Tropical Rainforest and Ecology
The balance of CO2 and O2 without disturbing the Amazon is not neutral, which means that always consumes more CO2 and releases more oxygen than it consumes, unlike animals.
The problem is that this balance seems to be balanced each year if we consider only the biomass that produces the jungle.
But for the plants to continue living, even without producing new biomass it is required large amounts of energy they take in the atmosphere and ground water.
This is evident in infrared images taken from space, from the jungles and forests, where vegetation appears red, demonstrating the production of energy passing of this vegetation to the atmosphere as heat through the process known as transpiration or evapotranspiration which readily apparent consumption of carbon dioxide and release oxygen, a process that makes life possible for animals and humans on our planet.
The forest contains a huge amount of biomass and converts CO2 from the atmosphere into food, that is, carbohydrates that form the basis of that biomass.
In short, the vegetation, both terrestrial and air or water is responsible for maintaining the ratio of carbon dioxide by 0.3% globally, which could not be explained without it.
Unfortunately, tropical forests have been subject to indiscriminate logging clearcuts and more than a century, which is rapidly reducing its area worldwide.
In the nineties, it is estimated that there was an annual reduction of 58,000 km ². Fourteen percent of the Earth's surface was covered with primary forests, while at present, this rate has declined only six percent and at current rates of deforestation, they have disappeared around 2050.
The primary forests are replaced by fast-growing secondary vegetation but less valuable from the standpoint of conservation of ecosystems. Biologists believe that many species are being doomed to extinction, possibly more than 50,000 a year, due to the elimination of their habitat. However, the number of new species that appear each year is not known.
Moreover, neither we have studied the spread of desert areas that are salvaged or flooded for agricultural use each year. Looking at satellite images of the Sahara will see in some areas under irrigation expansion is increasing every year, as shown in Wadden, Libya, where the marginal plots are increasingly distant from the population and are larger and better defined. And they are proliferating mechanized crops (crop circle) with sprinkler irrigation system in Sahara desert. In summary, the consumption of CO2 in forests is enormous and this causes the gas to remain relatively low. Obviously, the levels or ratios of CO2 in large cities are much higher than in forest landscapes, but this is a local, not global.