[abernard1]

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."

[dgellow]

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).