Like so many of the environmental scare stories which grip the world’s media periodically, it is a panic which has been deliberately and cynically stoked by left-leaning eco-activist groups for a number of purposes:
To generate public hysteria in order to precipitate expensive and unnecessary government action which no sober cost benefit analysis could ever justify
To raise ‘awareness’ — and, by extension, money — for the green cause
To discredit conservatives, especially those who are properly sceptical of the green agenda, such as President Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro
To reinforce in the popular imagination the notion that economic growth and expressions of national sovereignty — in this case the interests of Brazilian farmers — are intrinsically bad for the environment
To promulgate the common received idea that the Amazon is the ‘lungs of the planet’ and therefore sacrosanct and inviolable in much the same manner as polar bears, glaciers, Pacific islands, the Great Barrier Reef, etc.
To lend false credibility to the global left’s claim that the planet is experiencing a #ClimateEmergency
To invoke the spectre of the Green New Deal and, by extension, to rain on the parade of Trump 2020
To exploit the mainstream media’s insatiable demand for environmental scare stories, especially in the August “silly season” when there’s a shortage of real news
Here is the truth about the Amazon fires:
The fires are mainly on agricultural land – not virgin rain forest…
It wasn’t always rainforest…
There is nothing abnormal about this fire season
Even NASA admits this…
Deforestation is getting better, not worse
The Amazon rainforest does NOT produce 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen
From a 2008 article ‘Brazil: Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanised’
A quote from NYT of all places:
From a 2014 New York Times article by Nadine Unger, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at Yale:
End quote. (bold, my emphasis)Moreover, it is a myth that photosynthesis controls the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.Even if all photosynthesis on the planet were shut down, the atmosphere’s oxygen content would change by less than 1 percent.The Amazon rain forest is often perceived as the lungs of the planet.In fact, almost all the oxygen the Amazon produces during the day remains there and is reabsorbed by the forest at night.In other words, the Amazon rain forest is a closed system that uses all its own oxygen and carbon dioxide.
It shows graphs, tweets, NASA stuff.
