Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point' • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#41

Post by rodolphoarruda » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #35

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Brazilian, I'm trying to imagine the logistical costs of running any type of large scale export oriented agriculture business in the Amazon. There is no railroad, no paved roads, no electricity, no workforce (human density is lower than 1 per square Km, let alone work aged humans), nothing. There's a lot of dense forest and water. Feeding cattle in large scale must be a huge expensive challenge in the Amazon reg…

You don't have to "imagine" there are the pictures from the satellites which can be compared with the older: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HusBCLws0Q https://youtu.be/L9zWDtDKDS8?t=45

Interesting. Do you have videos showing cattle, warehouses, trucks etc.? With so much devastation, it must be easy to land helicopters anywhere out there and film the whole thing from close distance.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#42

Post by terlisimo » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

wincy wrote: post #33

monk_e_boy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re being down voted, but you raise a valid point. We are helpless. Even our first world governments are helpless to save the amazon. It’s just so damn sad.

What should we do? Have the US military take over the Amazon river basin, declare it a human-free zone, forcefully evict all people from the site, and let it grow back? We're not helpless, we're just not totalitarian conquerors.

I heard a story/statement once, that every time a bunch of smart people got together to think about solving the world problems, they all pretty much came up with the same solution: eugenics and birth control.

Both of these are controversial subjects at best.

Have you seen the TV show Utopia? Basically a group of people decide it's in the humanity's best interest to wipe out 90% of the population with viruses. Rather grim, but understandable in a way.

While in the domain of Sci-Fi, the solution I liked better was the idea from "Forever peace" by John Haldeman, where human evolution is propelled to the next step by increasing mutual empathy through technology. The Internet might be a small step in that direction.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#43

Post by acqq » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #41

acqq wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to "imagine" there are the pictures from the satellites which can be compared with the older: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HusBCLws0Q https://youtu.be/L9zWDtDKDS8?t=45

Interesting. Do you have videos showing cattle, warehouses, trucks etc.? With so much devastation, it must be easy to land helicopters anywhere out there and film the whole thing from close distance.

> Do you have videos showing cattle, warehouses, trucks etc.?

No. And I surely agree with you that the explanations are probably broad generalizations. I have no idea how those that do it earn money in any specific case, but deforestation is really happening across the globe and definitely in Amazon forests too.

https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/maps/amazon_deforesta...

Here is one description:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/Deforestat...

"This pattern follows one of the most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall. Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the plots into large areas of pasture."

As the name of the area depicted is stated in this case: "The state of Rondônia in western Brazil — once home to 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres), an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas — has become one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon" you can do your own research starting from there.

Also:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

"The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest, but in the last 40 years at least 20% of it has been destroyed. The Amazon basin covers nine countries in South America, with 60% of it in Brazil, and for a decade local photographer Rodrigo Baleia has documented the beauty and destruction of the region from above"

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#44

Post by riffraff » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

gdubs wrote: post #26

gtirloni wrote: post #11

Until we find an economic solution, this trend will just continue. Unfortunately, people only want to profit at all costs and governments usually want to be enablers of that, so the economy grows and they can have more votes in the next election. I think the real question is: can equivalent money to logging/beef be made from tropical forests? If we can come up with an answer to that, maybe we can revert this trend.

If carbon was priced to reflect its negative externalities the Amazon [Rain Forest] wouldn’t have to generate money because clearing it for agriculture would be prohibitively expensive.

I'd imagine people wouldn't really pay for a permit to cut trees, the forest would just accidentally get burned or something like that.

If we'd make it not economically useful to burn it down, because agricultural products were less profitable, that would work, probably.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#45

Post by chiefalchemist » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

No doubt Jair Bolsonaro hasn't helped. However, this has been going on for a long, long, __long__ time. Tipping point or not, such spin on who's accountable is irresponsible.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#46

Post by riffraff » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

terlisimo wrote: post #42

wincy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should we do? Have the US military take over the Amazon river basin, declare it a human-free zone, forcefully evict all people from the site, and let it grow back? We're not helpless, we're just not totalitarian conquerors.

I heard a story/statement once, that every time a bunch of smart people got together to think about solving the world problems, they all pretty much came up with the same solution: eugenics and birth control. Both of these are controversial subjects at best. Have you seen the TV show Utopia? Basically a group of people decide it's in the humanity's best interest to wipe out 90% of the population with viruses. Rather…

We probably don't need to impose birth control, population is stabilizing and will probably decrease after peaking.

The faster we get people out of poverty, girls educated, and reduce child mortality, the faster we stop population growth.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#47

Post by vfc1 » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

maehwasu wrote: post #38

vfc1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cattle ranching in the Amazon is the main responsible for deforestation, responsible for about 65% of the land deforested. So a simple economic solution to the problem is to stop buying so much beef and the deforestation would reduce drastically. Why would they continue to chop the forest down if they have no economic incentive to do so? The excessive consumption of animal products in the west is the main reason why…

What incentive mechanism are you proposing? (Real question, not rhetorical) Generally, when people ask for an economic solution, they’re looking for a proposal to change behavioral incentives, rather than proclamation of the desirability of someone’s pet cause (as noble as it may be).

The incentive to keep deforesting is to provide cheap beef meat mostly for western countries which can pay the most.

By reducing the amount of meat consumed in the west, there would be no reason to keep chopping down the forest, it's expensive.

In the west we would need a meat tax like it has been proposed in several countries, this alone we would reduce demand for beef and reduce the rate that the forest is getting chopped.

Only if it hurts on people's pockets will anything change, if it doesn't and it goes down for long enough, and the climate keep changing like it has it's going to end up as it as always ended when multiple groups of people are competing for resources: war.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#48

Post by woogiewonka » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

makerofspoons wrote: post #10

Loss of the Amazon would be a major tipping point in ecological collapse: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/how-c... In one model if the Amazon were deforested the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains declines by half. There are global impacts for all of this.

No sources, but something tells me we are already past the tipping point.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#49

Post by forgotmypw3 » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

If you buy palm oil, you're complicit.

Re: Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

#50

Post by rabidrat » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:51 PM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #46

terlisimo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a story/statement once, that every time a bunch of smart people got together to think about solving the world problems, they all pretty much came up with the same solution: eugenics and birth control. Both of these are controversial subjects at best. Have you seen the TV show Utopia? Basically a group of people decide it's in the humanity's best interest to wipe out 90% of the population with viruses. Rather…

We probably don't need to impose birth control, population is stabilizing and will probably decrease after peaking. The faster we get people out of poverty, girls educated, and reduce child mortality, the faster we stop population growth.

The population is not stabilizing. The growth rate is stabilizing. We're still adding almost 100m new humans to the roster every year. We're going to hit 8 billion in 3 years (ahead of predictions made 20 years ago), and then 9 billion 12 years after that. People love to talk about the birth rate is falling in developed countries and how we're going to have a population peak here Real Soon Now. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the world human population in 2100 is greater than the population in 2090 (a horrific mass killer like the Bubonic Plague or nuclear war notwithstanding).