Fires Globally Have Declined 25% Since 2003 | Hacker News Reader

Fires Globally Have Declined 25% Since 2003

forbes.com

77 pointsmpweiher53 comments

An overlooked problem in these kinds of articles is that fires are not a yearly problem. If you have 10 hectares of forest and in the first year 4 hectares burn down and afterwards every year one hectar ... there is no forest after 10 years. So it’s not a “win” that only one hectar got burned. There are several studies that point to possible tipping points where the Amazon as a weather/rain/cloud producing ecological system breaks down if you burn enough of it. Wherever that point may be at the end, we sure as hell are getting there step by step.

The same article also contains this:

> For the last 35 years, the world has been re-foresting, meaning new tree growth has exceeded deforestation. The area of the Earth covered with forest has increased by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined.

So, at least globally in aggregate, deforestration concern doesn't seem like a unmitigated disaster anymore. Of course, we still need to continue on reforestration / conservation as well as fighting more localized deforestration like in Amazon. But it's not all gloom and doom.

EDIT: Deforestration is still a serious concern.

Reforestation does not replace conservation. Most trees are planted for commercial purposes, which usually means monoculture. These kinds of forest don't support the same species whose habitats have been destroyed. Tropical rainforests in particular are most likely irreplaceable.

Having said that, commercial tree planting is still very important to keep demand for wood away from natural forests.

Also, cutting and possibly burning, even if trees are later planted, usually destroys soil and consequently water cycles. Poor soil with bad water retention means water, even soil runoffs, floods, and consequently water shortages.

Commercial wood forests tend to have shallow soil and poor retention.

Which ironically, could make the farmland they are burning the forest down for unusable (as it converts to desert)

What's not reported is recently arable land & "greened" deserts.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YBLZmwlPa8A

There are more meridonal jetstreams meaning changes to regional climate. Some places become deserts & some become green.

Exactly. One of the reason fires decline is because there is less to burn. Most of the major forests have already been wiped out at spots more susceptible.

This isn't the case, as it says the earth has been greening. This is in no small part due to higher CO2, which stimulates plant growth.

The article linked from the OP:

"Researchers Detect a Global Drop in Fires"

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90493/researchers-d...

> Across the grasslands of Asia, the tropical forests of South America, and the savannas of Africa, shifting livelihoods are leading to a significant decline in burned area. Using NASA satellites to detect fires and burn scars from space, researchers have found that an ongoing transition from nomadic cultures to settled lifestyles and intensifying agriculture has led to a steep drop in the use of fire for land clearing and an overall drop in natural and human-caused fires worldwide.

> Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015, according to a new paper published in Science. Scientists determined that the decline in burned area was greatest in savannas and grasslands, where fires are essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems and habitat conservation.

> The map above, based on data from the international research team, shows annual trends in burned area over the study period. Blues represent areas where the trend was toward less burning, whether natural or human-caused, while red areas had more burning. The line plot shows the annual fluctuations in global burned area and the overall downward trend. The research team, led by Niels Andela of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, analyzed fire data derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. They then compared these data sets with regional and global trends in agriculture and socio-economic development.

I'm a doom-and-gloom type myself, but this seems like good news, eh?

"I'm a doom-and-gloom type myself, but this seems like good news, eh?"

uh, not sure about that:

"Scientists determined that the decline in burned area was greatest in savannas and grasslands, where fires are essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems and habitat conservation."

You're right, that's ambiguous at best. Is it a decline in "bad" fire or "good" fire or both or something else?

The article is completely misleading, it's not forest fires that have gone down, it's fires in general[1].

In this case, urbanization has caused less fires set for agricultural purposes, particularly in savanna regions. What you do is set a fire to get rid of all the shrubs. Afterwards, grass quickly grows, supporting grazing animals. It's been done for thousands of years.

This kind of fire also occurs naturally and is actually healthy for the ecosystem.

It's funny how the article uses this development that is actually negative (at least for the local flora/fauna) and spins it into a positive. Most people read it as "forest fires have gone down", when the opposite is true[2].

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90493/researchers-d...

[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-global-warming-has...

If fires go down because forests are now developed areas, is that necessarily a good thing? To me that kinda says that we're running out of forests.

According to the article, fires have gone down because people aren't burning grasslands and shrubs. They are still burning forests and the article doesn't say whether more or less.

I mean, people are part of nature too no matter how much they try to escape it. It's entirely subjective as to whether the world should have more or less forests vs savannas vs apartment buildings.

The 'humans are nature, therefore everything humans do is OK' argument is incredibly naive. Humans need to eat, for example, and there are complex global systems that our food supply depends on (e.g. pollinators), and that we do not fully understand. Turning all forests into apartment buildings is a great way to crash these global systems that we depend on to live.

Naturally, but our population is kept in check by the same laws that govern nature, just as you say, we can't mow it all down. And that's part of the reason the population growth is slowing.

Are we running up against a wall, famine is forcing the population down? Rather the growth is slowing because we have it pretty OK, don't you think?

It depends on your beliefs. I believe that people should have genuine freedom, and that requires that they have agency, if all types of environment apart from urban landscapes are destroyed then no one will have any choice about how they live - or what they experience - for the rest of time.

I rate that as a massive crime. If you don't believe in freedom or the rights of our children, and their children then I expect you disagree with me.

Exactly - it becomes more clear if you say that an individual's (or society's) freedoms needs to be compared to those of the coming generation (according to the Iriquois nations - from where the ideals of the US Constitution were inspired [1]).

[1] https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/how-t...

> Cole claimed that, as a result of burning fossil fuels, "the oxygen content of the atmosphere must start to decrease."

> That claim was incorrect and debunked as early as 1970 by climatologist Wallace S. Broecker writing for Science in June 1970.

Broecker in 1970 article[1] explains that a slight decrease in O₂ concentration is a definitely a non-concern compared to increase in CO₂, yet, unlike the article claims, still projects about 0.2% decrease of atmospheric O₂ for 1970-2000 period.

This is what I don't like about debunking articles. If debunking, at least they should get their facts straight.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/168/3939/1537

I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but isn't there more biodiversity that hasn't been fully explored in the Amazon compared to forests in temperate climates? That's what I'm more worried about.

"Forget about the Syrian civil war hype, the number of violent deaths globally have gone down!"

I hope everyone gets the point that you can drown a serious negative trend in a much larger set of unrelated data (how related is the incidence of fires in Ruussia with those in Brazil? I don't know, lets combine them anyway!).

I hope I get to live to the point where this sort of sensationalist trash headline isn't the most common type online.

The headline is a factual statement. Also, the data says globally Earth is seeing a reforestration, not deforestration. That doesn't mean there's no localized deforestration, nor we should stop fighting against deforestration everywhere. But it also means it's not all doom-and-gloom.

The article is exactly the kind of anti-sensationalist article that brings the proper context and data to the forefront and highlights the actual challenges.

EDIT: Per advice, removed unnecessary part.

Note that planted regularly cut commercial tree plantations are quite different from centuries old forests in their ecological potential and effects.

> The article is exactly the kind of anti-sensationalist article that brings the proper context and data to the forefront and highlights the actual challenges.

The article is a spin. It takes the fact "number of fires has gone down" and sells it as "forest fires are not that big a deal as you may think". In fact, forest fires are a bigger problem now than they were in the recent past. See my other comment on this topic.

> I don't see how trying to tell the truth about something can be equated with trying to downplay the situation or encouraging people not to bother about it.

Because it's a red herring.

It's a very common form of red herring, to be precise: taking averaged measurements of a whole set to infer information about a single element. The converse is also a red herring; inferring information about a set by analyzing only a single, cherry picked member.

"Fires Globally" includes "Fires in the region X of country Y", but doesn't take into account the specific importance of that region, the trends over time, what's going to happen to surrounding regions in the future...

(For a quick metaphor: You have 99.5%~99.8% of your body in perfect working order when your eyes have just been gouged.)

The fires and deforestation were actually way, way worse prior to 2003. I saw charts for the Amazon in the 80s and 90s and throughout those decades the forest fires were more than 5x greater than any point since 2003.

It's not a red herring if we're discussing a global trend, and contributing factors to it. And we are discussing a global trend, or at least the article is a criticism against other sensationalist trends to make everything look like doom-and-gloom globally.

A global trend and a local trend contradicting with each other doesn't make the global trend a red herring, and putting forward the global trend to better understand the local trend in the context is not a bad thing. Nowhere in the article suggests we should stop doing things in Amazon.

> Have you actually read the article ?

I would edit this part out of your reply, it's unnecassary to your point, goes against the rules of HN and will invite downvotes.

>how related is the incidence of fires in Ruussia with those in Brazil? I don't know, lets combine them anyway!

If the "hype" the author is crusading against is the idea that the Amazon fire is killing the planet's lungs and will result in an apocalypse or whatever, then isn't it fair to look at incidence of forest fires all over the world?

The author is definitely being a contrarian and the headline is clickbait, but a lot of people in this thread are railing against the author saying nobody should care about the Amazon fire and that it's not a big deal, when really he's just arguing that the media is sensationalizing aspects of the ordeal to sell papers/subscriptions/views. You can care about/report on the story without going nuts on headlines saying the world is ending.

> a lot of people in this thread are railing against the author saying nobody should care about the Amazon fire and that it's not a big deal

Any newspiece that can have a political angle, regardless of the textual content and the author's intentions, will have its potential political angle explored by other agents. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20789081

So it must be read between the lines, even though that can muddy the technical/factual debate.

A more sophisticated reading of such a piece must take into account how people will perceive it, and what actions may come from it.

Especially in the US (which may not be an exception — I just follow it more closely) a lot of news organizations seem to operate with a "news you can use" viewpoint: these are the facts, here's how to act in face of these facts.

Readers are primed to change their minds after being presented with a set of facts. It's akin to overwriting data that should have been appended to existing data[0].

[0]: I'm dealing with data recovery, so this metaphor may be topical to me, but not entirely useful.

>I hope everyone gets the point that you can drown a serious negative trend in a much larger set of unrelated data

A single data point is not a trend. You have it completely backwards: just because there is violence in a particular state, doesn't mean the world is going to shit.

>sensationalist trash

Facts are sensationalist trash? As opposed to the flurry of articles lately telling us the world is ending?

Michael Shellenberger’s sloppy Forbes diatribe deceives on Amazon fires (commentary)

https://news.mongabay.com/2019/08/michael-shellenbergers-slo...

Will be honest: Based on the headline, I thought this was an article about declining sales of Amazon’s Fire product line. Obviously the 2003 year should have tipped me off.

Frankly this is a horrible headline. Even if fires have declined since 2003, we should still worry greatly about the Amazon fires. It seems that the argument here is that we need to pick up the pace on fires since they have been declining. As usual, Forbes sticking to sensationalist headlines as opposed to informing ones.

> As usual, Forbes sticking to sensationalist headlines as opposed to informing ones.

How is their headline sensationalist? As far as I can tell, it is literally the opposite of how you describe it.

I don't see how trying to tell the truth about something can be equated with trying to downplay the situation or encouraging people not to bother about it.

You seem to be basically saying "this situation is bad so it is better to mislead people about it (by claiming the severity of the current situation is unprecedented)".

Misrepresenting things might seem to have short-term benefits but it's dangerous because it erodes trust in things like the media, and ultimately can harm important causes.

Responding to the first part, the headline goes "Forget the Amazon hype". It's not hype it's literally fire.

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".

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.

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."

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).

"hype" is referring to the reporting of it in the news and social media, not the fire itself.

That might well be the justification of it, but there is no mention of "media" or "reporting" in that headline: a headline that does not include in it the supposed subject matter is a poor headline indeed.

You need to cough up some pretty extraordinary evidence for the claim that the editor writing that headline would not be aware that it is misleading to leave out the subject entirely.

The word "hype" inherently refers to what people are saying about something, not the thing itself. The issue is about what people are saying. The headline wasn't "Forget about the Amazon fires", because it was talking about the hype not the fires. What headline would you use instead?

They put out a title with such poor statistical reasoning that they might as well have said "Forget about the Syrian civil war, the number of violent deaths globally have gone down!". I hope it is clear from this second example that the headline is just putting two pretty unrelated things next to each other and hope it gives clicks.

You can mount a coherent critique of the media hype cycle without resorting to bascialy false reasoning.

> They put out a title with such poor statistical reasoning that they might as well have said "Forget about the Syrian civil war, .."

The correct analogy here would be "Forget the hype about the Syrian civil war" if there was inaccurate information being spread about that war.

That has nothing to do with downplaying the actual severity of the war.

What? The title you are defending is downplaying ("forget the hype") the severity of the amazon fires by including fire rates in completely different parts of the world. This is exactly like downplaying the severity of a civil war by pointing out that the rest of world is not taking part.

[EDIT: any of the people downvoting this care to say why you think its points are wrong or irrelevant to what is being discussed? The article is literally about the world-wide situation, and it's misleading to present the current discussion, and what I've been arguing about, as about the title in isolation. The headline is clearly just using the Amazon fires has a shorthand for the overall situation.]

Did you read the article? It's literally about the world-wide situation, and the reporting there has been on the world-wide situation.

Not a downvoter, but my guess is that despite the article (by your description) being concerned about the "world-wide situation" it actually misrepresents what is implied by the word "global" headline. (Connotation, not denotation). More specifically, "world-wide situation" and "global" appear to mean the number/size of fires, a quantitative measure versus a more "holistic" meaning of the world "global" (in the sense of world-wide significance or relevance).

In other words, downvoters may be interpreting what you call the "world-wide situation" as a misleading representation of the relevant context for understanding fires. World-wide, people are concerned about the Amazon rain forest burning and a headline about fires globally declining seems to be in bad faith when the article goes on to explain that part of the decline is because forests are being converted into cities insusceptible to forest fires.

EDIT: change "susceptible to insusceptible.

> the article goes on to explain that part of the decline is because forests are being converted into cities susceptible to forest fires.

That isn't what it says at all. It says that the amount of forest being burned to create farms (deliberately) is going down because the farms are more economically productive.

From the article.

> That's because the amount of land being converted into ranches and farms has been going down, not up, and because more of it is being done with machines than with fire.

> That isn't what it says at all.

I beg to differ. Quoting from the article (and with all due respect):

> And against the picture painted by celebrities and the mainstream media that fires around the world are caused by economic growth, the truth is the opposite: the amount of land being burned is declining thanks to development, including urbanization.

(emphasis added)

Does the article suggest that we shouldn't take it seriously? No. It just says the media is being sensationalist, and in some ways (the article doesn't say this)...it could honestly be driven by mild racism. Since a lot of it points at a South American (not-white-enough) country being too incompetent to take care of the situation...when stats back up the very fact that incidents are actually declining. That being said, the Brazilian government has refused most western aide.

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