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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/amazon-rainforest-deforestation-crisis/article37722932/

This is another good longform take that covers a few things I skipped over here for length:

- Brazil's historical anxiety about settling the Amazon so as to ensure it could preserve its borders/claims

- The ways in which the government is able to undermine its own enforcement arms (e.g., paying agencies to issue fines, then just never collecting on them)

- How easy it is for ranchers and loggers to get around official restrictions / conservation measures if they feel like it (again much easier when the government isn't taking enforcement seriously from the top down)

- The issue of land titling and how it factors in (which from my reading seems super complex and varied by region/province)

- How selective logging is often the beachhead that leads to larger deforestation efforts (and how degradation from selective logging and mining etc is causing its own class of massive problems)

I also like the line of graffiti that the reporter found: "When the law ignores reality, reality takes revenge on the law." I feel like that cuts to the heart of it from a local POV.

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Hmm - not sure why anyone mentioned carbon sequestration or oxygen production, neither of them are a significant issue related to the tropical rain forests. Instead it is major loss of biodiversity,

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/23/5775

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Are there good models that can be emulated? ā€” tropical forests that are being preserved and expanded?

I agree herb the author that even in America Iā€™m not aware of a lot of good forest preservation or the reconstitution of forests.

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author

Good question that I don't have a good answer to.

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author

A few things here:

1. Throwing money at the problem won't solve it by itself, no. But *failing* to throw money at it will make it even less likely to be solved. The money is necessary, but not sufficient.

2. There are guesses and there are trajectories. The trajectories here are what matters, and those are scientifically beyond dispute.

3. There's no such thing as true neutrality. Every writer has a POV. The most helpful thing we can do is disclose it and then be careful to both separate opinion from fact and to include a feedback loop to ensure those facts are actually facts. I've done that here, with great care.

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> beyond dispute

Math and religion provide that kind of certainty, but not science.

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author

Cute, but not especially true. The accumulation of science absolutely puts some things beyond meaningful dispute. Core insights that have been exhaustively validated slowly become axiomatic, eventually reaching an endpoint where further dispute is inherently bad faith. The job of good science reporting is making it clear to lay audiences which things are and aren't at that point.

So far as climate change goes, an uncomfortably large number of things are very much still within dispute. But some things aren't. The idea of say dieback death spirals is just mechanically true.

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"Mechanically true" is not actually a thing. The closest would be a mathematical proof which in ecology is going to rely on a bunch of questionable things embedded in the assumptions.

Before quantum mechanics, probably 100% of physicists would have said that local realism is true. Now that view is held only by cranks.

I doubt that a soft science like ecology is more reliable than physics.

Anyway, "beyond dispute" is an anti-science phrase.

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author

OK

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