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19 million hectares were being cleared every decade.in 1850, losses were around 50% higher at 30 million hectares per decade.Population growth meant that today’s rich countries across Europe and North America needed more and more resources such as land for agriculture, wood for energy, and for construction.
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Coal, railroads, and land clearing speed up greenhouse gas emission, while better agriculture and sanitation speed up population growth. carbon dioxide gas (CO2) in the atmosphere, as later measured in ancient ice, is about 290 ppm (parts per million). Mean global temperature (1850-1890) is roughly 13.6
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Fertilizers and other chemicals, electricity, and public health further accelerate growth.
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governments learn to mobilize and control industrial societies.
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"the world's forests were a significant player in global cycles of carbon and water. The conversion of forests to croplands since the early 19th century had given the first big contribution to the global rise of CO2. (Decades later, scientists realized that deforestation also contributed to cooling — for one thing, snow on exposed soil reflects more winter sunlight than a forest does — so the net effect of deforestation may have helped keep the 19th century cool.)"
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We lost 150 million hectares an area half the size of India during that decade. Clearing of the Brazilian Amazon for pasture and croplands was a major driver of this loss.
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the forest loss in the temperate regions peaked much earlier than the global forest loss. In the first half of the 20th century, temperate forests reached their peak loss at 34 million hectares per decade, and by 1990 they had passed the ‘forest transition point’.
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In the last 60 years, more than half of the tropical forests worldwide have been destroyed. The current scale and pace of destruction are alarming. In 2017, more than one football field of the forest was lost every second –the second-highest recorded since 2001.
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global loss of tropical forests contributed about 4.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year (or about 8-10% of annual human emissions of carbon dioxide).