Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

Thanks to Dr. Roy Spencer for his excellent WUWT article exposing the plight of the economically poor Brazilian farmers as well as the gross mischaracterizations by climate alarmists of fires in the Amazon region.

Dr. Spencer’s article provides a 30+ year long time period graphic showing the area of deforestation of the Amazon region starting in year 1988 through 2019 as shown below from the source referenced in Dr. Spencer’s posting.

The L A Times article addressed in my prior posting at WUWT provided a graphic presented by the Times showing the Amazon region area of deforestation but misleadingly cherry picked to address just the last two years of data for 2018 and 2019 as shown below.

I criticized the Times politically contrived cherry picking as anti-science alarmist propaganda which is a completely valid assessment since the Times was clearly concealing the much larger areas of Amazon deforestation that had occurred in the past as the more complete long time period graphic clearly displays both in my original posting (shown below) as well as Dr. Spencer’s posting.

If the Times had made a comparison between 2019 data versus 2016 data for example the result would show lower deforestation in 2019 with year 2016 data being more than 10% above 2019 data through August with only July 2019 being somewhat higher than July 2016 and all other months of 2019 being lower than year 2016 further demonstrating the anti-science cherry picking alarmist scheme by the Times in trying to support its politically misleading presentation.

Recent data from NASA Earth Observatory Images using MODIS data has documented a decrease in global fire burned acreage since 2003 further undermining alarmist claims that man made CO2 emissions are increasing global fire impacts. The study notes:

“One of the most interesting things researchers have discovered since MODIS began collecting measurements, noted Randerson, is a decrease in the total number of square kilometers burned each year. Between 2003 and 2019, that number has dropped by roughly 25 percent.”

Additionally results from a new study utilizing NASA satellite data show that during a 35 year period global forests have increased growth by over 2.2 million square kilometers due to increasing CO2. The study notes the following results over the period 1982 through 2016:

“Over the entire span, the researchers found that new tree cover had offset tree cover loss by approximately 2.24 million square kilometers—which they note is approximately the size of Texas and Alaska combined.”

The claims by climate alarmist and their media manipulators that we must now “panic” regarding global fires including those in the Amazon region are driven by politics not science.

As Dr. Spencer astutely noted in his article:

“This is just one more example of the media controlling the narrative and selectively and hypocritically placing blame on a particular (and almost always right-leaning) political party.”