For regular readers of this blog you will have noticed that I have written about Jair Bolsonaro on a few occasions. Unfortunately the fears that I have expressed appear to be bearing out in the behaviour of his government and the problems they are encountering.
Jair Bolsorano, new President of Brazil, is quite adamant that conservation is not of high priority. As an aside, conservation is not the only area that he does not value, he also does not value any of the initial inhabitants of Brazil, only worrying about the European immigrants. Indeed it seems to be skewed towards the highly rich, allowing them to steal more land.
However many of his supporters under his permission are damaging the Amazon. The problem with this is it makes the Amazon incapable of coping with extremes of heat and other attacks. This has manifested itself in a huge increase increase in fires in the amazon.
Sao Paulo, with the largest population in the Americas for a city ( with well over 11 million inhabitants), went dark at 3pm 19th August due to the amount of smoke in the air. While the blackout only lasted 1 hour it is still seriously worrying. It came on the day after announcement that the Amazon Rainforest had suffered more fires in the past year, having recorded over 70,000 fires between January and August, and this representing in 83% on 2018. While fires are more common as the temperature increases they are almost always started by some form of human activity, usually the damage we are doing to the forest makes them less capable of coping with these effects.