As for the myth that the Amazon provides “20 percent of the world’s oxygen,” it appears to have evolved out of a 1966 article by a Cornell University scientist. Four years later, a climatologist explained in the journal Science why there was nothing to be frightened of. “In almost all grocery lists of man’s environmental problems is found an item regarding oxygen supply. Fortunately for mankind, the supply is not vanishing as some have predicted.”74 Unfortunately, neither is the supply of environmental alarmism.
