One of the things we think we know for sure is that trees remove the greenhouse gasCO2 from the air. This has led to the hope of saving the world through mass reforestation, which provides an astonishing variation on Martin Luther's plan to plant an apple tree today even if he knew that the world would end tomorrow.
However, as the newspapers reported in the days leading up to Easter 2021, the Amazon rainforest is increasingly losing its ability to store carbon dioxide. According to new calculations, it is no longer helping to relieve the atmosphere but, on the contrary, warming it. Scientists have always feared that the forest's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide could be exhausted, but now they have found the climate driver methane at work. It occurs as a result of flooding in the Amazon basin, to which the trees have adapted by creating a spongy tissue that forms air channels in the roots. These are used to absorb methane from the soil and transport it to the shoot, from where it escapes into the atmosphere.
This very effective greenhouse gas continues to increase as a result of slash-and-burn agriculture, which turns the rainforest into pastureland. Incidentally, when the trees burn, nitrous oxide is also released, and this N2O(nitrous oxide) has a further dramatic greenhouse effect. This means that if the rainforest loses its protective effect and fails as a climate buffer, even more effort must be made by humans to create a sustainable world, and this leads back to Luther's apple tree, whereby the monk thought less about the fear of greenhouse gases and more about the hope of life and a human contribution to the preservation of divine creation. Modernity has become more skeptical, and climate researchers point out that the mass increase in forest areas is giving the earth a darker face, which means less reflection of sunlight because it traps more heat rays on the planet. One thinks of Goethe's Faust, in which the devil says that he always wants evil while creating good. Man acts like his opposite. He constantly wants to do something good, and the world gets worse and worse as a result. Nevertheless, we cannot try to do evil.
