5 things the media won't tell you about the Amazon fires

5 things the media won't tell you about the Amazon fires

By Jesse Ferrell,

UPDATE: NASA changed the language on their website that I had quoted, and I've linked to a New York Times article that agrees with one of my points. Follow me on Facebook & Twitter for future updates.

This week, traditional and social media have gone crazy covering the fires in the Amazon (specifically Brazil), and the images and video like those we shared are compelling. But there's a lot of misinformation out there, and there is some good news: It may not be as bad as some in the media are reporting. This is serious stuff! We need to stick to the science. Here are five things that the media (which rarely gets it right on science) aren't telling you:

The Earth is burning, but it always has been.

Thousands of fires are continually burning across the Earth every day of every year, and they always have. They have an animation of the last 20 years of this data. You won't see much of a change, except that fires are worse in some areas and better in others from year to year. The map below shows September 2000 vs. 2018. They look about the same to me.

You can't actually "see" the fires or the damage they do, looking at the globe from space.

So why does it look like the whole Earth is on fire in the maps above? That's a great question, and it leads to exaggeration of the true size of what's burning. As I understand it, this data is actually composed of "warm pixels." This means the satellite has detected what it thinks could be a wildfire based on its temperature, and I assume, other algorithms. NASA warns on their website:

"Don't be fooled by sizes of some of the bright splotches on these maps. The colors represent a count of the number of fires observed within a 1,000-square-kilometer area."

This means you're not looking at actual fires, you're looking at pixels which represent the number of satellite-detected fires within 1,000 square-kilometers of a location, and that data can be represented with smaller pixels, but if you zoom out to show the whole Earth, as above, you wouldn't be able to see them. It's analogous to looking at a map of NWS Storm Spotters, where each car is the size of Rhode Island. When you zoom way out, it will look like cities are clogged with cars, but the reality is that a car is a lot smaller than Rhode Island, and when you get down to that level, they are very far apart.

Smoke rising into the atmosphere this week from hundreds of wildfires burning across Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and other parts of South America was so heavy it was picked up in satellite imagery. (NASA)

In theory, you could see the wildfire "scars" on satellite, when zoomed into a local area, but even that is unlikely if it's a bunch of small fires in different places. You can, however, see the smoke from space, because it thins out and drifts into much larger areas than the fires themselves. But even here the media are often getting it wrong. I had to correct a major media distribution platform on Friday after its journalists were looking at thunderstorms overnight on a satellite image, and mistook the storms for wildfire smoke -- a mistake that was disseminated to countless other media outlets.

Why should you trust me? Well, I'm not perfect, but I am a scientist and I've been working as a meteorologist, looking at these satellite images for nearly 25 years. The conclusions many in the media are jumping to are not fair to the science. This is why we need people to be more vigilant about bringing scientists in on the explanation of these events.

BTW: NASA also tweeted a good before-and-after of the smoke. See? It's the thin white stuff.

The Amazon region isn't even seeing above-normal fire activity this year.

Yes, there are a lot of fires in South America, some of them in the Amazon rain forests, but how unusual is that? Unfortunately, it's not unusual at all. The map below shows little change, and on Aug. 15, NASA wrote:

"As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated that total fire activity in the Amazon basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years."

UPDATE: NASA changed the text from the quote above from "slightly below" to "close to the" without explanation. See bottom of blog.

Could NASA come out next week with a revised estimate and say that there is an increase? Sure. Something else to consider -- a lot of the land may have not even been rain forest, in recent years, or ever. Looking at the extreme closeup satellite image from Maxar below, it looks like what's burning was already agricultural fields; the large areas of forests are not ablaze, at least in this image. UPDATE: A New York Times reporter confirms"the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year’s crops and pasture." (If you don't have a NYT account, click here for quotes).

There's no proof that more of Brazil has burned than in past years.

Now we're getting to the crux of "what's different" about the fires this year. According to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, there have been about 76,000... well, they don't say what, but let's assume they are showing a count of wildfires, which is an 85% increase vs. 2018. But what does that really mean?

Counting fires doesn't really give you much data because we don't know what size they are. They all could be small fields, or they could be huge fires that are wiping out entire towns (like some of the big ones we've had in California recently). Without data on the area burned, it's not fair to make a comparison. The United States maintains statistics on fire sizes (and if you look you'll see the biggest year for acres burned is actually "below average"), but Brazil does not.

Wildfires aren't necessarily bad.

I know, this sounds like a cut and paste excuse from environmentalist haters, but it's true. Even Smokey the Bear admits: "Fire can also be an important part of maintaining diverse and healthy ecosystems. This can trigger a rebirth of forests, helping to maintain native plant species." That said, he still doesn't want you starting them, because they could hurt people or property.

By the same token, the media reports that many of the new fires in Brazil this year are human-started. Some are for agricultural purposes; some may be arson. The only proof offered by the media that the fires are arson was a video of an indigenous woman, but that turned out to be faked -- it was two months ago, over 1,800 miles away, not in the Amazon.

Am I saying we should be burning down the rain forest? No. It sounds like a bad idea that could have a big effect on the Earth. But I'm not an environmental or political expert -- I can only give you the numbers above, which I hope make you realize that this is not a new problem, and it may not even be one that's getting worse.

That's good news! If you feel passionate about burning less of the rain forest, don't let me make you less so, just go into it armed with facts and not misleading information.

UPDATE: Jon Passantino of @BuzzFeedStorm pointed out that my quote above from a NASA website was not what he was seeing on their page. It turns out they changed it. The Google Cache of their page, which contained my quote, has been changed from "slightly below average" to "close to average" with no explanation of that revision. It would be nice to know if the data has changed, or it was a mistake.

Their source remains the Global Fire Emissions Database. Their "Cumulative Fire Counts Totals" (for the Amazon) so far in 2019 is about in the middle of the graph as of yesterday (August 22). It's below 2016 and above 2017 and 2018.

However, there is no average given, so I can't say whether it's above or below average. The data goes back to 2003, which is not far enough to make any climate assumptions, but they note that the source of the data changed in 2016, so records before then may not be comparable.

In summary, other than changing their quote above, their revision does not reject any of the points that I've brought up.