I think Asimov might have disagreed. In 1989 he said:
> I thought the most interesting scientific event of 1988 was the way everyone started speaking about the greenhouse effect just because there was a hot summer and a drought, when I had been talking about the greenhouse effect for twenty years, at least. - http://www.ubcome.com/AsimovSaveCivilization.html
He also talks about the rainforest in '89:
> I said therefore, when Brazil begins to cut down the rainforest of the Amazon, not only is it destroying a habitat for vast numbers of plant and animal life which could be of great use to us, there are perhaps pharmacological products we know nothing about that are produced by these forms of life that if we knew about could advance the art of pharmacology and the practice of medicine, enormously. And we'll never find out, we're going to drive them to extinction. We're going to destroy the ground, because the soil of a rainforest isn't very good, and when you chop it down it doesn't make for good farming, what it makes is for good deserts. And finally, we're going to cut down on absorbing the carbon dioxide and on producing oxygen, so that we are actually tampering with the climate of the Earth and with the very atmosphere that we breathe, so that under those circumstances it is useless for Brazil to say that she can do what she wants with her own, that the rainforest belongs to her and if she wants to cut them down, she can. The rainforest doesn't belong to her, it belongs to humanity, she is merely the custodian of the rainforests.
> I thought the most interesting scientific event of 1988 was the way everyone started speaking about the greenhouse effect just because there was a hot summer and a drought, when I had been talking about the greenhouse effect for twenty years, at least. - http://www.ubcome.com/AsimovSaveCivilization.html
He also talks about the rainforest in '89:
> I said therefore, when Brazil begins to cut down the rainforest of the Amazon, not only is it destroying a habitat for vast numbers of plant and animal life which could be of great use to us, there are perhaps pharmacological products we know nothing about that are produced by these forms of life that if we knew about could advance the art of pharmacology and the practice of medicine, enormously. And we'll never find out, we're going to drive them to extinction. We're going to destroy the ground, because the soil of a rainforest isn't very good, and when you chop it down it doesn't make for good farming, what it makes is for good deserts. And finally, we're going to cut down on absorbing the carbon dioxide and on producing oxygen, so that we are actually tampering with the climate of the Earth and with the very atmosphere that we breathe, so that under those circumstances it is useless for Brazil to say that she can do what she wants with her own, that the rainforest belongs to her and if she wants to cut them down, she can. The rainforest doesn't belong to her, it belongs to humanity, she is merely the custodian of the rainforests.