Are forest fires as bad as they seem? | Hacker News Reader

Are forest fires as bad as they seem?

bbc.com

45 pointselorant35 comments

Although it is the highest number of fires (for the year to 27 August) for almost a decade, it is actually lower than for most years in the period 2002 to 2010.
There is a similar pattern for other areas of Brazilian forestry that are not part of the Amazon basin.
Source: The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe)
If we look at satellite images for the overall area of burnt forest in Brazil's Amazon region each year, again we see very high levels in the early 2000s.

For 2019, we have data up to the end of August, and the overall area burnt for those eight months is 45,000 sq km. This has already surpassed all the area burnt in 2018, but appears unlikely to reach the peaks seen in the previous decade.

Just because the bleeding is less worse than it was in the early 2000s doesn’t mean the bleeding is good.

This is the biggest I issue I have with how the story has been reported.

The real story is that we have been burning the rain forests for so long that the ability for the forests to remove carbon has been dramatically depleted. We have been burning the forests for decades and now we are using them up.

woops. fires are also essential for the renewal of the ecosystem. Of course, not the ones started purposefully

It depends on the type of ecosystem

Yes, if people are causing them so they can clear land. The problem with forest fires is not the fires themselves but the fact that if you go out and cause a fire without knowing how to set up a controlled burn you are almost certainly doing something bad. Not sure why this article even tries to argue otherwise.

To play the devil's advocate, look at some species of trees such as eucalyptus [1]. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that these (and probably other) trees have evolved to include forest fires as a key part of their lifecycle. When there is a huge buildup of fuel in a forest, talking about who started a fire or what their motivation was is not seeing the forest for the trees.

The spark that starts a forest fire is only a proximate [2] cause. The ultimate cause is that these trees evolved to be highly flammable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus#Adaptation_to_fire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causati...

Brazilian here.

The Amazon Climate is wet and hot all year round. It rains more in Amazon Forest during the dry season of than in the wet season in most of the country. By the way, Brazil does have dry biomes, such Cerrado and Caatinga, where natural fires are common.

Most people are not aware the Amazon soil is very poor nutrition-wise. The trees depend on the decomposed organic material, the hot and wet climate is perfect to convert fallen leaves into hummus. Because of this, there's isn't much wild life in the forest at ground-level. It isn't a coincident that the pictures from the Amazon is usually from above.

Therefore, the biggest concern with the deforestation is actually the dim balance that keep the forest alive. If it goes beyond a certain point, it will be impossible to revert the end of the forest.

There is a lot of fantasy about the Amazon Forest, likely because it is a vast (almost the size of Continental USA) unexplored land. But from a biodiversity point of view, more efforts should be direct to other richer Brazilian biomes such the Atlantic Forest or Mato de Cocais.

As a curiosity. The country is named after a tree! The Pau Brasil is a tree that was used to make red dye during the Renaissance. It was explored by the portugues almost to extinction. It still endangered despite the efforts to reforest.

I know forest fires are essential to California forests. Redwoods, for example, have seeds that wait to be burned before they will sprout. The large redwoods are big enough to survive most fires.

However, the issue has been that we suppress forest fires for years, leading to a buildup of fuel, leading to fires that are so big that they destroy the trees that normally survive them.

California has changed the way it deals with forest fires to try to prevent this... they don't try to stop ALL fires now.

And, California plans controlled burns.

better than planned uncontrolled burns

But this does not apply to the rainforest as far as I know.

The real rainforest would not really burn(for long), due to all the humidity stored up. But since it is already quite damaged and split up .. it dries up more easily and farmland does not hold much water. So it gets bad. And I do not think, it makes sense to compare current numbers to numbers from the last year - when you should compare it to numbers before the cuttung and burning down started to happen.

As long as the area doesn't get plained, in 40 years or less it will be the same as it was.

The funniest thing about the fires to me is: can anyone research if they are out?

Glad to see this on here. I grew up in a town next to National Forest, and learned that Forest fires are part of the natural lifecycle. Feels weird to see everyone blaming them on climate change.

Interesting article, also from BBC, that explains how suppressing wildfires can actually make them worse http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160722-why-we-should-let-ra...

Since Europe and the US have committed to total reforestation, it’s only natural to expect Brazil to.... Oh wait a minute

Seriously, everyone up in arms, let’s put together funds and lease those lands to protect them. I’d contribute money myself. Since avoiding the damage is more valuable that their commercial activities we should be able to outbid them... right?

Or are we saying Brazil should bear the costs themselves?

I have some issue with the idea of buying/leasing land to protect the environment. It's a noble idea, but I don't think it will work in the long term. Most likely, you won't be able to outbid private companies- at least not for any useful portion of the land. Their usage makes money, while your idea takes money. For your idea to win you would need a lot more rich environmentalists than currently exist. I think a better idea would be to enact reasonable laws that protect the environment- the money that you would have spent buying land could be used to elect non-corrupt politicians.

There is a similar effort in Colorado to buy up land and pay off farmers to prevent them from using too much of the Colorado River so that way downstream states like California can have some. It's created with good intentions, but I think that it can't work in the long term- all it takes is a publicly accessible portion of the river to get overdrawn, or a stubborn farmer to refuse to sell and instead start piping his access of the river to other farmers, and then the idea fails. It's more sustainable to have legally binding usage agreements created by the states that can be enforced with the police and jail time- you just need to motivate the politicians to get off their butts and create the agreements.

Yes. My actual point is that people like to complain but want the costs borne by others.

> let’s put together funds

Not anymore. Lost opportunity. Brazil had received funds and support since 80's at least with Mitterrand being president of France; and is clearly not working. It seems that Bolsonaro had rejected expressely foreign funding and has insulted some big donors in the last weeks. Some places that had been protected in the past (probably with the help of foreign money) are now being assaulted and declared free game and the main culprit of the actual state of mess, we like it or not, is one man.

I fully agree that Europe must be (and can be) reforested but there are other ecosystems in the place and some of them are valuable and host endemic species that don't live in any other place

It's written in a way to make you feel there's no problem.

The total land burned over the years accumulate. We may have a constant speed to burn all the forests left, but it's a deadly speed.

There is still a sharp contrast with the alarmist headlines from a couple of weeks ago, or Macron ready to rupture diplomatic relations with Brazil over those fires. It is impossible these days to read a newspaper without a thick sentiment of skepticism.

Usually it doesn't accumulate as new trees grow in the place of burned trees.

No. The areas burned in the Amazon are replaced by grazing and farming fields, which are vastly less effective at locking in carbon. They’re also not a replacement for lost ecosystems.

45000 sq.km is about 10% of the size of France, there is no way all that land become grazing & fields overnight.

I read a long-form article recently that explained that when Brazilians slash & burn the forest they'll typically put some cattle on the land simply as a way to lay claim to the land, whether or not they're cattle ranchers, and whether or not they even intend to make use of the land immediately.

This happens even if the person might have had a legitimate claim to the property. That is, they may slash & burn land and put cattle on it because it's simpler as a practical matter than dealing with the bureaucratic formalities of land title in Brazil. If there are cattle both officials and others will normally recognize the claim and leave you alone.

The burden of land title transfer formalities are a problem all across Latin America. When it comes to property law, Continental European Civil Law doesn't work well for developing countries generally, and in particular for securing property rights of the poor. Many scholars have argued that Latin American countries would do better with Common Law-style property law. Doing so in Brazil might help reduce the pressure on the rain forest, at least a little bit.

Maybe it depends on the context of the seemer in question. I can't pretend to unravel the matter of their ecological impact; it seems to me that question has too much nuance for a casual observer of the literature to unravel.

However from the perspective of actually being near these things, I can say for sure that they're worse than I anticipated. The smoke is far more unpleasant than I anticipated. The fires also burn hotter and faster than I expected. Before having some personal experience with forest fires I thought that paved roads (certainly at least highways) would be effective fire breaks and that motorists would be largely unimpacted by a fire on the side of the road, but I now know these fires to be disturbingly powerful. They can stall out your car and roast you so hard you turn into a charred skeleton.

Massive forest fires dump large quantities of CO2 and particulates into the atmosphere. That is bad in the context of global warming where we (that is, we humans) have a crisis. Many ecosystems may require forest fires to be healthy, but the available "carbon credits" seem to have been stolen by those who use fossil fuels to generate energy. Is there anyone out there who can the numbers to reason about the positive and negative impacts of forest fires in today's context.

In many (most?) cases, when they set fire, the forest is already gone. First they sell the trees, and once they're removed, they use fire to clear up the area.

Although some times it is used when trees are to massive for machines.

https://beta.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/why-brazi...

So... things have been bad for at least a decade or two but we have only just started to notice.

If forest fires and volcanoes were the primary sources of carbon emissions our planet had to deal with then no, they would not be any concern but rather part of the natural weather cycles. Combined with human generated emissions they are bad.

data from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (Inpe)

Should I be suspicious? (Serious question, I’d hope that this was a body allowed to produce independent science- backed information).

The director was recently and famously fired for publishing accurate data (as it is his mandate).

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/08/03/amer...

I bought some beef from Trader Joe's a few years ago, not thinking much of it - probably the first time I bought raw meet from them. Cooked some burgers... With my usual onion mix, absolutely horrid flavor threw them away. Turned the package over, sourced in Brazil. Holy hell Trader Joe's.

If you you’re used to all American beef, nothing else will satisfy.

My post was about Brazilian beef specifically because it is raised on ex-Amazon forest land. Probably should have said that, but I figured people would get it.

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