Amazon is burning! Spain is burning! Siberia is burning! Alaska is on fire! The Arctic is burning! In July, it seems that the whole earth is on fire, forests are burning, wildfires are raging, and even the Greenland ice sheet is "burning", melting 12.5 billion tons of ice in a maximum day, and it is estimated that 440 billion tons will melt this summer.
Most of the Earth's land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere, where the Average Temperature is usually highest during the Northern Hemisphere summer, and July is usually the warmest month, 5-7 degrees higher than January. The latest data from the National Center for Environmental Information of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that just this past July, the average temperature of the entire Earth was 0.95 degrees Celsius higher than the average temperature of 15.78 degrees Celsius in July 20, breaking all previous records, which is the 415th consecutive month and the 43rd consecutive July, and global temperatures are higher than the 20th-century average in the NOAA database.
Many people may wonder what the 0.95 degree increase in the Earth's average temperature is, and we simply can't feel it. However, things are by no means so simple, just as people can't feel the change in the external temperature of 0.95 degrees, but if your body temperature rises by 0.95 degrees, it is fatal; the same is true of the increase in the average temperature of the earth, this is not the external environment of the earth, but the lowest atmosphere of the earth has warmed up by 0.95 degrees, which belongs to the "internal" heating of the earth. Due to the warming of the climate caused by anthropogenic emissions, more and more energy is retained in the atmosphere, and the air molecules are becoming more and more active, resulting in rising temperatures and various extreme celestial phenomena. The higher the temperature, the easier it is to cause forest fires, and since June, forest fires have spread around the world and have begun to burn everywhere.
Russia's Siberia has burned 120,000 square kilometers of forest, and another 30,000 square kilometers are burning, and peat layers in some places may also be burning. According to the scientists, once the peat layer is burned, it can burn for months, bringing in more carbon emissions.
Alaska in the United States is also burning, and by the end of July 9,600 square kilometers of forest have been burned, and the proud salmon have begun to die in large numbers because they are too hot.
The forests of Spain's Canary Islands have also burned like never before, forcing more than 8,000 residents to evacuate.
The Lungs of the Earth, the Amazon rainforest, has been burning for three weeks, and Brazil has recorded 74,000 wildfires this year, an 83 percent increase from the same period in 2018. According to NASA satellite photos, the huge smoke from the burning amounted to 3.1 million square kilometers, obscuring large areas of Land in Brazil, and even São Paulo, more than 3,000 kilometers away, fell into darkness at 3 to 4 p.m. on August 20.
Wildfires in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the Arctic Circle, are a huge threat to the planet. That's because the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the Earth's average, causing warm air to constantly hit the Arctic, and the Greenland ice sheet, the "refrigerator" at the northern tip of the planet, is in jeopardy. David Holland, a marine scientist at New York University, and colleagues have installed radar and GPS equipment on Greenland's Helheim Glacier — a place thought to be where the Earth's refrigerator door opens to track the movement of the Greenland ice sheet. According to Holland, by 2100, just the loss of ice from the Greenland ice sheet could raise the Earth's sea level by 0.9 to 1.2 meters, which means that some of the planet's coastal megacities will be greatly threatened, including Calcutta, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, etc.
Rick Townman, a climate expert at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, believes that forest fires in the Arctic Circle will create a vicious circle of rising temperatures on earth. The more frequent wildfires, the more forests are burned, and the more exposed land there is, which will lead to warmer land in the coming years, thus melting the permafrost of the Arctic Circle and releasing more carbon dioxide and methane, which in turn leads to hotter summers and more fires.
The last 5 years have been the highest average temperature on record for the Earth, summer heat waves have left people breathless, and warming has begun to accelerate, will the burning Earth trigger a tipping point for climate change? No one knows, but it's time for our planet to take a breather.
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