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by abernard1 2489 days ago
From some historical data on fire coverage in the Amazon here: https://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon

This doesn't really seem to be that big of a deal. It appears to be worse than previous years, but nothing to write home about. If it's such a huge crisis that we need non-stop media coverage about it, why wasn't it 80%-of-a-crisis last year or the year before?

I think the answer, which the article is addressing, is that people's ignorance of the issue has allowed media outlets to keep pushing a sensational story, when the reality is much more banal. I think that fairly classifies as "hype".
1 comments
dgellow 2488 days ago
From your link:

> Cumulative active fire detections of the fire season from May 1st through August 22nd, 2019 from MODIS and VIIRS confirm that the 2019 fire season has the highest fire count since 2012 (the start of the VIIRS record) across the Legal Amazon. In addition, fires in 2019 are more intense than previous years, measured in terms of fire radiative power, consistent with the observed increase in deforestation.

I think it's great that we have media coverage, and it would have been better to have coverage for previous years.

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abernard1 2488 days ago
If you drill down into the graphs of those regions, you can see other proxies for fires since 2003. It is not clear that there wouldn't have been MODIS and VIIRS results much higher prior to 2012 had those measurements been available.

Even since 2012, this year is higher, but not remarkably so, given that during summer it increases about 10x over a fairly high fire baseline.

From all accounts, fires on the order of this magnitude have been annually occurring for decades in Brazil. It is hard to take the media criticisms seriously in the face of this data. It's also hard to believe that the Amazon is in imminent danger, given the duration of this "problem."

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dgellow 2488 days ago
Sure, don’t take media criticisms seriously, that’s almost a constant, their content is of course heavily editorialized with a focus on sensationalism. Still a lot of people who aren’t living in South America wouldn’t know that the Amazon region has fire issues without the current media trend.

The Amazon forest won’t die right now, but the fact that forest fires are a common occurrence since decades is definitely an issue given that they are mostly caused by human activities (with help from the local climate).

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