Huge swathes of tropical rainforest were burned or hacked down for cattle and crops last year, led by destruction in Brazil, researchers said Thursday, warning that climate change itself is making it harder to reverse the losses. Some 11.1 million hectares (27.5 million acres) of tree cover was lost across the tropics in 2021, with 3.75 million hectares of that in old-growth primary forests, according to annual research by Global Forest Watch, the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland. “That’s 10 football pitches per minute. And that goes on for a year,” said Rod Taylor, who…