Free Republic

Unlike the United States and Canada, where many wildfires are ignited by lightning strikes during the summer, large fires are not a typical, natural occurrence in the Amazon, particularly during non-drought years such as this one. [snip]Instead, most fires in the Amazon are caused by humans, set either accidentally or intentionally. Brazil's National Institute for Space Research found the country has lost more than 1,330 square miles of forest cover to development since January, when President Jair Bolsonaro took office. That's a 39 percent increase over the same period in 2018. July in particular featured a huge spike in forest...

All this week, the mainstream media have been trying to scare you with heartrending tales of burning Amazonia — a conflagration the like of which we have never seen before. Supposedly…But almost everything you have read or heard about the Amazon fires in the mainstream media is #FakeNews....The fires are mainly on agricultural land – not virgin rain forest… There is nothing abnormal about this fire seasonEven NASA admits thisThe Amazon rainforest does NOT produce 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen

The Amazon has made headlines this month as fires rip across the region. While this is the dry season for the area, during which fires are common, fires have nonetheless reached unprecedented highs this season — up 80 percent compared to last year. As the Amazon burns, the world has lit up with despair and outrage, with hashtags such as #PrayForTheAmazon going viral. As the fires and emotional uproar continue, one naturally wonders "who is to blame?" Of course, the obvious cause is "human ignition," as these fires are mostly due to farmers and ranchers using flames to clear forests...

Carson and his colleagues wanted to explore the question of whether early Amazonians had a major impact on the forest. They focused on the Amazon of northeastern Bolivia, where they had sediment cores from two lakes nearby major earthworks sites. These sediment cores hold ancient pollen grains and charcoal from long-ago fires, and can hint at the climate and ecosystem that existed when the sediment was laid down as far back as 6,000 years ago. An examination of the two cores — one from the large lake, Laguna Oricore, and one from the smaller lake, Laguna Granja — revealed a...