The Amazon isn't the world's lung and doesn't produce 20% oxygen.

Amazon rainforest is rich in biodiversity, but it is not the lung of the world.  Not even close to 20%

 Forest consumes almost all the oxygen it produces.  Just as important as the forest is phytoplankton, microscopic algae that produce oxygen in the oceans.

 The trees sweat water vapor.  This is what scientists call evapotranspiration.  They are microscopic droplets that saturate the clouds of water vapor.

 What the eyes do not see turns into a river a day, which comes out of the Amazon rainforest and becomes rain in other parts of the country, irrigating the crops, filling the reservoirs of hydroelectric dams and the filling stations of cities.

 Forests also retain carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.  When burning occurs, the release of CO2 accelerates the climate imbalance.  There are millions of tons of gas raising the average temperature of the planet, apart from the impact on air quality of cities, as happens now in the Northern Region.

 The advance of deforestation and burning in Brazil has justified several messages on social networks noting that the Amazon rainforest is fundamental to the planet, among other reasons, because it produces oxygen.  For example, French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterrez have said.

 Scientists point out that while the Amazon rainforest produces oxygen, it is far from the lungs of the world.

 “The Amazon does not change the oxygen balance much.  It, for example, annually removes up to two billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and it returns about 1.5 billion tons of oxygen to the atmosphere.  But 1.5 billion tons of oxygen is a very small fraction, 0.001% of the planet's oxygen, ”explained climatologist Carlos Nobre.

 For Paulo Sérgio Salomon, oceanologist and researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, explains that most of the oxygen present in the atmosphere has been accumulating in billions of years in the processes of life formation on Earth.  For him, as important as the forest is phytoplankton, microscopic algae that also produce oxygen in the oceans.

 "Advances in knowledge have shown that this oxygen producer function is shared approximately 50% with phytoplankton."

What is fake news about the Amazon fire?