Wildfires eventually extinguish, but their impacts burn for decades
2020 has felt like an apocalyptic hellscape, but these fires aren’t just going to disappear with a new year.
Wildfires rage far beyond the American West.
Countries from Brazil to the Arctic are dealing with their worst wildfires in decades thanks to climate change. And though 2020 has felt like an apocalyptic hellscape, these fires aren’t just going to disappear with a new year. Their effects will be felt for decades.
By the end of fire season in August, charred peatlands in Siberia had released a record 244 megatonnes of carbon — carbon that enters the atmosphere, exacerbates global warming, and accelerates sea ice loss and sea level rise. Even worse, the Arctic has millions of hot spots that leak methane (a greenhouse gas 28 times as powerful as CO2) as ice melts.
The Amazon is also burning like crazy, and a burning Amazon has huge climate implications. In fact, we’re at a real tipping point: One study out this week suggests that 40% of the rainforest could become dry grassland because of the fires.
When forests burn, biodiversity inevitably suffers. And even with the Amazon’s slow-moving fires, animals are forced out of their ecological range where they could meet violent competitors or insufficient resources.
The yearly occurrences of these wildfires is also notable. Australia, for example, is bracing for another scorcher, after last year’s wildfire season burned millions of acres, destroyed thousands of homes, and killed at least 28 people.
Those bushfires are expected to worsen, just like those in the Amazon, Siberia, and California did this year. But these seasons aren’t anomalies — they’re realities of a climate-changed future already here.
“We are now seeing events far outside of what our societies are adapted to,” Friederike Otto, co-author of a study on the Arctic fires, told CBS News. “Climate change is here now, it is not only a problem for someone else, somewhere else, but heat waves are threatening lives and livelihoods everywhere.”
As these fires continue to burn year after year, it’s not only our planet that will suffer — so too will our health. Smoke can linger in the air for weeks and travel thousands of miles, posing health risks to people near and far. And as fires burn more residential areas throughout the world, drinking water sources will be under threat. These issues will disproportionately affect already under-resourced communities.
To make matters worse, world leaders are fueling the fires with misinformation, distracting us from the source of the problem: our continued destruction of the natural world. Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro publicly denied the severity of the Amazon fires over the summer, while U.S. President Trump continues refusing the role of climate change.
The last thing we should be doing is politicizing wildfires. They aren’t a one year thing, or an election cycle thing — they’re something we’ll have to deal with forever.