While I was researching my last post on the G7 Summit, I was looking for information on Bolsanaro and the Brazilian rainforest fires. I tried to get past the eco-alarmist propaganda on the various search engines but found it almost impossible to do so. I know better than to check with Google but even Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Dogpile mainly returned hyperbolic headlines like this ~
 

• Jair Bolsonaro launches assault on Amazon rainforest protections

• Amazon fires: Bolsonaro actively trying to devastate rainforest

• Bolsonaro Defiant As Amazon Fires Raise Global Alarm

And here’s a good one, from Vox ~ The right-wing populist wave is a threat to the climate ~

The Amazon rainforest is on fire — and the consensus is that Brazil’s far-right populist leader, Jair Bolsonaro, is to blame.

(The “consensus” of the climate hysterics that is.)
 
So I had to fall back on my collection of climate realist bookmarks (Climate Depot, Cornwall Alliance, JoNova, James Delingpole – at Breitbart, ) – along with Free Republic, to discover the truth – or at least find some other opinions. After all, if the only option is that President Bolsonaro is guilty of maniacally torching the Amazon rainforest, then it’s a hideous crime against Gaia, and the global community must immediately invade Brazil and arrest him in the name of earth justice!
 
Or maybe it’s not quite that clear cut.
 
I stumbled on one link that – surprisingly – corrected some misconceptions. Seems CNN had a flash of journalistic integrity last week and admitted that “some of the most-shared images of the Amazon rainforest fires are old or are not of the Amazon”

Social media helped increase coverage of the wildfires, but it’s also contributing to misinformation.
 
There’s no question that several parts of the Amazon rainforest are on fire, and humans are likely the cause of the blazes.
 
Satellite images are helping show just how many fires there are, and how much of their smoke has spread across the country.
 
But photos on social media are conflating the current crisis with previous fires.

 
Here was one of the wildly inaccurate tweets that CNN corrected ~

Only found out on twitter that Amazon rainforest, ‘the earth’s lungs’ has been burning for 3 weeks?! Why is there no media coverage about it? HEARTBREAKING. #PrayforAmazonia 🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/JYwWnAPmom

— David Licauco (@davidlicauco) August 21, 2019

What a doofus.

The two photos on the right aren’t even of an Amazon wildfire. The top image is from a 2018 wildfire in Sweden; the bottom is of a wildfire in Montana on August 6, 2000.

[The other two are from 2018 – and 1989!]
 
The “earth’s lungs” is one of the colorful myths that the enviro-nuts have been peddling about the Amazon rainforest. According to Dan Nepstad, (President and Founder of Earth Innovation Institute and the co-founder of The Amazon Environmental Research Institute, a scientific, non-governmental, non-partisan and non-profit organization that has worked for the sustainable development of the Amazon since 1995) it’s a phony description ~

“It’s bullshit. There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration so it’s a wash.”

 
That particular article at The Daily Wire was discussing the convenient timing of the rainforest fires for the purposes of pushing the climate change agenda, and demonizing Bolsanaro. It also referenced a conversation with Leonardo Coutinho, a leading Brazilian environmental journalist ~

“What is happening in the Amazon is not exceptional. Take a look at Google web searches, search for ‘Amazon’ and ‘Amazon Forest’ over time. Global public opinion was not as interested in the ‘Amazon tragedy’ when the situation was undeniably worse. The present moment does not justify global hysteria.”

 
 
The Myth of Ecocide at Spiked was especially enlightening ~

So now we know: the idea that the Amazon rainforest is burning on an unprecedented scale and that these fires will rob humanity of one of its key sources of oxygen is fake news. It is hard to think of any other global event this year that has been as awash with misinformation as the rainforest fires. We’ve been told these fires are a calamity, an act of ‘ecocide’; they’re proof of humanity’s contempt for the environment; they will blacken and possibly even destroy ‘the lungs of the world’, as the rainforests are referred to, given they produce 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen. It’s all untrue. We are being misled […]
 
The idea that millions of glorious, oxygen-producing trees are been burnt to a cinder by evil humans is nonsense, too. To the extent that there has been an increase in fires in the Amazon – and this itself is a deceptive claim – many of this year’s new fires are of dry scrubland, where trees have already been felled.
 
It is untrue that the fires are historically huge or unprecedented. NASA says the Amazon fires are ‘slightly below average this year’ […]
 
More broadly, it simply isn’t true that mankind is at war with forestland. As made clear by a substantial report in Nature, published last year, the world’s tree cover has increased over the past 35 years. In three decades, 2.24million square kilometres of trees – an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined – have been added to the world’s already existing tree-covered land. The study, involving satellite analysis of the Earth from 1982 to 2016, found that while there has been some tree loss in subtropical areas, this has been ‘outweighed by tree-cover gain in subtropical, temperate, boreal, and polar regions’.

So now we do know. The truth is still out there, somewhere in the vast reaches of the internet. But the progressive, authoritarian science settlers are making it increasingly difficult to find it.

 
Beware. And bookmark for future reference.
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Related:
What everyone gets wrong about the Amazon ~

The first thing people need to understand is that there has been a huge decline in deforestation since its peak in the early 2000s. Deforestation is still 75 to 80 per cent lower than at this peak. Deforestation has been going up in recent years, but that rise didn’t start under the current Brazilian government. Clearly, much of the response from the Western media is a reaction to Bolsonaro – it’s not just about what’s happening on the ground.

 
Amazon Fires – A Big, Fat Nothingburger of a #FakeNews Scare Story ~ James Delingpole with some inconvenient facts, figures and charts ~

• The fires are mainly on agricultural land – not virgin rain forest
• There is nothing abnormal about this fire season
• Even NASA admits this
• Deforestation is getting better, not worse
• The Amazon rainforest does NOT produce 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen
• It wasn’t always rainforest

 
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Updated: 9-1-19
Brazil’s Bolsonaro HUMILIATES Macron over Amazon Fires! ~ (Video)