The fires that have been raging for weeks in the western United States are so powerful that the smoke they release has spread to Europe, and may be further fueled in the coming days by high winds expected in California.
Since it began its satellite observations in 2003, the European Copernicus service on climate change had never recorded data of this magnitude. The activity of these fires ” unprecedented “ is, according to the organization, “Tens to hundreds of times more intense” than the average. Unprecedented amounts of carbon have already been released into the atmosphere. And the smoke, particularly dense, crossed the whole country and the Atlantic.
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“The fact that these fires emit so much pollution into the atmosphere that we can still see thick smoke 8,000 km away reflects how devastating they are, in terms of scale and duration.”, underlined Wednesday in a press release Mark Parrington, scientist of the service of monitoring of the atmosphere of Copernicus.
Most of the smoke is concentrated on the west coast of the United States, where the air quality of the major California cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, or those, further north, of Portland and Seattle, is currently among the worst in the world. For days, it has been classified by local authorities as “Unhealthy”, even locally dangerous, and some are starting to worry about the health consequences of such exposure to fumes.
The winds of Santa Ana
More than 17,000 firefighters, exhausted by their fight against the flames since mid-August, are at work in the only state of California, the most affected, with some 25 major outbreaks. And Gov. Gavin Newsom warned on Wednesday of the Santa Ana winds, strong and laden with hot, dry air, which are expected over California in the days to come and may worsen an already tense situation.
The state has already suffered more than 7,600 fires this year, compared to less than 5,000 throughout 2019, and the forest fire season traditionally lasts until November, said Newsom.
One of these fires, the “Bobcat Fire,” threatened to engulf the historic Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, but firefighters managed to avert the danger immediately.
The fires of the American West have killed at least 30 people in California and Oregon. More than 2 million hectares in total have already gone up in smoke and tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes, hundreds of which have been reduced to ashes.
“Climate pyromaniac”
The fires that are increasing across the planet are associated with various phenomena anticipated by scientists due to climate change: increase in temperature and decrease in precipitation in particular.
With less than two months of the presidential election, the fires, which have already caused several billion dollars in damage, have entered the campaign. President Donald Trump visited California on Monday, where he sparked controversy by seeming to deny the role of climate change in these extraordinary fires, especially due to him due to a bad “Forest management”.
His Democratic opponent Joe Biden, who will face him at the polls on November 3, called him in response to “Climate arsonist”. Governor Newsom, who spoke to President Trump earlier this week, said he did not “More patience for those who deny the existence of climate change”.
