forest fire – Page 10 – Desdemona Despair

Time series of climate-related responses to anthropogenic drivers, 1990-2020. Out of the 31 tracked planetary vital signs, 18 were at new all-time record lows or highs in 2020. Data obtained before and after the publication of Ripple and colleagues (2020) are shown in gray and red respectively. For variables with relatively high variability, local regression trend lines are shown in black. The variables were measured at various frequencies (e.g., annual, monthly, weekly). The labels on the x-axis correspond to midpoints of years. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in the supplemental material. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2021 / BioScience

July 31, 2021

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021 – Humans face untold suffering from “the consequences of unrelenting business as usual”

28 July 2021 (BioScience) – In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of […]

A firefighter works on the Dixie Fire in California, 22 July 2021. Photo: InciWeb

July 25, 2021

Evacuations ordered after two California wildfires converge into one

By Maria Caspani 25 July 2021 (Reuters) – Crews and officials battling a large fire that has incinerated more than 190,000 acres (77,000 hectares) in northern California braced for the possibility on Sunday that smoke columns could spawn lightning storms capable of igniting more blazes. The swarming Dixie fire in Butte County, north of Sacramento, […]

Firefighters work at the scene of forest fire near Andreyevsky village outside Tyumen, western Siberia, Russia, on 16 June 2021. Wildfires in Siberia are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases, scientists say, contributing to global warming. Photo: Maksim Slutsky / AP Photo

July 25, 2021

Siberia hit by unprecedented wildfires – 1.5 million hectares burn after driest weather in 150 years – “Everything is on fire”

By Andrew Roth 20 July 2021 MOSCOW (The Guardian) – Every morning and evening for the last few days, shifts of young villagers have headed out into the taiga forest around Teryut with a seemingly impossible task: to quell the raging fires that have burned closer and closer for a month, shrouding this remote eastern […]

Black carbon mass density over North America from GEOS-5, 21 July 2021. Smoke from wildfires in the U.S. West poured into the eastern U.S. on 20-21 July 2021. In New York City, levels of fine particulate pollution rose above 170 on the air quality index, a level considered harmful even for healthy people. Data: GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC. Graphic: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

July 25, 2021

Skies turn hazy from Pittsburgh to Washington to Boston, as smoke from fires in Canada pour into the U.S. Northeast

By Adam Voiland 23 July 2021 (NASA) – While plumes of wildfire smoke from western North America have passed over the northeastern U.S. and Canada multiple times each summer in recent years, they often go unnoticed. That is because smoke that spreads far from its source typically moves at a fairly high altitude—between 5 and 10 kilometers—as […]

Satellite view of smoke from wildfires in the Yakutia region of Siberia, 18 July 2021. Photo: NASA / EOSDIS

July 18, 2021

Siberia permafrost ablaze with hundreds of wildfires in world’s coldest region – Half are burning unchecked due to firefighter shortage – “Siberia is dying now”

13 July 2021 (The Siberian Times) – Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia – or the Sakha Republic, the largest and coldest entity of the Russian Federation. The scale is mesmerising. There are some separate 300 fires, now covering 12,140 square kilometres – but only around half of these are being tackled, because they pose […]

A truck driver who hauls fire equipment watches as the Sugar Fire, part of the Beckwourth Complex Fire, burns in Doyle, California, on 10 July 2021. Photo: Noah Berger / AP Photo

July 12, 2021

California and other parts of the West broil and burn in third 2021 heatwave – “Do not stop and take pictures”

By Christopher Weber 12 July 2021 (AP) – Firefighters working in searing heat struggled to contain the largest wildfire in California this year while state power operators urged people to conserve energy after a huge wildfire in neighboring Oregon disrupted the flow of electricity from three major transmission lines. A large swath of the West […]

Aerial view of the charred remnants of homes and buildings in Lytton, B.C. that were destroyed by a wildfire on 30 June 2021. This photo was taken a week later, on 6 July 2021. Photo: Jennifer Gauthier / REUTERS

July 9, 2021

Residents to tour remains of Lytton as wildfires continue to burn across British Columbia – “Nothing about this feels real”

9 July 2021 (CBC News) – Residents of the B.C. village virtually destroyed by a fast-moving wildfire last week will be allowed to survey the damage for the first time Friday as part of a bus tour. The Thompson-Nicola Regional District organized the tour of Lytton to allow residents to see the aftermath of the […]

Aerial view of smoke rising from fires at Long Loch and Derrickson Lake in Central Okanagan in Canada on 30 June 2021. Photo: B.C. Wildfire Service / Reuters

July 4, 2021

Unprecedented heat, hundreds dead, and a town destroyed – Climate change is frying the Northern Hemisphere in 2021 – “This is literally the deadliest weather on record for the U.S. Pacific Northwest and far southwest Canada region”

By Angela Dewan 4 July 2021 (CNN) – The tiny town of Lytton has come to hold a grim record. On Tuesday, it experienced Canada’s highest-ever temperature, in an unprecedented heatwave that has over a week killed hundreds of people and triggered more than 240 wildfires across British Columbia, most of which are still burning. Lytton […]

A wildfire rages beside the Kolyma highway, 30 June 2021. The highway is the major connection between the Republic of Sakha’s capital Yakutsk and the port town of Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk. The highway had to be shut because the fire got too close to the road and was much too fierce for safe driving. Photo: The Siberian Times

July 3, 2021

Siberia’s “Road of Bones” closed as early wildfires rage – “We can’t see the sun because of the smog, flakes of ash are raining from the sky. We are struggling to breathe, we really need help.”

By Svetlana Skarbo 30 June 2021 (The Siberian Times) – More than 2,000 people are deployed in extinguishing wildfires raging around Russia’s coldest inhabited territory, Yakutia, now in the third year of an extremely intense season of wildfires. The first of them ignited as early as the beginning of May right outside the world-famous Pole […]

Residents rest at a cooling center during a heat wave in Portland, Oregon on 28 June 2021. Photo: Maranie Staab / Bloomberg

July 3, 2021

Climate change in the U.S. has gotten deadly, and it will get worse – “The suffering here and now is because we have not heeded the warnings sufficiently”

By Sarah Kaplan 3 July 2021 PORTLAND, Oregon (The Washington Post) – The emergency department at Oregon Health Sciences University had rarely been this busy, even during the worst stages of the covid-19 pandemic. Physicians raced to provide fluids to patients who arrived breathless, dizzy, and drenched in sweat. Others were brought in on stretchers, […]