'There are many many reasons to be concerned…but a risk to the world's oxygen supply is not one of them,' Allison Mills from Michigan Technological University told Newsweek.
Amid this coverage, many media outlets, charities, celebrities and even world leaders repeated the claim that the Amazon produces 20 percent of the world's oxygen supply. The implication here is that the destruction of the rain forest poses a threat to this oxygen supply.
In fact, the world's oxygen levels are actually quite stable and are not dependent on rain forests, which use up as much of the gas as they produce in the long run, according to Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research. "There is a net release of oxygen while the tree is growing and storing carbon in its wood, but when the tree dies the wood rots, removing the same amount of oxygen from the air to form carbon dioxide from the carbon in the wood," he said.
"The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is 20.95 percent, and it is not changing very much," she said."From this perspective, the Amazon could burn up and blow away and the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere would not be much affected—CO2 is another story though." So if we lost the entire Amazon forest—it would only change atmospheric oxygen—which is thought to weigh 1.2 million gigatons in total—by a small amount, much less than 1 percent.
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