The Amazon forest has an almost 3x year-on-year increase in fires in February | Hacker News Reader

The Amazon forest has an almost 3x year-on-year increase in fires in February

brazil.postsen.com

153 pointsandrenth52 comments

Interesting that this kind of problem exists elsewhere. What happens in the UK is a developer buys a "listed" building - meaning it has a special status that means you need to preserve it and cannot knock it and down then, say, build a bunch of flats or offices on the same location. These buildings have a very unfortunate tendency to burn down overnight, leaving said developers with little option but to build apartments or offices there.

Just one of those things, eh!

That seems like such an easy thing to fix, though. The land a listed building is sitting on should be zoned only for the listed building. If it burns down, it gets rebuilt exactly, or donated to the public. Allowing developers to benefit from such "accidents" is the problem.

This, at least sometimes, happens: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-68...

Largely because it was reported so widely and was obvious what had happened.

Where I live a listed church mysteriously burnt down the night after planning permission to turn it into a hotel was declined.

Oddly it's just sat there as a burnt out husk for the last 15 years, rather than the developer forcing the issue.

or the site is cleared and goes into a 50 year ‘public use’ lockup, where the developer owns it still, but it must be used for the public good for 50 years. A park or community garden, for example. Basically just enough to make it unattractive as an option for the contractor

Start doing things like this, you just might shake enough of the BS money out of the real estate markets to return to sanity.

You propose to make the real estate markets work better by further restricting supply?

Are you advocating for increasing supply through arson?

Restricting illegal profit-taking, where possible.

Black money inflates markets. Inflated markets inflate other markets.

That worked well in the Bay Area. Definitely a bastion of sane real estate markets.

Govt leadership is in bed with developers and would never enact such restrictions. But you can dream about how liberal processes could lead to rules you like better and try the well worn strategy of voting and waiting.

This opens up forms of other abuse.

Anyone who has ever played Civ knows you need to chop those forests to build wonders.

Funny reference, but does not deserve to be the top reply.

I’ve seen it happen before my own eyes in Toronto. Very popular developer Brad Lamb burns down historical buildings downtown in broad daylight with sometimes multiple attempts taken days apart. He’s highly successful and faces no repercussions.

> On March 23, 2020, Wellington House partially caught on fire amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Police say that at least one small explosion took place inside the abandoned semi-detached houses. Only two days later, the same building caught fire once again.

You can't make this up... Jesus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_J._Lamb

That’s the one I saw. A huge plume of smoke in the middle of the day. He’s suspected of other arson activity over the years. Lots of organized crime, criminal business leaders and collusion with politicians here in Canada. But sure it’s democracy.

This article doesn’t cover one of the key contributing factors to this which is the cyclical nature of drought resilience and deforestation. As rainforest is lost, precipitation decreases due to a decrease in tree perspiration, reducing humidity and the amount of water available to the trees, making them more susceptible to fires.

When you then combine that with longer dry seasons, higher max temperatures, and slash and burn land management practices, the rainforest is in for a bad time.

> the rainforest is in for a bad time

you mean: we are in for a bad time ?

Is it okay to consider the wellbeing of others, too?

The key contributing factor is slash and burn for farming like activities. Your point is more of a long term consequence. The forest is not burning naturally...

I don’t think any part of my comment implied this was happening naturally, but just to clarify: it is a cycle very much driven by human activity. My intent in explaining the cycle wasn’t to say “this is happening anyway without humans starting fires” but to say “not only do fires started burn down trees today but they also make future fires worse”.

Which is why I say it’s a key contributor to the increase in fires, and disagree with it just being a long term consequence, as you say. Because of this cycle, there will be incidences of slash and burn land management that progress to major forest fire that would not have done previously.

Yes

It’s been 25 years since I first flew over the Amazon at night. I remember wondering what those ragged orange arcs on the ground were. At first I thought they were the lights of coastal settlements, but the map showed us hundreds of miles inland.

It has also been 25 years since the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) in the US had their fundraising vodka parties and reliable bumpersticker activism. wtf did they get done? this is miserable

Why do you single them out in particular? There are lots of advocacy groups. Ultimately it comes down to politics in the Amazon states.

actually let us frame it this way -- the RAN got money and also did a few things; ranchers and plantation builders got money, and also cut a lot of forest to do it, even illegally in their own country, because the law enforcement got money, and their political leaders got money and "watched"

what is the common theme there? what suffered while all that happened? who had the staying power to be in the news and show up at work the next day, for years, while it all happened? who went crying alone, injured lost and dismayed, and had to change to some other activity while all that happened?

They did manage to create a bunch of $200K jobs for the well connected activists.

The article mentions that these fires are all man made. I assume it's due to increase farmland or ranch land. Can't the Brazilian Government stop this, or is it quietly sanctioned by them?

Have you seen how bad crime is in high density parts of Brazil? And you think they have the police force required to enforce rules on a 7 million km² area?

it's relatively loudly sanctioning them.

Don't mistake noise for action. One thing corrupt people love to do is make loud sounds that they are fighting corruption when they are not doing that, instead having their palms greased by people doing that exact kind of corruption.

The Amazon rain Forrest has also become much drier due to climate change.

Last I heard the largest export for Brazil is their meat. The largest producer of meat is in fact headquartered and based out of Brazil — JBS, SA.

They are a very corrupt entity [1,2,3] and likely have many Brazilian politicians in their pocket/on payroll. The list of controversies this company has would put Goldman Sachs to shame [4]. So it would not surprise me if the government was blind to the destruction of Amazon Rainforest.

At this point, I am okay with the world taking ownership of the Amazon Rainforest and delegating protection to the natives that live in the Amazon Rainforest.

Fuck JBS. Fuck the corrupt Brazilian government.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/meat-giant-jbss-owner-settles-u...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-15/brazil-s-...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/jbs-parent-to-pay-3-16-billion-...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_S.A.

And how would this transfer take place? With Aircraft carriers and a naval invasion? Are we setting up for Falklands v2.0?

> And how would this transfer take place? With Aircraft carriers and a naval invasion?

Can I make a wishlist?

> Are we setting up for Falklands v2.0?

Somehow I doubt that.

It's incredibly difficult to contain. These are very remote settlements and deep inland. Furthermore the government is ill-equipped to fight against it all. To have been working for years now on a project to protect the Amazon rainforest in southern Peru, even when pointing the illegal farming operations the government can't do much. At best they are overwhelmed, more often then not they don't even bother intervening if it's not on a national park land or border. Only private conservation efforts are managing to help slow down the spread, and they are very very localized.

> Can't the Brazilian Government stop this

They're too busy for that. They have far more important things to do like persecuting the previous president and implementing censorship and helping out their fellow communist dictators with brazilian taxpayer money.

Madison WI hit a new February all time temperature record. It was the average June temperature. They warned forever that after the ocean and glaciers absorbed a certain amount of excess heat that air temperatures would hockey-stick. I was hoping I wouldn't live through it.

of course today in Madison the high is 15°F

“In short, the main origin is the anthropic origin that we talk about, the origin is the man setting fire, whether in a pasture area, next door or directly in the forest to practice, to let it spread”

Compare that to here. Man made fires by people who think fire suppression is the folly of European settlers.

+286% is nearly 4x (100% => 386%), not nearly 3x.

> the number of fires this year for [Feb 1-Feb 25] already exceeds those recorded in the last seven years [for Feb]

So that would be 2017-2023 ?

So those would be the years since the last El Niño (2014-2016), I wonder how it compares ? (Did we even have the measurement infrastructure during that previous cycle ??)

Actually, El Nino is forecast to end this fall and turn into La Nina.

El Nino is collapsing quickly; el nina is forecast by summer now.

https://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/ens...

In general, I wish people would avoid >100% increase type formulations. Like biweekly, it confuses a lot of people, even if they should probably know better (or aren't sure if the person writing it used it correctly).

That's what happens when you get a historical drought.

It's man made, the drought barely help the people behind this to do it faster.

Oh... "The" Amazon, as in rainforest.

I went in thinking this was about site reliability engineering.

That too.

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