Climate Point: Wildfires, rising CO2 and vanishing sea ice make for grim news
Impacts from the changing climate are being seen and felt across much of North America this week.
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Dinah Voyles Pulver, a national environment and climate reporter with Paste BN.
If you live across parts of the northern United States, you’ve likely seen, smelled or breathed in the smoke from Canadian wildfires. Drought and warm conditions have fueled a huge number of fires across Canada. The resulting smoke triggered health alerts and blanketed cities from the central U.S. to the Northeast, including New York City.
Climate scientists say an increase in wildfire activity is another example of how climate change can exacerbate natural disasters as temperatures rise and heat waves grow more intense.
It doesn’t help in the Northeast that wildfires also are burning in New Jersey, which added to the smoky skies in the surrounding area.
New Jersey and New York braced this week for another bout of significant air pollution from the dozens of large forest fires in Canada sending smoke into the United States.
Fire activity in the U.S. is below average year to date, but officials in Utah and Michigan warned this week of potentially dangerous fire conditions in those states.
Since January 1, 18,403 wildfires have burned 518,698 acres across the United States, slightly below the 10 year average to date.
The rain and snow that broke records this winter in Utah may be contributing to a burst of growth in grass and shrubs that could provide more fuel for fires, writes David DeMille at The Spectrum.
Conditions are tinderbox dry in Michigan after weeks of hot temperatures and virtually no rain, reports Keith Matheny with the Detroit Free Press. A wildfire last weekend quickly grew to 2,400 acres and closed a section of Interstate 75. "It's unprecedented over at least the past 20 years for us to be at this level of fire danger," one state official said.
Canada has seen over 1,800 fires so far this year, a 115% increase above normal, according to Natural Resources Canada. More than 2.7 million hectares have burned, more than 10 times the 10 year average to date.
“Year after year, with climate change, we’re seeing more and more intense wildfires – and they’re starting to happen in places where they don’t normally,” Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted this week.
Firefighters are flowing into Canada from across the world, including the United States. Trudeau reported firefighters have come from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and France, and additional international help has been requested.
As if the world needed any more grim climate news, scientists report that Arctic sea ice could virtually disappear in the summer season by the 2030s. In fact, an ice-free Arctic each September is likely already "baked" into Earth's climate system, according to study lead author Seung-Ki Min of the Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea.
Meanwhile carbon dioxide in the atmosphere soared to a new high last month at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, writes Paste BN’s Doyle Rice.
The carbon dioxide (CO2) level measured in May in Hawaii averaged 424 parts per million, NOAA said. That’s 3 parts per million more than last year’s May average and 51% higher than pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. It also represents the fourth-largest annual increase on record.
“Every year we see carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere increase as a direct result of human activity,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He added: “Every year, we see the impacts of climate change in the heat waves, droughts, flooding, wildfires and storms happening all around us.”
Read on for more climate and environment news from across the Paste BN Network this week.
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