Human industry and commerce — no, let's call it CAPITALIST industry and commerce — are setting the world on fire.
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After more than a year of record-breaking heat, the peak of fire season is approaching across vast swathes of our green planet.
"It feels like we are getting used to the Earth being on fire," say wildfire ecologists Víctor Fernández García and Cristina Santín. According to their new research, extreme wildfires happen twice as often and are doubly destructive compared with two decades ago.
Fossil fuel emissions have risen by more than a third over that period. The combustion of coal, oil, and gas is the main reason the world is burning more frequently, more intensely, and for longer. Climate change has made typically dry wildfire-prone regions even drier and raised the prospect of extreme heat waves. Animal agriculture and deforestation are also significant causes.
Russia is reporting a 50% rise in the extent of its wildfires this summer, as enormous blazes hurl smoke into the Arctic Circle. Wreathing the far north of Europe, Asia, and North America is the boreal forest, one of Earth's biggest carbon sinks.
Natascha Kljun and Julia Kelly, environmental scientists at Lund University say computer simulations of Earth's climate could be underestimating the contribution of boreal wildfires to global heating. According to their research on Swedish forests, CO₂ emissions from burnt areas continue for several years after the flames die.
Fires beget more fires because of their influence on the local climate. The same is true on a global scale: as forests burn, they release the carbon they stored while growing. More carbon in the air means more climate change; more climate change means more fires and more carbon in the air.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://phys.org/news/2024-08-wildfires-dangerous.html
#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Canada #Russia