The Arctic is on fire

     When I first saw that headline it took a moment to fully recognize its significance. Imagine it. We grow up thinking of the Arctic as a severely cold environment, much of it covered by ice and underlain by permafrost where few people have the fortitude to survive. Polar bears and ice and not much more where the temperature rarely rises above 40 F and can dip to minus 50 or more. and you could walk from Alaska to Siberia on the ice in the Bering Strait. Tough to imagine it could be on fire, but it is, almost all the way around the world at least in the sub-Arctic regions.
ALASKA

Alaska in July when we were just getting going. By Aug. 25 more than 750 fires covering 2.6 million acres had been reported. (NASA photo)

SIBERIA

EUROPE

     So what?
     Well, here's what. while we've been looking north we discover all the lands along the Equator, all the way around the world are on fire and it looks a lot worse from here.
     First there's the Amazon
SOUTH AMERICA

Impressive, huh? Those are the lungs of the wold burning today.

     But there is more. And then just when we have that absorbed that we learn there are more fires in Equatorial Africa than in South America.

AFRICA

Seldom mentioned as such, but this has to be a huge oxygen generator as well.

     If there were a large land mass out in the Pacific Ocean it would probably be on fire as well.
     Those fires in the Amazon and Africa may be the most dangerous. In Alaska we have serious fire-fighting ability. You have to wonder what's available in Amazon and African jungles. Both look so massive as to seem impossible to extinguish. And, they are consuming large numbers of trees in areas that produce a large portion of the available oxygen for the planet.

VIEW A NASA ANIMATION OF THE AMOUNT OF CO2 EMITTED BY FIRES WORLDWIDE

     Does anyone think climate change is junk science now? You have to wonder if by the end of the year if the fires continue we will have passed the tipping point, where Earth heats up to the point no mitigating measures can reverse the effect, those resources that regenerate naturally have been exhausted and eventually our planet becomes uninhabitable much sooner than the most radical of those fake scientists predicted.
     Aren't we lucky Antarctica doesn't have trees? Oh, wait. There's melting.
Does it all seem so far away it doesn't matter? Well, it does. As my friend Patricia Monaghan wrote several years ago, "You are nowhere where you are not part of the world."

At least 2.6 million acres have burned in Alaska this summer
The Amazon can't be recovered once it's gone and the cause is political
More fires burning in Africa than in South America
More than 1,600 fires reported in Europe this year.
Siberia: World largest forest has been burning for months