Seeing wildfires rage around the world feels a lot like watching climate change unfold. Fires have a way of making heat, an often invisible threat, intensely vivid.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the 13 consecutive months of new global heat records continue to fuel extraordinary wildfires all over the planet.
In California, the Park fire became the fifth-largest in state history after it grew to 12 times the size of San Francisco, my colleagues Austyn Gaffney and Isabelle Taft reported. The fire was started by arson, but hot and dry weather had turned the forest into a tinderbox. It could now burn for weeks, if not months, and has the potential to become the largest fire in California’s history.
The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, a research organization funded by the European Union, reported this month that fires in Canada were above average in some regions, and about 25,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes when Jasper National Park in Alberta was burned by the biggest blazes it’s experienced in a century.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn Brazil, the Amazon hasn’t seen this many fires in the first six months of the year in almost two decades. And Russia reported a 50 percent increase in area burned compared to last year, as immense blazes sent smoke above the Arctic Circle.
We are still in the middle of summer and it’s too early to tell how the final toll of this year’s wildfires will compare to 2023, when Canada’s fires were more than two times as big as the previous record and Greece experienced the European Union’s largest wildfire ever documented.
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.aubet