Weather ravages Brazil

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By Alan Clendenning ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAO PAULO, Brazil | Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged. Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.

It's "the $1 million question," said Carlos Nobre, a climatologist with Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.

While a definitive answer will take years of careful study, climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the years ahead. Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall elsewhere, from Brazil's agricultural heartland to the U.S. grain belt, as rising ocean temperatures and rainforest destruction cause shifts in global climate patterns.

"It's important to note that it's likely that these types of record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the near future," Mr. Nobre said. "So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future: It's not for the next generation."

The immediate cause of the unusually heavy rains across northern Brazil is an Atlantic Ocean weather system that usually moves on in March, but stayed put until May this year.

Almost simultaneously, southern Brazilian states far from the Amazon have suffered from an extended drought, caused by La Nina — a periodic cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean. And La Nina alternates with El Nino, a heating up of Pacific waters that is blamed for catastrophic forest fires plaguing the Amazon in recent years.

"Something is telling us to be more careful with the planet. Changes are happening around the world, and we're seeing them as well in Brazil," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said this month on his radio program.

Brazil's government approved $440 million in emergency funding in response to the northern floods and southern drought.