The plight of the rainforests has not been "front page news" for
several years now, due possibly to the media's incessant passion to cover
events in the war against Iraq and terrorism. But the fact that
rainforests are not headlines, as they were a few years ago, does not mean
the problems facing these vital forests have gone away, or have been
solved. Indeed, the rainforests are in dire straights, and must be
protected, as the Dalai Lama states in the "Foreword" to Arnold Newman's
book, Tropical Rainforest: "Resolving the present environmental crisis is
not just a question of ethics but a question of our own survival. If we
exploit it in extreme waysâ€in the long run we ourselves and future
There are ample reasons to be concerned about the health of Earth's
rainforests, as this paper will report and analyze. But moreover, whereas
the problem of global warming is affecting rainforests, on the other hand,
the rainforests' which are burning are spewing millions of tons of carbon
into the air, contributing to the problem of global warming.
Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect
The earth's temperature is definitely heating up, according to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (World Almanac,
2002); the average global temperatures between 1880 - 2000 rose from 56.65
degrees to 57.60 degrees. In fact (Newman, 127-128), "the 16 warmest years
since record keeping began in 1860 have occurred since 1979, which may be
unprecedented in the last 1,200 years," according to NOAA data that Newman
retrieved for his book. James Baker, a NOAA administrator quoted in
Newman's book, reports that as of the year 2000, the hottest year in
recorded history was 1998, and the second hottest was 1997. "There is not
time in recorded history that we have seen this sequence of record-
setting," Baker explained. These data are "remarkable and sobering," he
...