Links - 21st March 2020 (Amazon Rainforest)

Emmanuel Macron’s fake news about the rainforest - "nothing in the president’s melodramatic statement was true. The Amazon rainforest is not ‘our house’, literally or figuratively... There have been many fires in the region recently, but most of the fires are on farmland or already cleared areas... By no stretch of the imagination are the fires an ‘international crisis’.Even the photo in Macron’s tweet turned out to have nothing to do with the recent blaze – it was taken by a photographer who died in 2003. Yet the president’s emotional, irrational and baseless claims ignited a wave of hysterical headlines and commentary around the world. If these words had been tweeted by President Trump, perhaps news editors would have commissioned fact-checkers to scrutinise each detail, and his departure from fact would have led the news reports. Instead, Macron’s false claims were repeated in news items for days afterwards as scientific fact. The BBC, CNN, Sky News and many others have run with the notion of the burning Amazon as a portent of doom – apparently uncontaminated by reason, proportion or historical perspective. It is hard not to conclude that alignment to a political agenda, not science, orients broadcasters’ coverage of events.And it isn’t just the news media, either. Many of those in the world of science also seem increasingly aligned not to objectivity, but to a political agenda... This wasn’t really about the rainforest – it was about politics. Which is why attention soon turned from Macron’s fictions to Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro. Last October, Bolsonaro won comfortable majorities in both rounds of the country’s presidential elections. But he has quickly become a bête noire of various Western leaders and commentators. This is reflected in much of the discussion and coverage of the fires... Brazilian-born Professor Alexandre Antonelli, director of science at Kew Gardens, joined calls for economic sanctions to be imposed on Brazil, on the basis of claims that Bolsonaro, who is sceptical of environmental NGOs and the broader green agenda, had encouraged the fires.Others have gone further. Before the outbreak of the fires, Stephen M Walt opined in Foreign Policy that ‘Brazil happens to be in possession of a critical global resource… and its destruction would harm many states if not the entire planet’.On this basis, Walt imagined not only economic sanctions, but also military intervention... Macron’s posturing isn’t about the Amazon, then. Rather, it is reflective of an international set shaken by Brexit, Trump and populists across Europe. Bolsonaro is the latest recalcitrant upstart challenging its authority... Agree with his politics or not, Bolsonaro’s democratic mandate seems to have been built in part on facing down the ‘international community’. And that ‘international community’ has increasingly defined itself in relation to the climate issue"

does the amazon provide 20% of our oxygen? - "the phytoplankton in the oceans also photosynthesise, generating around 240 Pg of oxygen per year. So total global photosynthesis (land and sea) produces about 570 Pg of oxygen per year. Therefore in terms of TOTAL global photosynthesis, photosynthesis in the Amazon contributes around 9%. This is smaller, but still substantial.Second, a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces. This is shown in the diagram below. Plants produce oxygen through photosynthesis (green arrow). However, the the same plants consume the equivalent of over half the oxygen they produce in their own respiration (blue arrows: my own team's research suggests this is more like 60%). Plants metabolise just as animals do, just at a slower rate, and at night when there is no photosynthesis forests are net absorbers of oxygen. The remaining 40% of the Amazon oxygen budget is consumed mainly by microbes breaking down the dead leaves and wood of the rainforest, a natural process called heterotrophic respiration (dark blue arrows).These process of plant and heterotrophic respiration are effectively the reverse of the photosynthesis equation above.So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero. The same is pretty much true of any ecosystem on Earth, at least on the timescales that are relevant to humans (less than millions of years). The oxygen levels in the atmosphere are set on million year timescales by the subtle balance of geological, chemical and biological processes. They are not set by the short term (short term equals anything less than hundreds of thousands of years) activities or existence of current biomes. "

Don’t Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests - ""A picture is worth a thousand words" is one of the dumbest aphorisms ever coined. Speaking as a former television producer, I'd say a picture takes a thousand words to explain. Take this much-circulated NASA satellite photo showing vast smoke plumes over the Amazon region... Interestingly, when NASA released the satellite image on August 21, it noted that "it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity. Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits."So why are there so many fires? "Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year's crops and pasture," soberly explains The New York Times. "Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use."It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures.What about deforestation trends?  Since the right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil's president, rainforest deforestation rates have increased a bit, but they are still way below their earlier highs"

What everyone gets wrong about the Amazon - "there has been a huge decline in deforestation since its peak in the early 2000s. Deforestation is still 75 to 80 per cent lower than at this peak. Deforestation has been going up in recent years, but that rise didn’t start under the current Brazilian government. Clearly, much of the response from the Western media is a reaction to Bolsonaro – it’s not just about what’s happening on the ground... from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, conservationists realised that they could get a lot more media attention by telling people that environmental problems weren’t just problems that people should care about because they love the environment. Instead, they started to say that these were really problems that threatened an apocalypse or the end of the world. They have been doing this with basically every environmental problem. It’s manipulative. It’s a sad commentary on the cynicism of many environmentalists and environmental scientists, who think that they can’t get people to care about nature and that we only care about ourselves... Thirty million people live in the Amazon. But whenever the Western media and environmentalists point to the people living in the Amazon, they only ever point to the indigenous people. But the indigenous people are just one million out of 30million... you get more media attention through alarmism, and media attention is important to sustain and raise money for organisations... It’s also very noticeable to me that the people that engage in environmental alarmism tend to be secular and on the left. If you’re on the political right, in much of the Western world, you tend to have a traditional religion, with your own gods and your own view of the apocalypse. You don’t need a political ideology to fulfil that. After the fall of communism and the failure of Marxism more broadly, the left needed a new apocalyptic religion and that has become environmentalism... There is an effort to represent European economic interests over Brazilian interests. I think one of the most interesting things I discovered during my reporting on the Amazon is that Macron’s own farmers are offering a lot of resistance to the trade deal between the EU and Brazil, as it involves importing a lot of Brazilian food. That makes sense when you think about it. So Macron seems to be doing something that might allow him to not engage in this free-trade deal with Brazil... when somebody is talking about how to ‘make the world a better place’, it’s worth asking yourself whether they are really advocating for a kind of control, if they are making a power move or if there is an agenda being dressed up as altruism"
Secular religion as filling the role of traditional religion

Andrei Biro - "How can I bet against the Amazon having any significant effect, especially compared to the scaremongering that’s going on!? What!?! In 1963 there was a fire in Brazil affecting 20 times the square kms this current cataclysm is turning to ash? No way. And we’re still alive. 🤪🤪🤪 shieeet
Hmm, could it all be overblown? Noooo, we’re all gonna die 🤪🤪🤪🤼‍♂️🤼‍♂️"

Why Everything They Say About The Amazon, Including That It's The 'Lungs Of The World,' Is Wrong - "What about The New York Times claim that “If enough rain forest is lost and can’t be restored, the area will become savanna, which doesn’t store as much carbon, meaning a reduction in the planet’s ‘lung capacity’”?Also not true, said Nepstad, who was a lead author of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. “The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but so do soy farms and [cattle] pastures.”... CNN ran a long segment with the banner, “Fires Burning at Record Rate in Amazon Forest” while a leading climate reporter claimed, “The current fires are without precedent in the past 20,000 years.” While the number of fires in 2019 is indeed 80% higher than in 2018, it’s just 7% higher than the average over the last 10 years ago... One of Brazil’s leading environmental journalists agrees that media coverage of the fires has been misleading. “It was under [Workers Party President] Lula and [Environment Secretary] Marina Silva (2003-2008) that Brazil had the highest incidence of burning,” Leonardo Coutinho told me over email. “But neither Lula nor Marina was accused of putting the Amazon at risk.”... Against the picture painted of an Amazon forest on the verge of disappearing, a full 80% remains standing. Half of the Amazon is protected against deforestation under federal law"


With this post I have decided to create a new blog tag, "environment", for the first time in a while

Unfortunately, going back to tag old posts is not going to be easy