'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute
bbc.com
bbc.com
Yes, we are still net deforesting the Amazon rainforest... At the slowest rate since we began measuring. In 2016 we deforested about 6000km2. TFA says that in 2018 we deforested about 3700km2. This is down from the 1995 peak of 28,000 km2/yr. Remember all those programs to save the rainforest? Turns out they're working really well, and TFA proves it.
BBC opted not to print the headline "Amazon deforestation still improving, now at lowest rate ever!" And opted for the scary/outrageous version we see above. Both are true, but one tells you that our anti-deforestation efforts work, and have been improving the situation for decades. The other says everything is hopeless. Which one do you think is better for encouraging further action?
We're not done yet, there's still a terrible amount of deforestation going on, but we are definitely getting there!
(Fancy chart: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/11/annual-rate-of-le... )
I can fairly easily imagine that the doom and gloom spin does better. The message that anti-deforestation efforts work and have been for decades likely does less to make the average person feel they should continue to do anything about it in their daily lives, since the current trend indicates everything will be fine. Instead, if you believe that the situation is dire, a person that otherwise would not care deeply about the problem might be more likely to take action.
I would argue that a combination of the two is most effective, if the primary goal is to encourage further action. A little doom and gloom by framing the current situation as an image people can understand ("a football pitch every minute") convinces people that there is still a significant problem, and then the hopeful aspect (that the trend actually shows a positive outlook) convinces them that any action they take will be useful.
The rate of losses has accelerated as Brazil's new right-wing president favours development over conservation.
I remember flying over the Amazon, watching this endless sea of empty green drifting past for hours on end. Thinking about these "football pitch per minute" logging numbers and thinking to myself "they're really going to need to step things up if they want to make a dent in this thing".
Sure, it's ugly near big habitations. But even those are few and far between. Still, it's nice to hear that the logging rate is dropping that sharply.
I agree with your sentiment. I guess "Things Aren't All That Bad After All" doesn't get as many clicks.
"Things Aren't All That Bad After All"--indeed. Just like carbon emissions weren't all that bad 40 years ago (compared to today!). And little by little, while people look the other way, gobble gobble. There's no undoing the destruction of pristine rainforest. It's really important that we stop it now; not when it gets down to 20% or 10%--now.
It's not about singling any company out (even though many rightly should), it's about informing people. We wouldn't appreciate someone coming up to us and giving us bad news every day or week and think of it as mentally healthy, but the media has always done it regardless.
People may be ambivalent to this type of progressive talk, but if they are truly ambivalent then they shouldn't actually care.
Thank you for this comment, very educational.
A football pitch is 7,140 square meters so that’s 10,281,600 square meters per day. That’s 10.3 square kilometers per day, which assuming 24/7/365 work progress comes out to 3752 square kilometers per year. According to Wikipedia the Amazon rainforest is about 5.5M square kilometers so that’s 0.0682% per year assuming zero regrowth.
Honestly that does not seem like a lot.
If you're gonna try to sound smart by dismissing something out of hand, then be smart. But for the love of god don't trivialize deforestation just as climate change is in the beginning stages of getting really, really bad, based on some half baked hunch you have, and then suggest I read some 64 page document that has, more than likely, no value add to the discussion.
(Sorry but not sorry for the tone. Trivializing this issue is not ok. The logic was not correct. Patronizingly suggesting I read a 64 page doc, like a professor handing out homework. This is climate change, and the arguments were weak to wrong.)
The numbers also dropped off significantly in 2009 and the latest figures seem to jive with my back of the envelope math. The "football pitch per minute" level quoted in the article is is below the averages for the past decade.
> If you're gonna try to sound smart by dismissing something out of hand, then be smart. But for the love of god don't trivialize deforestation just as climate change is in the beginning stages of getting really, really bad, based on some half baked hunch you have, and then suggest I read some 64 page document that has, more than likely, no value add to the discussion.
> (Sorry but not sorry for the tone. Trivializing this issue is not ok...
Being outraged does not give any additional credibility to your opinion. Far from it.
> ... The logic was not correct. Patronizingly suggesting I read a 64 page doc, like a professor handing out homework. This is climate change, and the arguments were weak to wrong.)
I linked to an article that lists out estimates of the timber resources of the USA over the past 100-years. It seemed relevant to me as, though it's not apples to apples to compare any two countries across the globe, it's more relevant than arbitrarily claiming any level of cutting is going to end the world.
I doubt there's going to be much regrowth. It's still a huge and increasing number, regardless of whether it's a small fraction.
It's how we go "Oh that's not so bad, we can allow more of it." And more and more of it. Let's say 10x that number is where you draw the line and don't allow any faster. In a lifetime (80 years) 60% of it is gone, but it never happened quickly. Pretending large numbers don't matter because they're small fractions only counts when they're really small fractions and there are other forces at play to fix it.
To be fair (and I'm not one to defend deforestation in the slightest) new growth does capture more CO2.
Of course the other points in your comment are more important, to me at least.
If we cut a tree it seems that the new rings are much thin than the older rings, we could assume that the tree is growing slower each year but this image is deceiving
Is true than the older tree is investing much more energy on reproduction, flowers and (most) fruits do not capture CO2
But the tree's work of a year, a cilinder of wood of just 5cm thick has much more mass than a solid stick of 50cm (young tree), because the diameter of the older ring is 6m and its height 30m, whereas the younger tree is a solid stick of 50cm x 5m.
The older tree can be putting much more mass over its shoulders each year than the younger tree = capturing more CO2.
Second: We don't want faster growing trees to capture CO2. We should aim for slow trees instead. The faster a tree grows, more "spongy" its wood. More brittle and less durable. Hard woods instead are really slow growers, specially when young, but weigth much more (much more CO2 captured in the same space) and this wood lasts intact much more decades. The CO2 capture is much more reliable. The ultra fast tree lives 30, maybe 50 years and then is over, the slow three can live for 500-1000 years easily.
- from further down in the article, the speaker is an anonymous person in Brazil’s conservation department who isn’t giving his name for fear of reprisals,
It's not just that one block of minecraft was once forest and is now dirt. It's a loss of ecosystem for huge numbers of species.
It's additional GHG as they transport the wood.
Some of that wood will end up being burnt, adding more GHGs.
That's not to say anyone outside the Amazon is entitled to it, but it's not just "not so bad", it actually is bad.
"Regrowth" does not imply a restoration of the pristine ecosystem. Loss of biodiversity is irreversible. It might look "fine" to you to see leaves everywhere, but the thousands upon thousands of complex and intricate food webs don't just spring back overnight, or even over a century. When things go extinct, they just don't come back, ever. (reforestation always brings this image to mind: https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-08-25/amateur-restoration-b...)
The situation feels hopeless until the Brazilian government makes a sweeping effort to preserve the Amazon and that it's laws are fully enforced.
If respect isnt there, its corruption
If respect is there, its the law
Whether you're strip mining the earth's resources, stripping away the wealth of the nation, subverting the moral/political culture or simply just amassing ill-gotten gains, corruption is the proven method.
Its just that the observation goes both ways
The idea that rule of law basically doesn't exist and isn't the method of choice in perpetuating a circumstance in "these other corrupt countries" is overly broad and often inaccurate
It's very cheap, although the paperwork is both expensive and time-consuming.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
US also sucks compared to EU so being first world country is not an excuse.
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/17/brazil-sergio-moro-lula-...
https://fair.org/home/these-revelations-really-show-the-elec...
I’ll assume the former. If you actually read these leaks, you’ll see there’s absolutely nothing that even indicates any kind of corruption on the part of Moro or any of the attorneys.
What you have is an unverified leak by a political activist that likes to pretend he’s a journalist, who’s married to a politician from the far left whose party would love to bring down a legally elected government.
Think about it. Who are the parties interested in voiding the Car Wash operation? This is the largest anti-corruption operation in the world. Who benefits from taking it down?
There is no shortage of proof against Lula, Cunha, Cabral and all the other politicians in jail. Do you want them free? Why?
Please don’t spread misinformation here, because unaware people might buy it due to not understanding the situation.
Believing in a conspiracy against Lula is akin to being a flat-earther. Not even he believes in that crap.
The real coup attempt here is being done by the method of greenwalding [1].
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=greenwalding
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to warn you about this repeatedly, yet you've continued to break the site guidelines. That eventually leads to getting banned on HN. I don't want to ban you, because you've posted good comments as well, so would you please fix this?
But I should have articulated that in different words.
I do think that the original post should also be warned against political flamewars, because if a post like that goes unreplied, someone might think it’s true without questioning it.
You've articulated this perception nicely. We all feel it, but it's a cognitive bias that we project onto others. I've been trying to convince HN users of this for years: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I did reply to other comments in this thread, but in general it's too high a bar to expect mods to reply equally to all violations, for the same reasons that cops can't give speeding tickets to all speeders: they don't see all of them, and pulling them over and issuing a ticket is time-consuming.
The collaboration of the prosecutors with Moro, however minor, is more serious. That doesn't mean the charges were faked -- the evidence is publicly available and has been considered by many independent parties. Nobody qualified was arguing that this was a sham before June. However, judicial procedure exists for a reason. If back-channel discussions could have influenced Moro's decision, then it could be reversed even if the evidence is nonetheless sufficient to prove Lula's guilt. (I am not a lawyer.) It's not exactly out of the ordinary for prosecutors to be friendly with judges, who are themselves often former prosecutors, and it isn't evidence of any foreign influence.
What they did do w.r.t. the election was say they wished they could file an injunction to prevent Lula from speaking publicly, but they were legally barred from doing so. Instead, the Bolsonaro campaign filed the motion and it was granted. It's unclear how much this would have influenced the election, which Bolsonaro won by just over 10%. That's a landslide in the United States.
Furthermore, the American role in Lava Jato was never secret nor nefarious, and was well-known to independent institutions, e.g.:
https://www.law.columbia.edu/public-integrity/conferences-an...
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/b49a8c69/la... Furthermore, this kind of paranoid ranting about "lawfare" is exactly what Brazil does not need right now:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/12/brazils-d...
>Widespread distrust of institutions will feed the “salvationist” narrative taking hold in Brazilian politics. Bolsonaro is a direct product of that — and he won before these recent revelations about Lava Jato.
Liberal and conservative institutions alike in the West mourned the election of Bolsonaro. The West is not always the most honest actor but it is difficult to manage how it could manage to be so uniformly opposed to something in public and favor it in private. Right-wing economists in Brazil who supported his campaign have expressed regret.
https://reason.com/2019/06/01/deal-with-the-devil/
>Some of Ling's closest associates had pleaded with him not to sit down with Bolsonaro, who was infamous for public comments praising torture and dictatorship and denigrating women and minorities. Just associating with him, they feared, would tarnish Brazil's libertarian movement, which was drawing new followers at an astounding pace and winning mainstream recognition.
This isn't an organized coup. It's a product of various special interests poking and prodding from within and without on a democracy, like every other country but with a lot of inequality and a culture of doing whatever it takes to get ahead. Painting a picture that colors in the lines drawn for you by Russian propagandists isn't going to clarify anything. It might make you feel like a hero, of course, but you won't be one.