How does destruction of the forest affect rainfall?
BILL: As you can probably hear in the background, we are getting thunder and lightning happening. This is the tropical wet season and so we are going to be getting thunderous rains here, I would say pretty soon. But one of the big concerns is that, in fact, we may be seeing a reduction in rainfall in many tropical areas. The rain forest, it turns out, is very effective at releasing a lot of rainfall that falls on the forest, and goes right back up into the atmosphere. This occurs by a process called evapo-transporation, which means basically that when the trees and plants photosynthesize, they are releasing water vapor up into the atmosphere constantly and so about half of the rainfall that falls on a tropical forest is almost immediately put back up into the atmosphere as water vapor. This helps to maintain continuous cloud cover, and helps to maintain consistent rainfall. And so one of the big concerns, as we are knocking down larger and larger areas of forest, is that the source of
