The world is burning
In 2023, forests are burning even earlier than before. It’s too dry around the world. 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022 were drought years.
That’s why forests are burning in the Urals, California, south of Berlin, Canada, Scandinavia, Spain and Siberia. The forest fires are getting worse every year.
The “Drought Monitor” of the Leipzig Environmental Research Center (UFZ) now shows “exceptional drought” in eastern Germany, the Upper Rhine and parts of Lower Saxony, the “highest of the five warning levels” (TAZ on 9/6/2023). That means increasing risk of forest fires.
The Spiegel climate report on the same day: “It has become almost impossible to ignore the worrying state of our planet. No sooner are temperatures above 20 degrees than forests and moors are burning in Germany, too, and the Helmholtz Center’s drought monitor is getting redder by the day. In other countries, for example in southern Europe, a devastating drought has already been raging for months, and in New York, people have been breathing the unhealthy smoke from Canada’s forest fires since this week. (S+) ‘Honestly, it makes you queasy,’ tweeted ZDF correspondent Johannes Hano from New York.”
There, the air quality today is about as lousy as it was 15 years ago in China’s megacities. Even then, people there could only go out onto the streets wearing masks. That’s exactly how New Yorkers are walking the streets now in the post-Corona era. And authorities are advising New Yorkers to “stay home.” Children are virtually unable to play outdoors. What a lousy quality of life!
In China, more than half a million people already die year after year from bad air. And science warns that this is all just the beginning. The Alps will be glacier-free before the end of this century, the Arctic will soon be ice-free in summer, and the sea ice area is shrinking dramatically.
What does all this mean for our health?
Already in the heat summer of 2003, about 70,000 people in the EU died of heat-related deaths. Globally, we will be 1.14 degrees warmer in 2023 than in the pre-industrial era. Of course, it is often forgotten that it has already become about twice as much warmer on land. At the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, there is no sign of a turnaround in global climate protection. Globally, we are still a long way from the 1.5 degree target set in Paris, but rather on a three degree path by the end of the century.
For example, despite all the climate promises of the Biden administration, the USA has roughly doubled its oil production since 2010. Germany, Norway, Canada, and Australia also continue to butter up investments in fossil fuels.
The green e-car country of Norway “produces ten times its domestic emissions through its oil and gas exports,” according to Der Spiegel. The longer we burn fossil fuels en masse, eat far too much meat, build concrete houses and bulldoze new highways, the more we burn our children’s and grandchildren’s future.
The biggest problem: We have lost our breeding instinct. The increasing forest fires are a harbinger of the world we are leaving to our descendants.
Source
Franz Alt 2023 / Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
