Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency first order in two days! #ActForTheAmazon pic.twitter.com/dogOJj9big
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) August 22, 2019
French President Emmanuel Macron, Madonna and Leonardo DiCaprio were among the celebrities who distributed on social media at least a dozen different photos of fires that purported to illustrate a crisis in the Amazon rain forest.
The problem is they weren’t taken this year, and many might not even be of the rain forest, the Washington Times reported.
Fact-checkers included the far-left Mother Jones and Agence-France Presse, which found some of the photos came from blazes in California, India and other places.
Macron, warning of an “international crisis,” tweeted a photo by Loren McIntyre, a photographer who died in 2003. DiCaprio tweeted the same photo.
In a tweet from its official account, Mother Jones said: “Stop sharing those viral photos of the Amazon burning. They’re fake.”
In an article linked to the tweet, Mother Jones said there are “very real fires burning in the Amazon and they do deserve more coverage, but there’s a big problem with this viral campaign: Most of the photos claiming to show the fires are fakes.”
The New York Times challenged the claim that old-growth rain forest is at risk.
“Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year’s crops and pasture,” the paper explained. “Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use.”
Reason’s Ron Bailey pointed out that when NASA released a satellite image of the Amazon on Aug. 21, it noted that “it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity. Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits.”
He found that the rate of deforestation has increased slightly since right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil’s president, but the rates are considerably way below earlier highs.
A 2018 study in Nature concluded the global tree canopy cover had increased by 865,000 square miles from 1982 to 2016. Bailey observed that as Brazilians become wealthier, “the deforestation trend in the Amazon will likely turn around toward afforestation, as it already has done many other countries.”
