Amazon Fires Used to Stoke ‘Climate Crisis’ Fears
Real target of newest eco-drama is Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and his less-restrictive environmental policies.
By now, Legal Insurrection readers have learned about the ‘climate crisis’-infused stories related to the three weeks of wildfires within South America’s Amazon rainforest.
The Amazon is known to produce moisture and humidity, making it relatively resistant to wildfires, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Instead, it seems that a combination of droughts, and ranchers and farmers taking advantage of the dry season to burn and clear land for cattle, are to blame.
…Droughts caused both by climate change and deforestation are also part of the problem, according to Greenpeace. The forest fires are contributing to higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions, which lead to global temperatures rising. As these temperatures rise, major droughts become more frequent and can extend the forest’s dry season.
Of course, the political elites have used the wildfires to virtue signal and promote more liberty-crushing rules and taxes.
Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency first order in two days! #ActForTheAmazon pic.twitter.com/dogOJj9big
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) August 22, 2019
However, a more detailed and rational review of the situation shows the story behind the Amazon fires is the perfect trifecta of eco-drama, political virtue-signaling, and #FakeNews.
Some celebrities have tried to raise awareness are shared false or misleading images of other fires.
For example, actor and musician Jaden Smith shared an image on Instagram showing a large swath of the forest on fire with smoke billowing out.
“The AMAZON Rain FOREST IS ON FIRE THIS IS TERRIBLE IT’S ONE OF THE BIGGEST CARBON SINKS IN THE WORLD, Spread The Word. #theamazonrainforest,” he wrote.
.. The image of the Amazon burning was posted by The Guardian in 2007 and notes it was taken in 1989.
Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio has been sharing several images and posts on Instagram meant to raise awareness of the fires and instruct people on what they can do to help. Unfortunately, one of the many images he shared can be found on the Carbon Brief organization’s website dated from 2018.
Next, scientists studying satellite image data from the fires indicate that most of the blazes are burning on agricultural land where the forest had already cleared out.
The majority of the agricultural land currently in use in Brazil’s Amazon region was created through years of deforestation.
“Most of this is land use that have replaced rain forest,” said Matthew Hansen, who is a co-leader of the Global Land Analysis and Discovery laboratory at the University of Maryland.
“Brazil has turned certain states like Mato Grosso into Iowa,” said Mr. Hanson, referring to the Brazilian state on the southern edge of the Amazon region. “You’ve got rain forest, and then there’s just an ocean of soybean.”
Finally, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration indicates that the number of fires in that region is right around the average, as calculated from the last 15 years of data.
As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years. (The Amazon spreads across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and parts of other countries.) Though activity appears to be above average in the states of Amazonas and Rondônia, it has so far appeared below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to estimates from the Global Fire Emissions Database, a research project that compiles and analyzes NASA data.
I believe Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro is the real target. He ran on a small-government approach usually not taken in South American and with policies that are clearly out of line with globalist thinking.
It’s Bolsonaro’s fault!
This is a crucial moment. The Amazon is not just burning. Bolsonaro is stoking the fires, motivating farmers to clear the land while arguing that commodifying the forest is the best way of… protecting it. Sign the petition https://t.co/495PZVwnLU #diem25 #PrayforAmazonia
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) August 23, 2019
The elites blame less-restrictive environmental policies for the fires.
In a televised address Friday night, [Bolsonaro] said the government would take a “zero tolerance” approach to environmental crimes, and that Brazilians in the Amazon region must be provided with broader opportunities to make a decent living.
“I have a profound love and respect for the Amazon,” he said in a rare scripted message. “Protecting the rain forest is our duty.”
He provided no details about what assets the military would bring to bear in areas where fires are spreading.
But it was unlikely that his plan could address the underlying crisis without a fundamental shift in his environmental policies, which have emboldened miners, loggers and farmers to strip and burn protected areas with a sense of impunity.
I hope the authorities quickly contain the wildfires, the firefighters and emergency crews stay safe, and that Bolsonaro doesn’t fall victim to climate crisis eco-stunts.
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Comments
Conveniently timed CRYsis with the G-7. Saw articles siting NASA saying the number of fires and area is smaller than average actually.
Fake News thoroughly littering AP etc. what. a. joke.
For probability more than 12,000 years before Europeans first set eyes on North and South America, the Native Americans had been burning the forrests wholesale to clear it for farming and to shape the landscape.
It bugs me that a lot of good lumber is lost in this process but this is what they have been doing for the last 15-20,000 years.
The terrain surrounding Plymouth was no primeval forest. For centuries, the Indians had been burning the landscape on a seasonal basis, a form of land management that created surprisingly open forests, where a person might easily walk or even ride a horse amid the trees. The constant burning created stands of huge white pine trees that commonly grew to over 100 feet tall, with some trees reaching 250 feet in height and as many as 5 feet in diameter. Black and red oaks were also common, as well as chestnuts, hickories, birches, and hemlocks. In swampy areas, where standing water protected the trees from fire, grew white oaks, alders, willows, and red maples. But there were also large portions of southern New England that were completely devoid of trees. After passing several streams and ponds, Goodman and Brown came upon a huge swath of open land that had recently been burned by the Indians. Come summer, this five-mile-wide section of blackened ground would resemble, to a remarkable degree, the wide and rolling fields of their native England.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Voyage to War (Text Only) . HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Paul, without doubt, humans have burned forests to clear land for a long, long time. The first issue is one of scale. Twenty thousand years ago the planetary population was certainly less than 100 million. Today, the population is better than 75 times greater. By 2050 most credible estimates put the number around 95 times greater.
The second issue is per capita stress on the biosphere. In developed countries, a typical person uses far more resources than an aboriginal could have. Nature will not allow us to keep it up. It can’t. It’s the law.
“It’s the law.”
You get that Paul? Our snotty dictator has laid down the law.
Dumber-than-a-brick
Every spring, environmental idiots protest Kansas controlled burns that are required to keep pasture clear of invasive species (like Eastern Red Cedar) and promote grass growth. Sounds like this on a larger scale in South America.
https://www.ksfire.org/education/
You said the key word, “….’idiots’ protest….”
“Real target of newest eco-drama is”
President Trump.
Everything else is secondary.
The observation was made these fire are on average. I didn’t run the numbers but it struck me as odd. Now it makes sense there is political hay to be made against a conservative.
Fire, storms and lightning have been used to terrify people since the dawn of humanity.
Yes, by worshipers of false gods…….
In science the data speak. In Leftist pseudoscience they create drama to pull on your feelz.
In science class, they respect natural law, which cannot be broken no matter who wants it otherwise. Here’s an indisputable fact. It took from the dawn of Homo sapiens until the 1850’s for there to be one billion humans breathing at the same time. Currently, less than two hundred years later, the population is north of seven and a half billion. That has a name. It’s called “exponential growth.”
Humans are populating ourselves out of existence and we’re taking every living thing, from bacteria to beluga whales with us. The earth is a cage. Nobody gets in or out. The current status of the planet is a direct result of what the Firesign Theater once called the “expediency complex.” It means “Give me what I want now and to hell with the future.”
It doesn’t matter what your political views are. It’s over. Humans are natural born killers on a planetary scale.
That you Ehrich?
50+ years later and you’re still wrong.
Hollymon is a card carrying member of the earth prediction scammers club.
Nothing ever comes true from this group. Nothing.
Barry, facts are persistent things. Is the Earth’s human population north of 7.5 billion or isn’t it? If you believe my number to be untrue then say so. Produce the real figure.
Was the Earth’s human population in the 1850s a billion or so (plus or minus)? If not, produce the real figure and enlighten us all.
Have you ever even seen a graph of the Earth’s human population growth over time? It goes straight up, STRAIGHT UP on any scale that isn’t logarithmic.
How long do you think we’re going to be able to sustain that growth rate, Barry? No, I mean it; provide a number. How many more years do we have until the curve levels out?
You won’t and you can’t.
So, people who cite facts to support their arguments are “dumber than a half brick” and “member(s) of the earth prediction scammers club.” You get an “A” in name calling, no doubt from lots and lots of practice.
I’m calling you out, Barry. Put up or shut up. Provide the correct numbers.
Interestingly, we don’t have to worry about sustaining the same growth rate. The UN released a study showing that the global population is projected to pretty much flatline in terms of growth by the end of this century. Here’s the link to the Pew write-up: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/ You’ll find links to the UN data in there (will you accept this or will you prefer not to? Shrug.).
Thank you, fuzzy slippers for the link to that UN study. It pleases me to have someone who can respond with numbers and not just epithets.
I do not claim to have better credentials than the authors of the study, but I do know some things. Human populations decrease over time for only three reasons: fewer people are born, more people die, or a combination of both. There’s no other way. To flatten that virtually asymptotic population growth line in less than a century, an awful lot of people are going to have to die. Likewise the natality rate will have to decrease significantly.
One question I would ask is “Who’s going to stop having babies first?” The Indians, the Chinese, the Africans or any of the other expanding spots?
Answer: It doesn’t matter.
Humans in the developed world use more resources per capita than humans in the developing world. I seriously doubt that the Chinese or the Indians or anyone alive will just decide that they’ll allow their lifestyles to continue as they are right now and accept Western dominance without a fight and I mean a real fight. They’re going to continue to develop and compete for resources. This pressure on the rest of the biosphere will not be allowed to stand without consequence.
Humanity may have already exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity. Without doubt, we are certainly nearing it. Populations which exceed their habitat’s carrying capacity crash. That ain’t gonna be a walk in the park for anyone.
That’s when the increased mortality part kicks in. People are going to die, and in bunches- lots of people.
The only real question is “When we go are we going to take the rest of all the life on the planet with us?” Things have gotten awfully warm lately. Look what happened to Venus when it experienced a runaway greenhouse effect. That’s Earth’s future.
I overestimated, you’re at best a quarter brick in intelligence.
So lets just deconstruct your pathetic scam.
“Is the Earth’s human population north of 7.5 billion or isn’t it?”
Nowhere have I suggested the population of the earth. Here is the truth – You have NO IDEA what the maximum sustainable earth population of human is. None. Zero. Nada. So, regardless of the trend, it’s meaningless.
“It’s called “exponential growth.””
And of course you have no understanding of exponential growth as you extrapolate out into the unknowable future. Assuming the growth rate will always be the same is the scammers gold.
“How long do you think we’re going to be able to sustain that growth rate, Barry? No, I mean it; provide a number. How many more years do we have until the curve levels out?
You won’t and you can’t.”
I have no idea. Neither do you. None, nada, zip. You’re just a scammer.
What we can say without doubt is that as wealth increases, population growth not only declines, it goes into recession.
“Humans are populating ourselves out of existence and we’re taking every living thing, from bacteria to beluga whales with us.”
Wait! I thought we were growing exponentially! Which is it scammer?
“So, people who cite facts to support their arguments are “dumber than a half brick” and “member(s) of the earth prediction scammers club.” You get an “A” in name calling, no doubt from lots and lots of practice.”
You have cited no relavent facts, just like every itteration of the doom and gloom scammers club you belong to. You take the normal and pretend it is abnormal. You take the abnormal and pretend it is normal. You, Erlich, and the people like you are all halfwits, and yes I have practice as you dim bulbs are everywhere spouting nonsense. None of your pathetic predictions ever come true.
“I’m calling you out, Barry.”
Good luck with that quarter wit. Your so dumb you don’t even know it.
Like I said, no numbers.
Also, that would be “you’re” dumb.
There are no valid numbers halfwit. As I made clear. Clearly, reading comprehension is not your strong suit.
And yes,
you’reyour dumb, dumber than a brick.Say, I could claim the earth can sustain 100 billion humans. And I could even extrapolate numbers like food and energy production to prove it. I could take a population like China and India and extrapolate to prove it. Except I’m not a scam artist like you.
“Look what happened to Venus when it experienced a runaway greenhouse effect. That’s Earth’s future.”
LOL, you truly are an idiot.
Earth orbits the sun nearly 40% further away. The orbit is not nearly as eccentric as the earths, meaning it’s distance changes much less over an orbit. Venus’s axis tilt is low, meaning there is less variation through a rotation of the wattage received at the surface. There is almost no difference in temperature day and night. The rotation is slow adding to this. One day is 117 earth days.
There are so many other differences, core composition, no water, flatter surfaces, the reader can get the picture…
To compare venus to earth is the height of stupidity as there is no comparison.
Only idiots and scammers try this.
All pretty much true. I know. I taught astronomy professionally for 30 years. I know you don’t believe that, Barry, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
The important question is why doesn’t Venus have any water? Was it just unlucky when water was handed out?
Actually Venus once had water, lots of water. It’s gone- boiled away. As temperatures rise more of Earth’s water will evaporate and water is a much better greenhouse gas than CO2. That’s why on a clear fall night the temperatures drop and, conversely, why on cloudy nights it stays warmer. Infra red light can’t penetrate the clouds. The Earth warms and more water evaporates and so forth and so on.
I know you’re not buying any of it, but that’s not my problem.
Thanks idiot, but I don’t need any help from you in understanding earth science, orbital mechanics, or astronomy.
I pity your students.
To make an assumption about the future of the earth based upon venus is either disingenuous or stupidity at work. I’ll assume it’s both.
We don’t live in a greenhouse. The earth’s atmosphere cannot be understood trying to compare it to a greenhouse. All attempts to do so are fraud. There is nothing in your global warming scam that is science. All your data is fake, your analysis is fake. You cannot publish it because it would take people like me <30 minutes to find the fraud.
You use venus because you think others are ignorant. It sounds so reasonable – right up until someone tells the truth about the difference.
Here is a clue, dingbat, it doesn't matter why Venus doesn't have water – it's not the earth. Nothing about venus is like the earth. There are no comparisons to be made or conclusions to be drawn. We don't know why earth has water.
What we do know, earth has a finite lifespan like all other things in the universe. It has as long as the sun shines, and when our star goes supernova, actually much earlier, the earth will be consumed and all life with it. And that is if we don't have a massive collision before or some other life extinction event.
But you scam artists can't monetize that, so you cook up your snake oil. No sale.
The sun will never “go Supernova.” It’s not massive enough. By your own words you reveal that you understand nothing about astronomy. I’m done trying to smarten you up. Clearly this site caters to whack jobs whose only argument tools are contradiction and insult.
True, it’s not massive enough. Simple misuse of language. It will expand into a red giant and long before it becomes a white dwarf the planet earth will be consumed. Which is why I said the earth would be extinguished much earlier.
That is the only know factual end of the earth and life. Other possibilities exist as mentioned.
All your bullshit is just uninformed speculation used by scammers. You have no idea how many humans the earth can support. Your global warming scam is just that, a scam. You cannot cite data to support it because it doesn’t exist. Nothing you spout is anything but garbage. Dumber than a brick.
Bricks don’t make teachers. Insults are entirely appropriate for scammers like you. You pretend to argue facts and we know it’s all lies. Crawl back in your hole or call one of your supervisors over to help you out. You’re the crank.
Here in New England we’ve just had the coldest late August I can remember in fifty years. It’s freakish. First half of the month was as hot as usual. Were I easily alarmed, I’d insist that SOMEBODY has to DO SOMETHING!
Weather is local. Climate is global. Get it?
You freaks are dumber than bricks.
Name the difference that doesn’t involve time.
I knew he couldn’t do it. Being a brick is hard.
Weather is simply our climate over short periods. Climate is simply the weather over long periods.
Weather is a function of the climate.
Of course. Where else could it have come from.
Wonderful. Land that was doing nothing is now being productive and feeding people.
At the root of this whole thing is an ancient pagan belief that untouched wilderness is inherently good and man and all his works are evil. If man cannot eat without destroying wilderness then he should starve.
“Finally, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration indicates that the number of fires in that region is right around the average, as calculated from the last 15 years of data. ”
Thank you for this tidbit and the underlying quote. I had read that this was a very normal fire year for the Amazon, but had not seen the source.
We have a fundamental problem here, with not just fake, but lazy news. Somebody with an axe to grind sees a picture, and pulls a story out of thin air.
Also, in California, burning off weeds on private property requires a permit. I actually approve of this, due to dryness. However, ambitious “natural” farmers will then import something called “bio-char” to use as fertilizer.
The Amazon, which is much wetter, can allow farmers to burn weeds on-site, thereby producing their bio-char on-site. But it does make some smoke. Oh, my.
The inability of progressives to learn from history is astounding.
Less than a year ago many of them had their houses burn down because of the wildfires in California. Those wildfires were a direct result of enviro-fascist policies which prevented proper management techniques from being employed.
Don’t they get it? Wildfires happen… they have ALWAYS happened (before Bic lighters there was this thing called lightning) and an occasional burn off is GOOD for the ecosystem.
SMH
In related news, the entire premise behind global warming may have been dealt a debilitating blow. (http://www.mikesmithenterprisesblog.com/ 2019/08/the-iconic-image-of-global-warming.html) (Remove the space for link to work.) About ten years ago prominent climate researcher Tim Ball claimed that Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph that showed rapid heating in the atmosphere due to CO2 increases was essentially a lie based on falsified data. Michael Mann sued Ball for libel and after eight years of obfuscation by Mann the case was decided against Mann with prejudice. In other words, Mann was either unable or refused to defend himself against the claims the “hockey stick” graph was a manufactured graph that was not derived from any real data. (Mann did not even submit one piece of evidence as demanded by the court to support his position.) Mann may now face financial penalties from Ball as well as other sanctions. (Knowing the rabid and irrational beliefs of the global warming/climate change crowd, they will likely come to Mann’s rescue to protect him from any real penalties financial or otherwise.)
What I love about climate change deniers is how they pick and choose which “science” they believe and which they deny. Cell phones and GPS devices use Einsteinian relativity to actually locate things on Earth. I guess relativity is OK because we like cell phones.
Unlike religion, or government, science is a self-policing system. The degree to which we understand nature depends on our ability to root out and discredit errors and it is this system which has produced our current technological marvels- every single one of them from refrigerators to MRI machines.
Individual scientists can be wrong and frequently are. Remember “Cold Fusion?” Where are these scientists now? They and their incorrect ideas have been thoroughly discredited BY OTHER SCIENTISTS. It is science’s self-policing which ensures progress and to science as-a-whole the issue of global warming, and its proximate cause is no longer in doubt.
Deny all you want. We’ll all be dead before the excrement hits the air conditioner, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t accelerating towards the point of no return, because we are.
“What I love about climate change deniers…”
You ignorant buffoon, call it what it is, man made global warming. Changing the name is real cute, doesn’t work. No one has ever denied climate change. Those of us with an actual education understand full well the climate changes, has always changed, AND was changing before mans arrival on this earth.
There is no data that shows the earth is warming. None. No science exists that supports it. None. The only support is faked data, cherry picked data, and faulty methods that remain undisclosed. They remain undisclosed because it’s not science. If it were, the data and analysis methods would be disclosed.
The only people that believe this nonsense are quarter wits. You all follow the same pattern. You’re the targets of the snake oil salesmen.
As Monty Python once pointed out, contradiction is not argument.
Isn’t the brick cute. Monty Python. LOL.
You’re still a halfwit scam artist that cannot back up anything you claim.
Burning the rain forest will NOT deprive humans of breathable oxygen. The rain forest uses virtually all the oxygen it produces. It’s a zero sum game.
What’s getting torched in Brazil and elsewhere is biodiversity. It cannot be replaced except over enormous periods of time. In ecology that process is called “succession.”
Chances are that where you live now, large wildlife like bears, or deer, or moose used to graze and hunt. They don’t anymore. We’ve kicked them out and replaced the forests with lawns and pavement. Nothing wrong with that. Beavers build dams and restructure their habitat. We pave. It’s all very natural.
Nobody lives outside the biosphere. Not humans or horseflies, or bacteria. It’s less than twenty miles from bottom tom top. Earth’s biosphere may look big from within, but is is barely, BARELY a skim coating on an 8000 mile diameter rock.
Nothing personal, folks, but we are nothing more than bunnies trapped in a cage. Our hyper-reproduction threatens to destroy these complex and irreplaceable natural webs. We are fouling not only our own habitat, but every other living organism’s habitat as well. Life inside our cage is incredibly complex and it is this biodiversity which is the basis of all life on the planet. Humans do not live in a “vacuum.” We live, like every other living thing, in a complex ecological web of interdependent organisms. We may swat the occasional mosquito, but we NEED bugs, all kinds of bugs. Although it’s an imperfect analogy, destroying the biodiversity web cannot be good for the spider in the middle.
God may have wanted us to “multiply, but Mother Nature has had just about enough of that foolishness. Very soon, she’s going to introduce subtraction on a planetary scale. It ain’t gonna be pretty- for anyone.
Wrong again Ehrich.
50+ years later and you continue to be wrong.
Hollymon is a card carrying member of the earth prediction scammers club.
Nothing ever comes true from this group. Nothing.
Dumber than a half brick.
“Chances are that where you live now, large wildlife like bears, or deer, or moose used to graze and hunt. They don’t anymore.”
Good grief, you’re like gold for ignorant statements. I live in NC, near a major city. We have more deer than were here when man arrived in North America. We still have bear. Moose didn’t live this far South, but we did have Elk which have been reintroduced in the mountains and are thriving.
What we don’t have is the predator that would eat your children, the panther. Good thing.
You can’t get anything right.
Zach needed the night off
“God may have wanted us to “multiply, but Mother Nature has had just about enough of that foolishness. Very soon, she’s going to introduce subtraction on a planetary scale. It ain’t gonna be pretty- for anyone.”
So, is “Mother Nature” over God, or is God over mother nature. I think you’re quite confused in addition to being as dumb as a brick.
guess it’s ok for the Brits to deforest to put up windmills for power