When you mess with the Amazon rainforest you mess with a lot of
things — 2.5 million species of insects, 40,000 species of
plants, 1,300 species of birds, and those are only the known
ones. The 1.4 billion of acres of thriving, sprawling biology
that cover the Amazon help drive the very metabolism of a
continent. And now it appears that the rainforest is at least
partly responsible for something else: the Amazonian clouds
themselves. Clear-cut the land and you could, in effect, clear-
cut the sky. That improbable idea comes courtesy of a paper just
released in the journal Science, the product of work done by
researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz,
Germany. The clouds in the Amazon, just like everywhere else,
consist of water vapor clinging to tiny clumps of carbon
compounds. In forested areas, the carbon compounds are
byproducts of plants’ metabolism; in populated areas, they are
often from human pollution. Most of the time, atmospheric
chemists can see the carbon clumping taking place;