Through out the world, climate warming is enhancing fires, and fires are enhancing climate warming. According the Union of Concerned Scientists, as the climate continues to heat, “ moisture and precipitation levels change, with wet areas becoming wetter and dry areas becoming drier. Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snow-melt typically cause soils to be drier for longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a longer wildfire season.” They note that these dry conditions increase the intensity of fire and longer burn times.
The Siberian Times reports on a horrific and large outbreak of fires throughout the Siberian region. These fires are threatening the Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline and has caused the Irkutsk Oil Company to suspend supplies of oil.
'The situation with the fires in Irkutsk region and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) remains difficult,' he said. 'There are six wildfires less than in five kilometres from the ESPO facilities. Fires were as close as 300 metres from key pipeline facilities, he said.
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Alexey Yaroshenko, head of forest department of Greenpeace Russia, warned: 'The scale of the wildfires in Eastern Siberia can be compared with the catastrophe of 2010 in European Russia and the Urals.
'Our estimates are approximate. Perhaps more than 1.7 million hectares are burning, since some of the largest fires are completely hidden under strong smoke.
'For the second half of September, such a catastrophe in Siberia is unprecedented. It is associated not only with the inefficiency of the system of protection of forests from fires, but also with the climate change.
The view of Yaraktinskoye field before and after wildfires
Click here to see the wildfires that “officially” do not exist. The pictures show the fires in Irkutsk region, with one claim that locals have been subjected to smoke fumes for as long as six months from blazes that, per the Siberian Times, officially were not burning.
'From the air we see that the taiga is burning over an area that is measured in hundreds, thousands of hectares. And in official reports the picture is quite different. The data is clearly underestimated. We are trying to film everything we see on camera.'
In a evocative despatch on 22 September, he wrote: 'This is called the edge of the fire ... no end of it in sight ... we have examined Kirensky, Katangsky and Ust-Kutsky districts, forests are burning, and we have not seen any piece of equipment, not a single person who would put out the fire.'
An analysis of data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission shows greater soil water deficits in 2016 than previous drought years with high Amazon fire activity.
Brazil’s emissions are the seventh highest in the world, and they come mostly from what is called land-use change in the Amazon, a polite word meaning deforestation. The land is cleared, usually by setting fires, for logging, farming and cattle grazing. The Amazon biome is heading for a devastating fire season as dieback, or the process in which the forest dries out, storing less carbon, producing less rainfall, and worsening global warming.
Scientists from the NASA and at the University of California have warned that lower rainfall in the Amazon basin because of the 2015-2016 El Niño phenomenon’s climate effects means that this region is even drier than it was in 2005 and 2010, which were years of unprecedented drought.
Vast swathes of forest in Arariboia have been destroyed by illegal loggers and by fires which the authorities have failed to contain.
Per NASA:
For 2016, El Niño-driven conditions are far drier than 2005 and 2010 – the last years when the region experienced drought. The team has also developed a web tool to track the evolution of the Amazon fire season in near real time. Estimated fire emissions from each forecast region are updated daily, based on the relationship between active fire detections – made by the Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite – and fire emissions data from the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) in previous years. So far, however, the region has seen more fires to date than those years, another indicator that aligns with the fire severity forecast.
"When trees have less moisture to draw upon at the beginning of the dry season, they become more vulnerable to fire, and evaporate less water into the atmosphere," said UC-Irvine scientist Jim Randerson, who collaborated with UC-Irvine scientist Yang Chen on building the forecast model. "This puts millions of trees under stress and lowers humidity across the region, allowing fires to grow bigger than they normally would."
Fires in the Amazon have local, regional, and long-distance impacts. Agricultural fires that escape their intended boundaries can damage neighboring croplands and Amazon forests. Even slow-moving forest fires cause severe forest degradation, as Amazon rainforest trees are not adapted to fire. Together, intentional fires for agricultural management, deforestation, and wildfires generate massive smoke plumes that degrade regional air quality, exacerbating problems with asthma and respiratory illness. Smoke from Amazon fires eventually flows south and east over major urban centers in southern Brazil, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, contributing to air quality concerns.
According to Survival International, forest fires are “raging” in Indigenous Awá territory on the edge of the Brazilian Amazon in Peru, and “threatening to wipe out uncontacted members of the Awá tribe.”
Small groups of Guajajara Indians, the Awá’s neighbors in the Amazon, reportedly battled the blaze for days without the assistance of government agents until Brazil’s Environment Ministry launched a fire-fighting operation two weeks ago.
According to Survival International, nearly 50 percent of the forest cover in the territory was destroyed by forest fires started by loggers in late 2015, and the Environment Ministry has warned that the situation is “even worse this year.”
