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Comment by keawade | Hacker News Reader

The article does not promote deforestation.

> Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible.

It discusses a misconception that has been propogated lately.

> The Amazon is a vast, ineffable, vital, living wonder. It does not, however, supply the planet with 20 percent of its oxygen.

> As the biochemist Nick Lane wrote in his 2003 book Oxygen, “Even the most foolhardy destruction of world forests could hardly dint our oxygen supply, though in other respects such short-sighted idiocy is an unspeakable tragedy.”

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Characterizing 6% of the oxygen supply as “more or less zero” (as the author does) seems to signal approval of deforestation to me.

Where did you get that? I think you misread that paragraph from the article. The author did not equate 6% to zero.

Let's leave aside how ludicrous it is to ignore the author's half-paragraph of passionate description of deforestation as tragedy and read the tea leaves to determine he's a deforestation fan, and ignore how absurd it is to criticize a factual claim on the basis that it hurts or helps a narrative: you're not even reading the article's claims correctly.

> The Amazon produces about 6 percent of the oxygen currently being made by photosynthetic organisms alive on the planet today. But surprisingly, this is not where most of our oxygen comes from. In fact, from a broader Earth-system perspective, in which the biosphere not only creates but also consumes free oxygen, the Amazon’s contribution to our planet’s unusual abundance of the stuff is more or less zero.

The Amazon produces 6% of oxygen produces by photosynthetic organisms. The proportion of total oxygen produced by these organisms (let's call it P) is relatively small enough that the Amazon's contribution, 0.06*P, ends up being negligible.

The article is a classic mixed message propaganda. Too much “is it really THAT bad though?” mixed in with the mainstream opinion that it’s really bad. This is how consent is engineered. Not surprised at all that people fall for it though.

There are multiple paragraphs of the strongest possible language describing how horrible deforestation would be. I've looked through the entire article and can't find a single thing that would be considered "is it that bad", beyond the basic factual claim the article is premised on. Is there any way that your claim is falsifiable at all? Ie, what would an article debunking the "20% of oxygen" myth look like without being "mixed message propaganda engineering consent". The author clearly went to some pretty great lengths to head off the frothing paranoia that he knew people would bring to the issue, and it's not clear to me what else he could have done.

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