Putting destruction in context

The third headline on the BBC news website was "Amazon deforestation accelerates".  The article, in doom laden tones, usually consider appropriate by the BBC for environmental stories, states that:

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has accelerated for the first time in four years, Brazilian officials say. Satellite images show 11,968 sq km of land was cleared in the year to July, nearly 4% higher than the year before...

In recent years the Brazilian government has been able to celebrate three successive falls in deforestation. But the latest estimate from the National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE, shows that this trend has come to a halt.

Now, at a time that the world seems to be falling apart, with the terror attacks in Mumbai, protests in Thailand, the end of Western capitalism, and the assault by the Met police on Parliamentary sovereignty, you would think the ordering of BBC stories is strange. But the biggest sin, is the poverty of the story.

The lesser error is the suggestion that one year data can signal an end of a trend. To be honest, I wouldn't be sure that three years of downward data shows there is a downward trend; but there there is no way to tell whether this year's rise was a new trend or a blip.

But the howler is saying the 12,000 sq km were destroyed (as opposed to trees just being cut down) without any context.  How big is 12,000 sq km?

Using what seems to have been the international benchmark of choice when discussion Amazon destruction, 12,000 sq km is around half of Wales; that seems big.  A more appropriate comparison is that 12,000 sq km is but 0.2 per cent of the total rainforest area of 5,500,000 sq km.  Or put it another way, this rate of loss would have to continue for 50 years for the present rainforest to fall by 10 per cent; hardly disastrous.

So the bottom line of the story is there is no evidence that the slowdown of a already very slow fall in the Amazon rainforest has stopped.  A good news story.

BBC has only one way to skin a cat

Ben Bernanke has been offering some support to proposed fiscal boost in the US during is Testimony to the US Representative. So far so Keynesian (and so now).

What is the most interesting about the story is how the BBC reported it. The headline is "Bernanke supports higher spending". The first paragraph was:

US Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke has said more government spending may be needed to combat economic weakness.

It was if Ben was channeling Gordon Brown, in his new found love for spend, spend (after all, it helped the Japanese no end).

The thing is that Bernanke made no such direct comment. He did offer qualified support for a fiscal package, saying:

... consideration of a fiscal package by the Congress at this juncture [of weak economic growth] seems appropriate.

But what the BBC seem to have forgot is that a fiscal package can be a tax cut as much as a spending increase (or as Bernanke says himself, "increased federal expenditure or lost revenue"). The first US fiscal stimulus was a tax cut after all. The BBC could not however entertain such as ridiculous idea.

I admit I'm being a pedant, but there are two serious points here:

1. Whatever the advisability of attempting to fiscally fine-tune the economy (the consensus has been don't for around 20 years now), why do most governments consider only spending increases, which typically become permanent structural spending?
2. Why is the level of economic knowledge so low in the BBC, they have bought the new Brown narrative that only spending increases are somehow a worthy response. I thought it was their job to give people information about the present downturn and policy solutions?
   

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Springwatch returns

Springwatch returns to the BBC. I've been waiting since autumn for it to come back to our screens. Now I can watch the tumbles of barn owl, the stubbornness of a set of badgers, and the daft flirting and courtship rituals of the presenters Bill Oddie and Kate Humble. It also allows me to discuss Kate's great tits with my wife.