Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

Fires in Amazon Rain Forest Have Surged This Year

Author:     Manuela Andreoni and Christine Hauser
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     Aug. 21, 2019
 Link: Fires in Amazon Rain Forest Have Surged This Year
Stephan:   The Amazon rain forests are often called the lungs of the planet. As this report describes these lungs are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. Unfortunately, at this moment of crisis, Brazil, like the United States, has for a president a fascist narcissistic moron whose recommendation for climate change is that everyone should have a bowel movement only every other day, and who says science is fake news. Basically, Jair Bolsonaro is a Latin-American Trump and, like Trump, he is trashing his country as fast as he can so a few corporations and rich supporters can get richer no matter what. Unfortunately, mother nature does not acknowledge national borders and thus every country in the world is being harmed by these two incompetents.

A tract of forest burned as it was cleared on Tuesday by loggers and farmers in Amazonas State. Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has relaxed its environmental protections.
Credit: Bruno Kelly/Reuters

RIO DE JANEIRO — Fires are burning in the Amazon rain forest at one of the fastest paces in years, Brazil’s space research center said this week.

The center, the National Institute for Space Research, which monitors fires using satellite images, said on Tuesday that it had detected 74,155 fires this year in the world’s largest rain forest, an 84 percent increase from the same period in 2018.

The fires, most of which have been set by farmers clearing their land, are raging in uninhabited areas of rain forest and intruding on populated areas in the country’s north, including the states of Rondônia and Acre. About 4.5 million acres have burned.

The blazes are so large and widespread that smoke has wafted thousands of miles away to the Atlantic coast and São Paulo, the country’s most […]

Read the Full Article