While All Eyes Are On the Amazon...

Yes it's a terrible thing. Yes the deliberately set fires ravaging the Amazon rain forest may have dire impacts on climate change, what are called 'knock-on effects.' Yes we should be worried.

Only let's focus on the bigger picture, a world on fire.

The satellite photo above isn't the Amazon. It's last year's fires, also deliberately set, to clear the jungles of Indonesia to make way for plantations to produce palm oil for world markets. At one point the country was ablaze from one end to the other, the smoke being carried north to blanket much of east Asia. And many of those fires are still burning. Here's a crew tending a palm oil plantation fire last month:

An article in The New York Times reports that wildfires are now also sweeping through Africa. From Africa to South America, Europe to North America from the Mexican border into the high Arctic, fire.

While the Brazilian fires have grown into a full-blown international crisis, they represent only one of many significant areas where wildfires are currently burning around the world. Their increase in severity and spread to places where fires were rarely previously seen is raising fears that climate change is exacerbating the danger. 

Hotter, drier temperatures “are going to continue promoting the potential for fire,” said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of Idaho, describing the risk of “large, uncontainable fires globally” if warming trends continue. 

This year has so far seen a dramatic increase in wildfires in some arctic regions that traditionally rarely burned.

Since July, fire has charred about six million acres of Siberian forest, an area roughly the size of the state of Vermont. In Alaska, fires have consumed more than 2.5 million acres of tundra and snow forest, leading researchers to suggest that the combination of climate change and wildfires could permanently alter the region’s forests.

Alaska

Those forests were once considered massive "carbon sinks." They held and safely sequestered enormous quantities of CO2 drawn from the air. Now they've transformed into "carbon bombs."

Some researchers warn that as fires strike places where they were previously rare, it threatens to contribute to a feedback loop in which wildfires potentially accelerate climate change by adding significant amounts of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere.

...One reason that arctic wildfires are particularly concerning is that in addition to trees and grassland burning, peat also burns, a dirt-like material in the ground itself that releases much more carbon dioxide when it burns than do trees per acre of fire. In the past, peat fires in northern climates were rare because of moisture that is now disappearing as the region becomes warmer and drier.

Gee, the Liberals are right. We are in the clutches of a genuine "climate emergency." The 'saying' is one thing but the 'doing' is another altogether. When it comes to action, the Libs are all hat and no cattle.  A piddling carbon tax makes a farce of their bold emergency declaration. But I digress.

Southeast Asia is eager to get in on the palm oil bounty and, you guessed it, they're also turning into pyros.

A similar pattern is playing out in Southeast Asia, where 71 percent of peat forests have been lost across Sumatra, Borneo and peninsular Malaysia between 1990 and 2015. In many cases the forests were replaced by farms that produce palm oil, which is used in everything from cookies to cologne and is one of the most important crops in the region. 

In 2015, the smog and haze from the peatland fires was so severe that it may have led to the premature death of 100,000 people, according to a study released the following year.

You could be forgiven for asking yourself if these recurrent and global patterns are consistent with a civilization focused on bolstering its prospects for survival.