Carlos Nobre

person · earth · Brazil

The Brazilian earth system scientist most closely associated with the Amazon tipping point argument, and a co-author of both the 2016 assessment that proposed a forty per cent boundary and the 2018 paper that revised it down to twenty to twenty-five. He is worth naming in a Journey about a threshold because his own published position moved substantially in two years, in public, in response to evidence about fire and climate interacting with clearance. That is the correct behaviour for a scientist and it is also the reason the threshold figure should not be quoted as a constant: the number most often attributed to him is the one he replaced. He has also argued consistently that the Amazon requires an economic alternative rather than only a prohibition, which is a different kind of claim and rests on different evidence.