[MelBridgeman]

Originally Posted by New Era

Oh Mel, reading is hard.

"Scientists at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research calculated that there were 35 percent more fires so far this year than in the average of the last eight years."

That's significant, and can't just be attributed to the burning of fields for crop preparation. The article says just that.

“Brazil has turned certain states like Mato Grosso into Iowa,” said Mr. Hanson, referring to the Brazilian state on the southern edge of the Amazon region. “You’ve got rain forest, and then there’s just an ocean of soybean.”

Mato Grosso is like the plains in the US. This is the corn and soybean belt for Brazil. It's farmland that butts up to the southern areas of the Amazon rain forest. It is this area where the concern is.

“Fires are not a natural phenomenon in these forests,” said Mark Cochrane, an expert on wildfire and ecology at the University of Maryland. “All of the fires in this region are caused by people.”

Mr. Cochrane noted that while a large majority of the fires were on land that had already been cleared, many others were detected burning with particular intensity. He said these were likely deforestation fires, not just fires for clearing previously deforested land.

“When you slash an area, pile it up, let it dry and then burn it, it burns very intensely, and that’s also what puts off a lot of that smoke,” said Mr. Cochrane."

The farmers, in an attempt to make more money, are clearing rain forest and burning it.

"“Most of this is land use that have replaced rain forest,” said Matthew Hansen, who is a co-leader of the Global Land Analysis and Discovery laboratory at the University of Maryland."

The incursion into the rain forest to make more farm lands continues and this is exactly why these fires are burning. The farmers are cutting down huge swaths of forest, piling it up to dry, then burning it. This is what we are seeing in the satellite data. This is exactly what the article says.

Like i said behind a pay wall. So ya reading is hard. But hey at least we are now paying attention and have our boogie man to blame for things that have been happening for decades.