Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We are statistical guide to the numbers all around us and I'm Tim Halford.

The news over the last couple of weeks has been full of reports about the fires in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

They're known as the planet's lungs, the organ through which the world breathes.

Wildfires have been raging in the Amazon rainforest.

World leaders and the Pope are weighing in as we see new images of the devastation.

It's just shard of earth as far as the eye can see. This is absolutely devastating.

The raging fires in the Amazon rainforest.

Each minute chipping away at the forest known as the lungs of the earth.

Responsible for 20% of the world's oxygen.

Some common themes there, devastation, the lungs of the world, 20% of our oxygen passes through the rainforest.

And a number of listeners have pointed at some of the other statistical claims that have been thrown around.

There has been an 84% increase in fires since last year.

10% of the air that we breathe here in London is actually passing through the Amazon rainforest.

That was the voices of British parliamentarians, Deirdre Brock and Diane Abbott.

So what do we know? Are those claims true?

And more importantly, what's going on in the rainforest and to what extent can we quantify it?

We found someone who's made it his business to study the Amazon rainforest for 30 years.

My name is Dan Nebstead, I'm the Executive Director of the Earth Innovation Institute.

The first thing I wanted to ask Dan, who's seen Amazonian fires firsthand, is what those fires are actually like.

When I heard that news reporter telling me all about the fires he could see,

and I mentioned those huge, tall, luscious trees on fire, flames ripping through the canopy

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