This summer’s wildfires have become more intense and destructive, with nations, from the United States, and Greece to Russia and Turkey, all being impacted in the worse possible way by a changing climate that is fueling droughts, higher temperatures, and intense heatwaves.
According to U.S. weather officials, July was the planet’s hottest month on record, reports the Associated Press. A landmark United Nations report on climate change, released on Monday (Aug. 9), confirmed the trend: our planet is not coping with human influences on its climate and we are seeing those impacts.
The Bootleg fire in Oregon started on July 6, 2021, and became the largest wildfire in the U.S., burning 413,765 acres by August 6, 2021. But the Bootleg fire was soon to be overtaken in size after the Dixie fire, which started on July 13 grew to 721,298 acres by August 22.
The Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and Canada have been plagued by extreme drought conditions caused by climate change that has made the western part of North America warmer and drier in the past 30 years.
The usually hot Mediterranean region has experienced higher than usual temperatures this summer. Temperatures in Turkey and Cyprus have soared to over 120 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius). Greece has recorded slightly lower temperatures of 115 degrees F (45 degrees C).
But after experiencing its worst heatwave in decades, Greece has been battling devastating wildfires for nearly two weeks, with one large wildfire this week threatening villages outside of Athens.
In Russia, wildfires have been blazing across Siberia’s Sakha Republic for months and, according to The Washington Post, they’re bigger than all of the fires around the world combined. They have even sent smoke across the North Pole.
According to CAMS data, wildfires in Siberia have emitted more than 188 megatons of carbon since June 2021, which is equivalent to about 505 megatons of carbon dioxide. In comparison, Europe’s biggest polluter Germany emitted 750 megatons of carbon dioxide in the entire year of 2018.
And the list goes on, and on. In the U.S., there are fires raging in Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and a number of other states, while in Canada, British Columbia has seen large sections of beautiful old-growth forests destroyed, as well as the province of Alberta.
And we must mention the smoke from all these wildfires. Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the European Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), told Space.com, air pollution from wildfires can frequently spread across distances of thousands of miles.
“Wildfire smoke is quite hazardous and quite toxic to human health,” Parrington said. “And we are seeing severely degraded air quality in all the regions downwind of these fires.”
