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> I don't see how trying to tell the truth about something can be equated with trying to downplay the situation or encouraging people not to bother about it. B
by dictum 7y ago
> I don't see how trying to tell the truth about something can be equated with trying to downplay the situation or encouraging people not to bother about it.
Because it's a red herring.
It's a very common form of red herring, to be precise: taking averaged measurements of a whole set to infer information about a single element. The converse is also a red herring; inferring information about a set by analyzing only a single, cherry picked member.
"Fires Globally" includes "Fires in the region X of country Y", but doesn't take into account the specific importance of that region, the trends over time, what's going to happen to surrounding regions in the future...
(For a quick metaphor: You have 99.5%~99.8% of your body in perfect working order when your eyes have just been gouged.)
- drivebycomment 7y agoIt's not a red herring if we're discussing a global trend, and contributing factors to it. And we are discussing a global trend, or at least the article is a criticism against other sensationalist trends to make everything look like doom-and-gloom globally. A global trend and a local trend contradicting with each other doesn't make the global trend a red herring, and putting forward the global trend to better understand the local trend in the context is not a bad thing. Nowhere in the article suggests we should stop doing things in Amazon.
- chrisco255 7y agoThe fires and deforestation were actually way, way worse prior to 2003. I saw charts for the Amazon in the 80s and 90s and throughout those decades the forest fires were more than 5x greater than any point since 2003.