But her samples showed the
opposite: At lower altitudes, the ratio of carbon increased. This suggested
that emissions from the slashing and burning of trees — the preferred method
for clearing fields in the Amazon — were actually exceeding the forest’s
capacity to absorb carbon. At first Gatti was sure it was an anomaly caused by
a passing drought. But the trend not only persisted into wetter years; it
intensified.
For a while
Gatti simply refused to believe her own data. She even became depressed. She
had always felt a deep connection to nature. As a kid in a distant town called
Cafelândia, she would climb a tree in front of her house, spending hours in a
formation of branches that seemed custom-made to cradle her arms, legs and
head. In later years, no matter how many times she flew over the Amazon, she
never got used to the sight of freshly paved highways, new dirt roads always
branching off them, forming a fish-bone pattern. Sometimes she soared past
columns of beige smoke that rose all the way to the stratosphere.
Back at her
laboratory, which is now housed at Brazil’s National Institute for Space
Research (INPE), Gatti ultimately spent two years refining her methodology. She
wanted to know just how much carbon the rainforest was losing — and even more
important, how representative these results were. The whole point of her
project was that, by capturing air from such high altitudes, it could provide
an empirical and comprehensive picture of the Amazon’s so-called carbon budget.
So she worked up seven different ways to calculate the effect of wind flows and
the composition of air from over the Atlantic Ocean, gradually perfecting her
method for subtracting the background noise. Finally she felt confident that
her “regions of influence” captured what was happening across 80 percent of the
Amazon. The net emissions averaged nearly 300 million tons of carbon per year —
roughly the emissions of the entire nation of France.
When Gatti
published her findings in Nature in 2021, it sparked panicked headlines across
the world: The lungs of the earth are exhaling greenhouse gases. But her
discovery was actually much more alarming than that. Because burning trees
release a high proportion of carbon monoxide, she could separate these
emissions from the total. And in the southeastern Amazon, air samples still
showed net emissions, suggesting that the ecosystem itself could be releasing
more carbon than it absorbed, thanks in part to decomposing plant matter — or
in Gatti’s words, “effectively dying more than growing.” The first time I spoke
to Gatti, she repurposed a lyric by the Brazilian crooner Jorge Ben Jor. How
could this be happening, she asked, in a “tropical country, blessed by God/and
beautiful by nature”?
The Amazon
is a labyrinth of a thousand rivers. They are born at 21,000 feet, with
seasonal melts from the Sajama ice cap in Bolivia, and they are born in the
dark rock of Peru’s Apacheta cliff, as glacial seepage spraying white from its
pores. They are born less than 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean; they are born in
the middle of the South American continent, in Brazil’s high plains, savannas
and sandstone ridges. Most are just tributaries of tributaries, headwaters for
much larger rivers — the Caquetá, the Madre de Dios, the Iriri, the Tapajós —
any of which, on its own, would already be among the largest rivers in the
world. Where these tributaries empty, just south of the Equator, they form the
aorta of the Amazon proper, more than 10 miles wide at its widest point. From
the Amazon’s farthest source to its mouth in the Atlantic, water flows for
4,000 miles, almost as long as the Nile. Measured by the volume it releases
into the ocean — the equivalent of a dozen Mississippis, one-fifth of all the
fresh water that reaches the world’s seas — the Amazon is the largest river in
the world.
The
consensus used to be that ecosystems are merely a product of prevailing weather
patterns. But in the 1970s, the Brazilian researcher Eneas Salati proved that
the Amazon, with its roughly 400 billion trees, also creates its own weather.
On an average day, a single large tree releases more than 100 gallons of water
as vapor. This not only lowers the air temperature through evaporative cooling;
as Salati discovered by tracking oxygen isotopes in rainwater samples, it also
gives rise to “flying rivers” — rain clouds that recycle the forest’s own
moisture five or six times, ultimately generating as much as 45 percent of its
total precipitation. By creating the conditions for a continental swath of
evergreens, this process is crucial to the Amazon’s role as a global “sink” for
carbon.
Many
scientists now fear, however, that this virtuous cycle is breaking down. Just
in the past half-century, 17 percent of the Amazon — an area larger than Texas
— has been converted to croplands or cattle pasture. Less forest means less
recycled rain, less vapor to cool the air, less of a canopy to shield against
sunlight. Under drier, hotter conditions, even the lushest of Amazonian trees
will shed leaves to save water, inhibiting photosynthesis — a feedback loop
that is only exacerbated by global warming. According to the Brazilian Earth
system scientist Carlos Nobre, if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent of the
original area, the flying rivers will weaken enough that a rainforest simply
will not be able to survive in most of the Amazon Basin. Instead it will
collapse into scrubby savanna, possibly in a matter of decades.
Much of the
evidence for this theory — including Gatti’s air-sample studies — emerged
thanks to a groundbreaking initiative led by Nobre himself. When Nobre started
trying to forecast the impact of deforestation back in 1988, he had to do it at
the University of Maryland, because his home country lacked the computing power
for serious climate modeling. Brazil was so strapped for resources that foreign
researchers even dominated Amazon fieldwork. But Nobre spearheaded a program
that, in the words of a Nature editorial, “revolutionized understanding of the
Amazon rainforest and its role in the Earth system.” Established in 1999 and
known as the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, or
L.B.A., it united disciplines that usually did not collaborate, bringing
together chemists like Gatti with biologists and meteorologists. While funding
mostly came from the United States and Europe, Nobre insisted that South
Americans play leading roles, thus giving rise to a whole new generation of
Brazilian climate scientists.
Until
recently, Nobre was working under the assumption that the Amazon would not
become a net source of carbon for at least another few decades. But Gatti’s
research is not the only sign that, as he put it to me over Skype, “we are on
the eve of this tipping point.” The rain machine is slowing. Droughts used to
come once every couple of decades, with a megadrought every century or two. But
just since 1998 there have been five, two of them extreme. The effect is
particularly acute in the eastern Amazon, which has already lost a staggering
30 percent of its forest. The dry season there used to be three months long;
now it lasts more than four. During the driest months, rainfall has declined by
as much as a third in four decades, while average temperatures have risen by as
much as 3.1 degrees Celsius — triple the annual increase for the world as a
whole in the fossil-fuel era. In some parts, jungles are already being
colonized by grasses.
Losing the
Amazon, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, would be catastrophic
for the tens of thousands of species that make their home there. Rising
temperatures could also drive millions of people in the region to become
climate refugees. And it would represent a more symbolic death, too, as “saving
the rainforest” has long been a kind of synecdoche for modern environmentalism
as a whole. What scientists are most concerned about, though, is the potential
for this regional, ecological tipping point to produce knock-on effects in the
global climate. Because the Amazon’s flying rivers circulate back over the
continent, the impact may already be reaching beyond the rainforest. In 2015,
Brazil’s populous southeast was hit by historic water shortages; in 2021,
quasi-biblical sandstorms swept the region. If the flying rivers peter out
entirely, it could affect atmospheric circulation even beyond South America,
possibly influencing the weather as far away as the western United States.
But even
these consequences pale next to the fallout from putting the Amazon’s carbon
back into the atmosphere. For all the slashing and burning of recent years, the
ecosystem still stores about 120 billion tons of carbon in its trunks,
branches, vines and soil — the equivalent of about ten years of human
emissions. If all of that carbon is released, it could warm the planet by as
much as 0.3 degrees Celsius. According to the Princeton ecologist Stephen
Pacala, this alone would probably make the Paris Agreement — the international
accord to limit warming since preindustrial times to 2 degrees — “impossible to
achieve.” Which, in turn, may mean that other climate tipping points are
breached around the world. As the British scientist Tim Lenton put it to me, “The
Amazon feeds back to everything.”
In May I
joined Gatti on a trip to the northeastern Amazon. Though it was not exactly
part of her research, she wanted to visit the Tapajós National Forest, a
1.4-million-acre conservation area that held clues to the rainforest’s
mysterious emissions, and to the transformation predicted by Nobre. First she
flew from São Paulo 1,500 miles north to Belém, at the Amazon’s mouth in the
Atlantic. From there she flew to Santarém, 400 miles upstream, where the
Amazon’s muddy brown waters are met by the dark blue Tapajós River. In the dry
season, tourists come from across Brazil to the Tapajós’s white-sand beaches.
Now it was raining heavily, the beaches under water. The river lapped at
Santarém’s sidewalks.
Santarém is
one of Brazil’s oldest cities, founded by Jesuit missionaries at a time when
the only local commodity was Indigenous souls. Its fortunes rose with the
rubber boom of the 19th century, and fell with the bust of the 20th. More
recently, it has been transformed by China’s growing demand for soybeans, which
are used as livestock feed and cooking oil. Gatti pointed out the long narrow
barges docking at a terminal run by Cargill, the American commodities-trading
giant. It began operating in 2003, the year before Gatti started running
flights from Santarém’s tiny airport. As we drove south on the BR-163, also
known as Brazil’s “grain corridor,” Gatti recalled how, back then, so many of
the fields were grass for grazing cattle. Of all the deforested land in the
Amazon, more than two-thirds is pasture. Here, though, Gatti watched as the
grass gave way to a “sea of soy.”
Before our
trip, Nobre had warned me to keep a low profile, because Gatti had become a
public face amid the buzz around her discoveries. Just a few weeks later, the
Indigenous-rights advocate Bruno Pereira and the environmental journalist Dom
Phillips would be murdered. Profit makes its own law in the Amazon. In the
Tapajós region, landowners must preserve 50 percent of their property as
rainforest. But Gatti noticed how farmers and ranchers continued to expand
their fields, ever so gradually, in long, thin strips meant to evade detection
by the satellites of her own employer, INPE. In 2006 the soy industry agreed not
to plant in newly deforested areas. But there are ways around this, too. Some
farmers bribe local officials for falsified documents. Others transfer land to
front men so that they can violate the moratorium without sullying their name.
As we drove, Gatti noted violations to report, even though one of her own
former colleagues once received death threats for this. She did not hide her
affinities, favoring T-shirts with toucans and macaws on florid backgrounds.
Gatti, now
62, has always had a rebellious streak. When she was in college in the late
1970s, some fellow students were arrested for protesting the dictatorship.
Outraged, she joined an underground political party and stopped attending
classes for a while. Though she was scarcely aware of this at the time, it was
the military regime that oversaw the first modern effort to colonize the
rainforest. One of its most ambitious projects was the Trans-Amazonian Highway,
which pierced 2,600 miles west from the coast and now forms the southern border
of the Tapajós National Forest. The goal was partly to fill what the generals
saw as a “demographic void,” keeping foreign powers like the United States from
moving in. They also hoped to relieve pressure on ballooning cities by uniting
“men without land in the northeast and land without men in the Amazon.” Never
mind that the forest was already occupied by a multitude of Indigenous groups;
they, too, would be made into productive citizens.
The
military regime had also built the BR-163, which branches off from the Trans-Amazonian,
forming the Tapajós’s eastern border. As we sped along it, signs advertised
land for sale, a store called House of Seeds, a World Church of the Power of
God. To our right, the Tapajós was a looming wall of green. To our left were
private lands where forests were interspersed with croplands. It was the tail
end of the soy harvest now, when many landowners started a rotation of corn;
tractors rolled through, long metal wings spraying pesticides. Gatti pointed
out a freshly cleared area; the trunks lay scattered like a game of pickup
sticks. Even when landowners followed the law, what was once a seamless
ecosystem became an archipelago, fragments of forest hemmed in by flat
expanses. At one point we passed a lone Brazil nut tree, inanely protected by
Brazilian law even amid the monoculture. “Here lies the forest,” Gatti
declared.
As she
spoke, Gatti gesticulated so vehemently that both hands sometimes came off the
steering wheel. She betrayed no affection for Jair Bolsonaro, the former army
officer who spent four years as president pushing to develop the Amazon.
Claiming (baselessly) that his own government’s deforestation numbers were a
lie, he strangled INPE’s funding to the point that it reportedly had to shut
off its supercomputer. He also slashed budgets for protecting Indigenous people
and the environment. Predictably, deforestation accelerated; in 2021, a
thousand trees were cut down every minute. Gatti sometimes thought about
quitting, moving with her German shepherd to an eco-villa in the countryside.
With Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva back in the presidency, though, she is feeling
hopeful for the first time in years. The last time he was in office, from 2003
to 2011, deforestation fell by two-thirds — and now he has promised to halt
deforestation entirely. The question is whether that will be enough to halt a
process that may now have a momentum of its own.
The War for
the Rainforest
March 16,
2022
Eventually
Gatti pulled off to the right, through a tunnel of overhanging branches and
into an open area where tall trees shaded a research base built as part of
Nobre’s L.B.A. The base resembled an eco-lodge, with low-slung wooden buildings
topped by clay-tiled roofs. Night was falling, the roar of frogs competing with
the distant howl of monkeys. We were met by a 39-year-old biologist, Erika
Berenguer, who wore an old white T-shirt, overlarge and dirty. Her specialty,
she said, was desgraça — calamity. It turns out that deforestation numbers
actually understate the problem of the Amazon, because a fifth of the standing
forest has been “degraded” by logging, burning and fragmentation. Now based in
Oxford, Berenguer has spent the last 12 years studying how these ills affect
the Amazon’s ability to store carbon. As she would explain, though, even she
was shocked by what happened in 2015, a critical turning point in the health of
the ecosystem.
At the time
Berenguer’s project was to measure every single tree in a few dozen plots in
and around the Tapajós National Forest, at regular intervals, to calculate the
weight of all the organic matter, or biomass, which serves as a proxy for
carbon. At first, when she noticed flames inside the conservation area, she
just kept doing her work — gathering up leaf litter, fixing tape around
centuries-old trunks, tagging each one with numbered scraps of metal sliced
from beer cans. As Berenguer’s colleague Jos Barlow likes to point out, outside
observers usually fail to distinguish between deforestation fires
(intentionally set to clear freshly clear-cut areas) and wildfires (when the
flames accidentally spread to standing forests). Now it was August, the height
of the dry season, when ranchers and farmers in the Amazon clear fields with
fire. Almost every year, embers floated across the BR-163 highway, igniting
leaves on the forest floor. But the forest itself remained so damp that the
flames could not spread far.
Berenguer,
a native of cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro, made a point of sweating alongside her
assistants, local men with nicknames like Xarope (Syrup) and Graveto (Stick),
whose families had settled by the BR-163 as part of the colonization push of
the 1970s. They were not too concerned, either. As subsistence farmers, they
also used fire to maintain their lands. It is a tradition that dates back to
the region’s oldest inhabitants, Indigenous people who discovered that ash
fertilizes the nutrient-poor soils. Outside the rarest of megadroughts, they
never had to worry about losing control of the flames. Researchers have found
areas of the Amazon that, according to sediment core samples, went 4,000 years
without a single burn.
As
Berenguer worked through September, however, the smoke from disparate fires
coagulated into a permanent, indistinguishable haze. It permeated everything —
their truck, their clothes, even Berenguer’s bra. When they kicked away dead
leaves, they noticed that the soil beneath was cracking. The little plants of
the understory wilted. Soon everyone was coughing; people took turns breathing
mist from a nebulizer, and her own snot turned black. Each morning, she and her
assistants had to clean a layer of fresh soot from the windshield of their
truck. They turned the brights on, turned the emergency lights on and edged
onto the highway. They drove slowly but couldn’t see vehicles ahead until they
were nearly colliding with them. The sky was hidden. The sun was a red
suggestion. Ash fell like alien snow.
The fires
were escaping to crop gardens, to pastureland where cattle grazed, to the
thatched roofs of houses. And the fires were doing what they should not:
spreading inside the rainforest. Splitting her time between Britain and the
Amazon, Berenguer had come to know her research plots as intimately as her old
neighborhood in Rio. She thought of her favorite places as rainforest versions
of her local coffee shop, her local bakery. There were the fallen logs where
she and her assistants returned day after day so they could sit and eat lunch.
There were the tall, thin buttress roots that acted as a makeshift bathroom
stall, hiding her from view when necessary. In one plot, a thick loop of liana
hung from the canopy, making for the perfect swing. Now she wanted to save
these places.
Among the
great old trees of the Tapajós, the flames rose a mere foot from the ground.
Berenguer and Xarope could stamp them out with their boots. But their efforts
were in vain. The flames consolidated into a thin, uninterrupted arc that
stretched for miles into the forest. It advanced slowly, a thousand feet per
day; in its wake, the rich perennial green was left brown and gray and
charcoal-black. Berenguer watched as animals fled from the fire line —
butterflies, deer, thumbnail-size frogs. One day she surprised a snake. It
leaped onto a smoldering trunk, accidentally immolating itself, and Berenguer
heard a sizzling sound, like buttered bread hitting a griddle plate.
Across the
Amazon, more forests ultimately burned than in the largest California wildfires
in history, putting half a billion tons of carbon back into the atmosphere —
the equivalent of more than one year of emissions by Mexico. It was the
Amazon’s worst wildfire season on record. Subsequent years have not been as dry,
but wildfires have mostly remained well above the average of previous seasons —
yet another sign that the ecosystem is losing its natural resilience, entering
an alternate feedback loop. In Gatti’s samples, the 2015-16 drought also marked
the moment when, as she put it to me, “the southeastern Amazon went to pot,”
and the forest itself started consistently releasing more carbon than it
absorbed. Fire does more than destroy trees. It also accelerates the
transformations predicted by Nobre’s tipping-point theory.
Just about
every researcher I spoke to for this article was careful to emphasize their
deep respect for Nobre, who has done so much to advance Amazon climate science.
But some have reservations about his theory. Partly this is because his
earliest simulations showed that, with less rain, the Amazon would give way to
the Cerrado, a savanna that covers much of central Brazil. The Cerrado, though,
is a carbon-rich patchwork of grasslands, marshes and forests that is itself
endangered by global warming and expanding agriculture. How could such a
vibrant ecosystem represent ecological collapse? Other researchers, having
studied the Amazon up close in mucky fieldwork, object to the use of computer
models that apply uniform assumptions to this multifarious biome. Still others
express a more pragmatic concern — that the way Nobre communicates his theory
is demobilizing. “Carlos gives the impression that the entire forest is going
to collapse at the same time, water will stop circulating and it will all
become a big savanna,” Berenguer told me. Gatti’s article, she added, actually
led to some misunderstanding, too. Attending the United Nations Climate Change
Conference in Glasgow in 2021, she even heard people say that if the Amazon was
now a net emitter, why bother saving it?
Nobre
himself is aware of these qualms. Now he hastens to clarify that the
transformation will take different forms in different regions, and that any end
state will be more of an impoverished scrubland than a Cerrado-style savanna.
He also predicts that the Amazon’s western forests, which are rainier
throughout the year because of their proximity to the Andes Mountains, would
survive a tipping point. His theory, though, is no longer confined to computer
simulations; in the southeastern basin, it may already be playing out. In one
study, a team led by the researcher Paulo Brando intentionally set a series of
fires in swaths of forest abutted by an inactive soy plantation. After a second
burn, coincidentally during a drought year, one plot lost nearly a third of its
canopy cover, and African grasses — imported species commonly used in cattle
pasture — moved in. Brando also participated in an observational study, led by
his colleague Divino Silvério, of the region’s enormous Xingu Indigenous Park.
Indigenous lands are home to much of Brazil’s best-preserved rainforest. But
after repeated wildfires, the Xingu’s grasslands — traditionally maintained as
a source of thatch — nearly tripled in size in less than two decades, to 8
percent of the total area. In the central Amazon, meanwhile, naturally
occurring white-sand savannas are taking over seasonally flooded forests —
again, largely thanks to fire.
It is
tempting to think of climate change as a process that, absent human emissions,
would only happen gradually. But as Tim Lenton points out, our planet is
naturally prone to “threshold behavior.” In a widely cited 2008 paper, Lenton
brought the catchy language of tipping points to the arcane revelations of
Earth systems science and paleoclimatology. Throughout our planet’s history, in
individual ecosystems as well as the wider climate, small, incremental changes
have started to reinforce one another until — sometimes suddenly — one feedback
loop was replaced with a radically different one. What Lenton calls the most
“iconic” examples are the Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last glacial period,
when temperatures in Greenland repeatedly shot up by as much as 15 degrees
Celsius in the span of a few decades, before cooling again. The causes are
intensely debated but most likely involved changes in ice-sheet coverage and
the circulation of seawaters.
There is
already evidence that our current era of global warming is shifting the borders
of various biomes. In Alaska, for example, white spruce trees are moving into
areas of tundra for the first time in thousands of years. But humans may have
triggered ecological “regime shifts” even before the fossil-fuel era. The
Australian Outback was probably lush and green until around 40,000 years ago,
when people hunted grass-eating megafauna to extinction, leaving more fuel for
fires, which apparently disrupted the continent’s own “flying rivers.” On
Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, deforestation is thought to have amplified the
drought that toppled the Maya. Then there is the Sahara. Ten thousand years
ago, the area resembled temperate South Africa, but livestock grazing may have
helped turn it into a desert. As the NOAA scientist Elena Shevliakova, who has
modeled the global impacts of Amazon deforestation, put it to me, “If a green
Sahara is possible, why not a savanna in the Amazon?”
The Amazon
has survived ice ages. It may not survive humans. By hastening the demise of
its flying rivers, cattle ranchers and soy farmers may be endangering their own
livelihoods too. But thanks to what climatologists call teleconnections —
weather anomalies linked across thousands of miles — they also threaten
agriculture much farther afield. In the El Niño teleconnection, an unusually
warm Pacific Ocean pulls the jet stream south, bringing drier conditions to
Canada and the northern United States (as well as to the Amazon region).
According to a study led by the Notre Dame researcher David Medvigy, a similar
pattern could emerge if the Amazon stops recycling its own moisture, as the dry
air would travel north in winter. This could halve the snowpack in the Sierra
Nevada, a crucial source of water for an already-drought-stricken California.
A growing
number of scientists worry that one tipping point can trigger another. In some
cases the influence is direct. If Greenland’s ice sheet disappears, the
circulation of Atlantic seawaters could be drastically altered, which would, in
turn, wreak havoc on weather patterns across the globe, making Scandinavia
uninhabitably cold, warming the Southern Hemisphere, drying out forests. The
impact of Amazon dieback would be to release tens of billions of tons of carbon
into the atmosphere — which is more diffuse, but no less dangerous. When Lenton
and his colleague David Armstrong McKay recently compiled the latest evidence
on an array of global climate thresholds, they found that even a very
optimistic 1.5 degrees of warming since preindustrial times may be enough to
trigger the gradual but irreversible melting of ice sheets in Greenland and
West Antarctica, and to thaw methane-trapping permafrost.
It is
difficult to predict how all these shifts might interact, as most models
assume, for example, that Atlantic seawaters will always circulate according to
known patterns. But in a 2018 paper, Lenton and the American Earth system
scientist Will Steffen warned that a dominolike “tipping cascade” could push
the global climate itself beyond a critical threshold, into an alternate
feedback loop called “hothouse Earth,” with hostile conditions not seen for
millions of years. It can feel like doom-mongering to contemplate such a
scenario. There is no way to put a number on it. Even if it is improbable,
however, Lenton argues that the consequences would be so dire that it must be
taken seriously. He sees it as a “profound risk-management problem”: If we
focus only on the most likely outcomes, we will never predict anomalies like
2021’s unprecedented “heat dome” in the Pacific Northwest. Or last year’s
winter heat wave in Antarctica, when temperatures jumped 70 degrees Fahrenheit
above the average. Or, for that matter, the proliferation of wildfires in the
world’s largest rainforest.
Berenguer
wanted to show Gatti how the 2015 megafires had altered forests in the
northeastern Amazon. So Xarope picked us up from the research base in the
morning, and we got back onto the BR-163. Here and there along the highway,
Berenguer pointed out “tree skeletons” — dead trees whose sun-bleached branches
poked from the otherwise lush green canopy of the Tapajós. Fire did not always
kill them right away. When Berenguer was back in Britain, her assistants would
send her updates by WhatsApp. You know Tree 71? one message might say,
referring to a centuries-old specimen in one of her plots. So, it just died. It
could take a few years more for it to fall to the ground. Some of the carbon in
Gatti’s air samples, then, could be a delayed consequence of past fires. But as
we would see inside the living forest, something stranger was happening, too.
Eventually
we exited the highway for an unmarked dirt track that ended in a wall of
vegetation. Machete in hand, Berenguer led us onto a tight path. Just a few
days earlier, she and her assistants spent hours clearing the way for us, but
new vines were already reclaiming the space. “You can see it’s a mess,”
Berenguer said. An impassable thicket of reedy bamboo hemmed us in on either
side; the canopy was low above our heads. To me it looked normal enough, as far
as jungle goes. In reality, though, a healthy rainforest should be easy to walk
through, because the largest trees consume so much light and water that the
understory lacks the resources to grow very dense.
We walked
over fallen trunks. Unlike in the southeastern Amazon, Berenguer still saw no
evidence of savannalike vegetation moving in. But the balance of native species
was now out of whack, as opportunistic “pioneers” occupied the spaces left by
dead giants. In some areas, fast-growing embaúba trees stood so uniformly that
they resembled the stems of a wood-pulp plantation. In others, hundreds of
newborn lianas formed a kind of snake nest. (Berenguer’s team had to measure
each one individually, a hellish task.) She pointed to a tall, proud tree that
had somehow survived the blaze. Because all of the other nearby individuals of
its species had been killed, it was unlikely to reproduce; Berenguer called it
a “zombie.”
A
University of Birmingham researcher named Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert has found
similar changes across the Amazon. Even in the absence of actual
“savannization,” trees that can withstand drier conditions are proliferating,
while those that need more water are dying in greater numbers. The dominance of
embaúba is particularly worrisome because the trees are hollow, storing far
less carbon than a slower-growing species like mahogany. Their life cycle is
also relatively short, leaving more frequent gaps in the canopy. The end result
of this transformation is unclear, but Gatti’s numbers have only continued to
get worse. According to her latest five-year averages, the Brazilian Amazon is
already giving off 50 percent more carbon than it was in the first five years
of her project — and even the historically healthier western forests are
sometimes emitting more than they absorb.
Eventually
we came into a clearing. I began to sweat. The sun was searing hot; Berenguer
said that unshaded ground can reach 176 degrees Fahrenheit here. Clearings are
a natural part of the Amazonian cycle, as large trees inevitably die and other
species gradually take their place. But even logging could not match the power
of fire to turn the forest into “Swiss cheese.” Berenguer never used to need
sunscreen because the canopy was so thick; now she gets sunburned here. And the
profusion of holes sets off a vicious cycle. The sun dries out the vegetation;
trees shed leaves to preserve water; the litter becomes fuel for the next fire.
The gaps also create a “wind corridor,” allowing strong drafts to penetrate
deep into the forest during storms. Perversely, with their heavy trunks, the
largest, oldest trees are especially vulnerable to being knocked over.
“This used
to be a beautiful forest,” Xarope said.
“Some days
it makes me sad,” Berenguer said. “Other days it pisses me off. This is one of
those days.”
Berenguer
had hoped that the misfortune of the megafire would at least provide an
opportunity to study how a rainforest recovers from such desgraça. But she
worried that she would never find out, because it would never get the chance.
Among scientists who study the Amazon, the notion of multiple tipping points,
specific to each region’s ecology, has increasingly taken hold. And some now
speak of an even more urgent “flammability tipping point,” past which an
ecosystem that never evolved to burn starts burning regularly. During the
drought of 2015, wildfires also ravaged another nearby conservation area, the
Reserva Extrativista Tapajós-Arapiúns. Because it was left so degraded, with so
much dried-out fuel on the floor, there was a much more intense conflagration
in 2017, even though that was a wet year. This time the flames were not the
foot-tall ones that are usually seen in the Amazon but reached all the way to
the canopy.
Though her
mainstay was ecological calamity, Berenguer also wanted us to see what
well-preserved old-growth forest looks like. In strictly scientific terms, it
was a control, a necessary point of comparison with the messed-up forests, as
she called them (though she used a more colorful word that cannot be printed
here). She also let on that she welcomed the rare excuse to traipse around a
more “David Attenborough” setting. So we drove south on the BR-163 until we hit
the 117th kilometer marker, where we re-entered the Tapajós.
We were
walking for only a few minutes before the difference became obvious. It was
cooler and darker. The flora was far more varied, forming distinct layers as
you lifted your eyes to the sky. The canopy was far more closed, the understory
far more open; Berenguer and Xarope didn’t even need to prune the trail for our
visit. There were lianas here, too, but they were few and large. One was as
thick as a tree; Berenguer said it was probably centuries old.
It’s hard
to shake a popular image of scientists as rigorously rational, unemotional
about their work. But Berenguer was not embarrassed to admit that, as she put
it, she and her colleagues have their own personal tipping points, too. For a
while after the 2015 fires, she lost her sense of purpose, the hope that her
work could make a difference. The flames had even ravaged the plot where she
used to swing on that perfect loop of liana. “Your whole reference system is
being destroyed, and you’re powerless,” she said. “It’s hard to explain without
sounding like a tree-hugger. Not to say I don’t hug trees, because I do.” Some
trees were too big for that, though. Here was an urucurana, with its winglike
buttress roots taller than my whole body. Here was a soaring strangler fig,
which surrounds another tree’s trunk as it grows, eventually killing its host.
“What a dirty trick!” Gatti exclaimed.
At one
point we came upon a low tree bearing a yellow fruit that neither Berenguer nor
Xarope could identify.
“Is it
poisonous?” Gatti asked.
“I don’t
know,” Xarope said. Then he plucked one from a branch and bit into it. We did
the same. There was not much pulp around the stone but the flavor was sharp and
rich.
Berenguer
remembered a past research trip to track frugivores — fruit-eating creatures.
She and her colleagues had to remain absolutely still and silent for hours to
avoid spooking them. I suggested we try it out for a minute, just to hear what
an old-growth forest sounds like without humans tramping around.
We stopped
walking; Berenguer sat on a log. As our chitchat faded, the racket of birds
swelled as if someone had suddenly turned the volume dial on a stereo. I closed
my eyes for a moment. When I looked again, Berenguer’s eyes had narrowed to
slits, her lips curled into a faint smile. Earlier, describing what she felt in
this place, Berenguer used the word grandeza, which literally means greatness,
but also bigness. The rainforest made her feel small, and she liked this.
Gatti had
spoken about feeling, at least temporarily, not so separate from the natural
world — almost as if she were a kid again, ensconced in that tree in front of
her house. Now she stood with her eyes shut, palms open at her sides as if she
were at a religious revival, as if she were receiving something.
I glanced
over at Xarope; he looked amused. Then the spell was broken by the more
familiar sound, distant but unmistakable, of a semi truck shifting gears.
This
article was written with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis
Reporting.
Alex
Cuadros is the author of “Brazillionaires.” He has been reporting from the
Amazon since 2013 and is now working on a book about the Cinta Larga Indigenous
group. Max Guther is a Berlin-based illustrator known for his work in a
hyperreal isometric 3-D style, often with an unfamiliar perspective from above.
A
correction was made on Jan. 10, 2023: An earlier version of this article
miscalculated the volume of potential carbon-dioxide emissions that the Amazon
stores. The ecosystem can store the equivalent of 10 years of fossil-fuel
emissions, not three years’ worth.
El Niño forecast to drive record heat from the Amazon to Alaska in 2024
El Niño forecast to drive record heat from the
Amazon to Alaska in 2024
Coastal areas facing ‘enormous and urgent climate
crisis’ as event supercharges human-caused global heating, scientists say
Damian
Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Thu 29 Feb
2024 16.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/29/el-nino-forecast-record-heat-2024-climate-crisis
The current
climate event known as El Niño is likely to supercharge global heating and
deliver record-breaking temperatures from the Amazon to Alaska in 2024,
analysis has found.
Coastal
areas of India by the Bay of Bengal and by the South China Sea, as well as the
Philippines and the Caribbean, are also likely to experience unprecedented heat
in the period to June, the scientists said, after which El Niño may weaken.
The natural
phenomenon, in which heat is released from the western Pacific Ocean, is known
to increase global surface temperatures and helped 2023 smash the record for
the hottest year by a large margin. Extreme heat in the second half of 2023 as
El Niño kicked in had severe impacts on people living in North America, Europe
and China, South America and Madagascar as the climate crisis intensified.
The new
analysis uses computer models to identify the likely regional hotspots in the
first half of 2024. It also found there was a 90% chance that the global
temperature over this period would set a new record.
“Intense
heatwaves and tropical cyclones, combined with [human-caused] global sea level
rise, [mean] densely populated coastal areas are facing an enormous and urgent
climate crisis that challenges our current capacity for adaptation, mitigation
and risk management,” said Dr Ning Jiang, at the Chinese Academy of
Meteorological Sciences in Beijing, and his co-authors.
“This
impending warmth heightens the risk of year-round marine heatwaves and
escalates the threat of wildfires and other negative consequences in Alaska and
the Amazon basin,” he said. Seas and coastal areas are particularly vulnerable
because the ocean can hold more heat than land, meaning hot conditions can
persist there for longer periods of time.
The Earth’s
climate cycles naturally between El Niño and its cooler counterpart, La Niña.
This boosts and moderates the strong underlying trend of global heating, which
is caused by the rising levels of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels in the
atmosphere.
El Niño
usually peaks between November and January and so the new study, published in
the journal Scientific Reports, modelled the effects of the event on the
regional variation in surface air temperatures from July 2023 to June 2024.
Biden says killing of more than 100 Palestinians near aid trucks will complicate ceasefire talks
From 3h ago
16.27 GMT
Biden says killing of more than 100 Palestinians
near aid trucks will complicate ceasefire talks
Joe Biden
said moments ago outside the White House, while on his way to the US-Mexico
border, that he’s reviewing the reports of Israeli troops shooting people
crowding for desperately needed food aid in Gaza – but he already is clear that
that the deadly incident will complicate talks on a ceasefire.
“I know it
will,” the US president told reporters gathering on the south lawn at the White
House as he left for a visit to the US-Mexico border today, when asked whether
the tragedy Gaza unfolding in would complicate negotiations.
Health
authorities in Gaza said the IDF fired on people waiting for aid near Gaza City
on Thursday had killed 104 Palestinians and wounded 280, with one hospital
saying it had received 10 bodies and dozens of injured patients, Reuters adds.
Biden
added:
We’re
checking that out right now. There’s two competing versions of what happened. I
don’t have an answer yet.
The
president also said that his previous comments that he hoped for a temporary
ceasefire by Monday, in the battle Israel is waging in Gaza with the goal of
destroying Hamas, would now “probably not” happen.
17.42 GMT
10m ago
18.57 GMT
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) was not
involved in the aid distribution in northern Gaza today that turned deadly and
resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people, the head of the agency has
said.
“Another
day from hell,” UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini posted to social
media, noting that more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since
the outbreak of war in October. He wrote:
An
additional 100 people are reportedly killed & 700 injured when they were
desperately trying to get lifesaving humanitarian aid from a convoy.
Neither
UNRWA nor any other UN agency were involved in this distribution. When will
this madness end?
The scenes
we are seeing unfold in Israel and Gaza mark a new chapter in the Middle East
conflict. The consequences and scale of losses are already devastating, and the
recent attack – and the war that now follows – is likely to shape global
politics for years to come.
With
correspondents on the ground and reporters updating this liveblog 24/7, the
Guardian is well-placed to provide comprehensive, fact-checked reporting, to
help all of us make sense of this perilous moment for the region. Reader-funded
and free from commercial influence, we can report fearlessly on world events as
they develop.
We believe
everyone deserves equal access to accurate news. Help power the Guardian’s
journalism and enable us to keep our quality reporting open for everyone. If
you can, please support us on a monthly basis from just £2. It takes less than
a minute to set up. Thank you.
18.51 GMT
The US is
urgently seeking information on what took place in northern Gaza, where health
authorities said more than 100 Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces as
they waited for an aid delivery, a spokesperson for the US state department has
said.
Matthew
Miller, speaking to reporters, said the US understands that Israel is
conducting an investigation of the incident.
He added that Washington will be pushing for answers and continues to make clear to Israel that all possible measures must be taken to allow the entry of m
Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Trump’s Immunity Claim, Setting Arguments for April
Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Trump’s Immunity
Claim, Setting Arguments for April
The former president’s trial on charges of plotting to
subvert the 2020 election will remain on hold while the justices consider the
matter.
Adam Liptak
By Adam
Liptak
Reporting
from Washington
Feb. 28,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/us/supreme-court-trump-immunity-trial.html
The Supreme
Court on Wednesday agreed to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is
immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election,
further delaying his criminal trial as it considers the matter.
The
justices scheduled arguments for the week of April 22 and said proceedings in
the trial court would remain frozen, handing at least an interim victory to Mr.
Trump. His litigation strategy in all of the criminal prosecutions against him
has consisted, in large part, of trying to slow things down.
The Supreme
Court’s response to Mr. Trump put the justices in the unusual position of
deciding another aspect of the former president’s fate: whether and how quickly
Mr. Trump could go to trial. That, in turn, could affect his election prospects
and, should he be re-elected, his ability to scuttle the prosecution.
The timing
of the argument was a sort of compromise. Jack Smith, the special counsel
overseeing the federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, had asked the court to move
more quickly, requesting that the justices hear the case in March.
Mr. Trump,
by contrast, had asked the court to proceed at its usual deliberate pace and to
consider the case only after he asked the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia Circuit to review the decision of a unanimous three-judge
panel, which had rejected his claim of absolute immunity.
In settling
on the week of April 22, the court picked the last three scheduled argument
sessions of its current term and seemed to indicate that its decision would
follow before the end of its current term, in late June.
That does
not mean the trial would start right away if Mr. Trump lost. Pretrial
proceedings, currently paused, must first be completed. By some rough
calculations, the trial could be delayed until late September or October,
plunging the proceedings into the heart of the election.
Mr. Trump’s
emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene had been fully
briefed since Feb. 15, and the court’s delay in addressing it suggested that
the justices differed about how to proceed. It takes four votes to add a case
to the court’s docket but five to grant a stay, and that math may have played a
role in the court’s calculations.
A separate
case, on Mr. Trump’s eligibility to hold office, may also have played a part.
The court heard arguments in that case, from Colorado, on Feb. 8 and is
expected to rule soon.
If the
court rules for Mr. Trump in the Colorado case, it might be attracted to the
optics of ruling against him on his claim of immunity, which legal experts say
is an ambitious argument with potentially frightening implications.
Got a news
tip about the courts?If you have information to share about the Supreme Court
or other federal courts, please send us a secure tip at nytimes.com/tips.
The Supreme
Court’s brief order said the court would decide this question: “Whether and if
so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from
criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his
tenure in office.”
In his
emergency application, Mr. Trump said the appeals court panel had been wrong to
rule that he may be criminally charged for his conduct as president. Total
immunity for his official conduct, Mr. Trump’s application said, is required by
the separation of powers, implicit in procedures for impeaching the president
and needed to prevent partisan misuse of the criminal justice system.
“An absence
of criminal immunity for official acts threatens the very ability of the
president to function properly,” the filing said. “Any decision by the
president on a politically controversial question would face the threat of
indictment by the opposing party after a change in administrations.”
Meet The
Times’s Supreme Court Reporter
Adam
Liptak, who has been covering the Supreme Court since 2008, started at The
Times as a copy boy in 1984. He left to attend Yale Law School, became a
practicing lawyer and worked in The Times’s corporate legal department before
returning to the newsroom. Learn about how he approaches covering the court.
“Conducting
a monthslong criminal trial of President Trump at the height of election season
will radically disrupt President Trump’s ability to campaign against President
Biden — which appears to be the whole point of the special counsel’s persistent
demands for expedition,” the application said. “The D.C. Circuit’s order thus
threatens immediate irreparable injury to the First Amendment interests of
President Trump and tens of millions of American voters, who are entitled to
hear President Trump’s campaign message as they decide how to cast their
ballots in November.”
Mr. Smith,
the special counsel, took issue with every element of his argument, citing his
efforts to subvert democracy.
If Mr.
Trump’s “radical claim were accepted,” Mr. Smith wrote, “it would upend
understandings about presidential accountability that have prevailed throughout
history while undermining democracy and the rule of law — particularly where,
as here, a former president is alleged to have committed crimes to remain in
office despite losing an election, thereby seeking to subvert constitutional
procedures for transferring power and to disenfranchise millions of voters.”
Mr. Smith
added that there was no reason to fear tit-for-tat prosecutions that would
chill other presidents from taking decisive action.
“That
dystopian vision runs contrary to the checks and balances built into our
institutions and the framework of the Constitution,” Mr. Smith wrote.
In a
supporting brief urging the justices to deny Mr. Trump’s request for a stay,
several former prominent officials who had served in Republican administrations
said the court did not need to rule broadly, as the conduct Mr. Trump is
accused of was so clearly outside of any immunity the Constitution might
confer.
“Denying a
stay would not preclude possible federal criminal immunity for a president’s
official acts in some different, exceptional situation,” the brief said.
Mr. Smith
echoed the point, citing the officials’ brief. “A sufficient basis for
resolving this case would be that, whatever the rule in other contexts not
presented here,” he wrote, “no immunity attaches to a president’s commission of
federal crimes to subvert the electoral process.”
Adam Liptak
covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A
graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The
Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak
