Hundreds of fire rollers are eating their way through Russia. Your smoke has become an amplifier of global warming.
The smoke is everywhere. “Above the fire, in the camp, in the city,” says a volunteer from Moscow who took part in the extinguishing work in the Republic of Yakutia. “That was what scared me the most that there was nowhere to breathe.”
On the weekend, heavy rains drove at least the smoke cloud over the capital Yakutsk, where 280,000 people live. And according to the Russian state television, it was possible to extinguish almost fifty forest fires in Russia’s largest region from Sunday to Monday. But when the heat continues, the flames regain their strength, the carbon dioxide-containing fog is still hanging over 30 Yakut cities and settlements and has also returned to Yakutsk. Hundreds of fire rollers, some kilometers wide, have been eating their way through the taiga for weeks.
Peat smoulders underground
A huge plume of smoke reached Alaska last week. Forest fires are also raging in the Russian Far East and Siberia, as well as in Karelia and the Leningrad region. There, as in Yakutia, peat areas are also affected; there are underground smoldering fires that can only be extinguished with great effort. And whose smoke is particularly life-threatening for people with heart and lung diseases.
According to the RBK agency, there is a threat of a similar annual result as in 2019 and 2020, when, according to official information, 16.5 million hectares each burned, i.e. about twice the area of Austria.
Environmentalists: inside seldom blame nature in the form of lightning strikes for forest fires, but much more often careless or willful people. 90 to 95 percent of the forest fires are their work, says Andrej Schtschegolew, forest expert from WWF Russia, to our newspaper. “It is often farmers who light their fields near the forest in spring because they believe they are fertilizing them that way. Or loggers who want to remove the waste wood after the felling by burning it. “
In addition, the average temperatures are also rising in Russia, and forest fires that have broken out are also heating up. “We are experiencing the hottest and arid summer in Yakutia since the weather measurements began at the end of the 19th century,” said Republic chief Ajsen Nikolajew on regional television. Nikolayev blames climate change for the massive forest fires.
Soot in the Arctic attracts heat
The forest fires throw tons of pollutants into the atmosphere. According to information from Greenpeace Russia, the great smoke now produces 25 percent of the pollutants worldwide that result from burning oil, coal and gas. And the wind carries them as soot particles into the Arctic, where they visibly cover the ice and, with their black color, intensify the solar radiation and the melting of the polar ice caps.
“The forests of the north have an inestimable value when it comes to binding greenhouse gases,” says Greenpeace expert Alexei Yaroshenko. “Without it, it is impossible to keep the world’s climate within acceptable limits.”
In Russia, however, due to a lack of fire-fighting planes, personnel and fuel, the state power has for years now only observed instead of fighting forest fires in the remote areas east of the Urals. Andrei Shchegalov calls for more foresters and forest rangers to be employed in order to better control the population’s access to the forest. “Our goal must be to prevent the forest fires from developing in the first place.”
