Rainforests More Fragile Than Estimated

The Amazon rainforest, one of the planet's most precious and besieged natural resources, is even more fragile than realized. If the planet warms even a moderate amount, a new study predicts that as much as 40 percent of it could be condemned to vanish by the end of the century.
A crippled Amazon could hasten global warming. If a significant portion of its trees die off, their vast stores of carbon would be emitted back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, pushing the climate further into dangerous levels of warming.