#amazon fires

[Image description: area of the Amazon Rainforest in flames.]

By treating foreign investors as idiots, Jair Bolsonaro shows that the declared objective of his trip to the Middle East (in theory, to attract investment and increase imports of Brazilian products) is a cock-and-bull story. Others may have gone to close deals, but he’s on tour.

“Our Amazon, being a rainforest, does not catch fire,” he said to an audience of businessmen, this Monday (15th), in Dubai. Like, ignore satellite images, thousands of videos and photographs, testimonies of indigenous people, riverside dwellers and city dwellers and soot clouds that darken the sky of metropolises that prove the opposite of what I said.

Like any effective lie, the president’s also uses a little bit of truth. The Amazon is, in fact, a humid tropical forest, which makes natural fires such as those in the Cerrado more difficult. This does not mean that it does not catch fire, the result of human action and directly connected with the deforestation process. The method is simple: the subject strikes a match on a diesel oil can left in the middle of the bush after extracting the largest trees and of high commercial value, and hell begins.

For example, Daniel Camargos, from Repórter Brasil, revealed that the fire outbreaks that destroyed part of the Jamanxim National Forest, in Pará, on August 10 and 11, 2020, were caused by rural producers in Novo Progresso, who joined forces in WhatsApp groups to finance a widespread fire in that region. They’ve pooled the fuel costs and hired bikers to spread the flames, in an episode that it became known as the ‘Day of Fire’.

Anyone who can guess who these people voted for and will vote for president wins a cabreúva bench*, a kilo of picanha**, and a sack of soy.

Continue reading.

Notes by the mod:

Why is no-one in your country reporting on Australia right now, because half of the east coast is on fire. In less than a week we’ve lost over 1 MILLION hectares - or 2.5 million acres - of land to bushfires (one fire in particular has burned almost 150,000h ALONE). 350 koalas are confirmed dead from one park on fire in one day. Unprecedented and immeasurable native losses across the other parks on fire. People are dying, and are missing. Over 200 homes are lost. The warning is literally catastrophic and there is total fire bans all this week. 600 schools closed today, 200 to stay closed tomorrow. The air quality in Brisbane was worse than Beijing today. Two fires started in suburban, metropolitan Sydney. Not on a farm. Not in the country. In between a university and main road. Two minutes from a train station. A 25 minute drive from the Sydney CBD.

This is what Australia looks like from space at the moment:

And this is the current fire map (you can barely even see where it reads Sydney for god’s sake). I included the legend too just so everyone knows what we’re up against.

We’ve got government problems for sure with all of this, but I’m not worried about those politics. I’m wondering why I haven’t heard a single American news site talking about this. Or any news site that isn’t Australian or New Zealand (who had to report on it because so much smoke was travelling so far that the air quality deteriorated). come to think of it. Our news was FLOODED with the Cali fires. I’m not saying this is a competition, I’m not saying you or us have it worse off. But why does nobody in the entire world other than Australia have any idea what the fuck is happening. We all talked about the Amazon. Why aren’t we talking about this.

Hey Anon! I’ve gotten a lot of asks about the Amazon forest fire situation so I’m going to address them all here.

The most concerning thing about the Amazon fires isn’t necessarily the fires themselves, but the reason that there are so many this year: This is almost certainly because Brazil’s current president is very anti-environmentalist, which has led to more clearing of the forest (which involves setting fires).

The fires themselves aren’t actually a new threat. People have been practicing slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazon for a long time. What’s different this year is that there seem to be more fires than usual and they are impacting densely populated locations.

Something that I think is being glossed over by many of the images and headlines being passed around is that it’s very normal for there to be human-caused forest fires in and around the Amazon at this time of year.

Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research says that this is a record year for forest fires in Brazil since they started monitoring fires via satellite in 2013. 

However, NASA says that the overall fire activity in the Amazon basin as a whole is actually slightly below average compared to the last 15 years; fire activity has increased in Amazonas and Rondonia but has decreased in Mato Grosso and Pará.

A manager for Global Forest Watch has said that the fires this year are roughly equivalent to what they saw in 2016 (according to satellite images). Now, 2016 was also a bad year for forest fires, but it goes to show that this level of fire is not unheard of.

So, why are we only hearing about the fires this year if they’ve been this bad before? Probaby because ash clouds darkened the sky over the most populated city in Brazil, which is a big, dramatic, apocalyptic thing that tends to get people’s attention.

Although some meteorologists think the ash over Sao Paulo may have been caused by fires in Paraguay, not even in the Amazon, the air quality in populated areas has been so strongly affected that Amazonas has declared a state of emergency.

To be clear, it is still definitely bad that parts of the Amazon are burning and the fact that the fires are impacting air quality in populated cities poses very real human health risks. We should be speaking out about this, drawing attention to it, and donating to organizations that are working to protect the Amazon. But this is not necessarily an apocalyptic scenario.

And the good news? #PrayforAmazonia went viral on Twitter. Tons and tons of news sources are covering these fires in a way that Amazon forest fires have not been covered in the past. People are talking about Amazon deforestation and its potential impact on climate change.

This whole debacle is generating a lot of outrage towards Brazil’s presidential administration. Hopefully, this will lead to more international support for those who are fighting his damaging policies towards the Amazon and the indigenous communities that rely on it. By the way, I think it bears mentioning that last week an indigenous women’s march occupied a Brazilian health ministry building in protest of their president’s harmful policies.

Do you want to help? Donate! I really cannot stress how much small amounts of money can go a long way in situations like this.

Donate to SOS Amazonia, a Brazilian NGO working to preserve the Amazon (I can’t find any third party information on how reputable this NGO is, but I think this may largely be because of the language barrier-they’ve been operating since the 1980s)

Donate to Rainforest Trust which buys and protects rainforest land all around the world (4/4 stars on Charity Navigator)

And don’t forget to vote for politicians that prioritize environmental protection and can put pressure on Brazil’s government to clean up its act!

Michael Benson’s recent New York Times opinion column offered a poignant photo, video, and prose commentary about how the Earth appears from space when huge parts of it are burning. Here are some excerpts:

“I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching. [....]

“[Earth’s] a stage, the only one we’ve ever known. All the individuals who’ve strutted and fretted here for millenniums, or for that matter fled and trembled, producing what we call history, are merely players. But even by the standards of that problematic legacy, this latest period seems different. It’s more worrisome, more global, and with increasing frequency, more terrifying.”

AUSTRALIA BURNING FROM SPACE

“Last winter, for example, Australia experienced one of the worst brushfire seasons in its history....A plume of smoke extended outward from the continent’s southeastern quarter, a region twice the size of Texas....carrying the color of the land it came from, that noxious exhalation bore the residue of a billion or more incinerated animals and innumerable plants, baked into tinder from decades of ever-hotter summers.” 

SOUTH AMERICA BURNING FROM SPACE

“South America’s fires were the result of a willful slash-and-burn assault on the world’s largest remaining tropical forests and wetlands.... By late September the already hellish 2019 escalation in deliberately set forest fires had been exceeded by 28 percent, with more than 44,000 outbreaks recorded in the Amazon and Pantanal this year.

“Seen from space, the resulting haze spanned approximately six million square miles. It’s unnerving to witness such enveloping madness. The Amazon rainforest is home to some 200 Indigenous tribes. It’s a priceless reservoir of biodiversity....It is also the world’s largest remaining carbon sink, capable of mitigating global warming by absorbing vast quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But you can’t ask it to absorb the results of its own incineration.”

THE U.S. WEST COAST BURNING FROM SPACE

“Meanwhile, North America’s Pacific Coast was choking under successive waves of fume and ash. As with Australia, the forests, chaparral and grasslands of California, Oregon and Washington State had been rendered explosive by a chain of summers so searing that by mid-August this year, Death Valley’s temperature spiked to 130 degrees Fahrenheit — probably the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth. [....]

“At its source, soot, ash and dust made the air quality of the continent’s western quarter the worst in the world. The intensity of the flames pumped smoke to an altitude four miles higher than a cruising jumbo jet. [....]

“By September’s end, nearly six million acres had burned on the coast, directly killing more than two dozen people, not counting the strokes, asthma attacks and heart attacks triggered by the smoke. Stanford University researchers estimated those deaths at between 1,000 and 3,000.”

[See more under the cut.]

emoji spell to continue the rains in the Amazon, protect the animals, and allow for life to heal, survive, and prosper after the fires.

Smoke cloud from the Pantanal arrived in the state of São Paulo.

The smoke generated by the fires in the Pantanal, Cerrado and Amazônia is reaching the south and southeast regions, carried by winds that are normal at this time of year. NASA satellite images show the spot on the map advancing mainly over the state of São Paulo.

This smoke is composed not only of soot, but also of toxic gases such as methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, which are extremely harmful to respiratory health.

Last year, a similar event occurred when the smoke brought from the fires in the Amazon found a cold front in São Paulo, leaving the sky of the São Paulo capital dark in the middle of the afternoon, on August 19th.

According to Renata Libonati, Professor at the Department of Meteorology at UFRJ and one of the coordinators of @ufrj_lasa, the image shows the extent of the smoke plume covering approximately 2.8 million km2.

Remember how they donated over $1 billion to Notre Dame in ONE day even tho it has ZERO impact on climate change and the ecosystem in general?