{"id":7552,"date":"2019-10-21T07:04:28","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T07:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7552"},"modified":"2019-10-21T07:04:28","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T07:04:28","slug":"is-the-earth-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/10\/21\/is-the-earth-burning\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Earth burning?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We're having to get used to hearing that the Earth is \"burning\" as it becomes a favoured phrase of those wishing to draw attention to the implications of rapid climate change.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks, then, to <a href=\"http:\/\/naee.org.uk\/september-2nd-report\/\">NAEE<\/a> for alerting us back in September to the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the UK reporting (TV + online + newspapers) of the fires in the Amazon. \u00a0Put simply, the Amazon fires this year are fewer than those in Africa, and fires, globally, are fewer in numbers than in many recent years.<\/p>\n<p>In fact according to <em>NASA<\/em> such fires are becoming fewer, and the rate of deforestation is slowing down: a 2018 UN report on the world's forests concluded that the net loss of forest area over the last 5 years was ~0.08% per year. \u00a0This contrasts with ~0.18% in the 1990s.<\/p>\n<p>Problems remain, however, as an article in <em>Nature<\/em> says that the global tree cover has increased by some 7% relative to 1982 levels. \u00a0Mostly, however, it seems, such re-afforestation is mainly in richer, economically-developed countries.<\/p>\n<p>However, the tendency remains in some parts of the press and on social media just to report the bad news with little leavening with counterfacts. \u00a0We like this, apparently ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We're having to get used to hearing that the Earth is \"burning\" as it becomes a favoured phrase of those wishing to draw attention to the implications of rapid climate change. Thanks, then, to NAEE for alerting us back in...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}