It’s always fire season now

It’s the end of fire season in the Amazon, where I am, and I can smell the smoke from burning trees. Millions of people can do that too IndonesiaIndia and the United States.

This is almost certain the hottest year ever recordedand it seems to be fire season somewhere almost every day.

Experts tell us that the world has always experienced fires all year round. The difference now is that these fires are much harder to ignore.

So far this year, forest fires have sent 2,020 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere, according to data from the European Commission. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. That’s more than what Russia, the world’s third-largest emitter in 2021 after the US and China, produced that year.

Globally, this year’s fires are still smaller than those in 2015, when the El Niño climate pattern fueled fires around the world. But they were extraordinary in many ways.

Australia’s bushfire emissions estimates so far this year are the worst in more than a decade. A fire in Greece was the largest ever recorded in Europe. And as my colleague David Wallace-Wells reported, more than half the world’s countries could fit in the area burned this year in the Canadian wilderness.

There is a bigger trend at play. Researchers at the World Resources Institute, an environmental research organization, calculated earlier this year that forest fires today are burning nearly twice as much forest cover as they were twenty years ago.

“We know the risk is increasing due to climate change,” said Mark Parrington, wildfire expert at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. A warmer planet means drier and hotter conditions, he added, fueling “very large, persistent wildfires.”

Nobody’s emissions

The Canadian wildfires so far this year have released almost as much carbon into the atmosphere as what the entire country reportedly emitted in 2021. But Canada doesn’t count those emissions in its official count. No country does that.

Nations follow guidelines designed in the late 1990s that consider forest fires a natural phenomenon beyond human control, just like volcanoes.

The thinking was that forest fires were part of a natural carbon cycle. Forests that burned now would grow back later, sucking carbon from the atmosphere back into the trees.

But climate change changes that equation.

“We are seeing increasing evidence that fires outside the natural range of historical variability are more frequent, intense and larger,” David Bowman, who researches fire at the University of Tasmania, told me in an email.

That means that forests in some regions that were once carbon sinks are now becoming sources of greenhouse gases.

Breaking out human causes from natural processes is an enormously complex undertaking.

“The question is to what extent is there a departure from historical principles that may or may not include Indigenous fire management,” Bowman said.

Some researchers are calling for a change in the way emissions are measured. In 2021, a group of Brazilian scientists wrote a letter to Nature calling for the including burningand other forms of forest degradation count towards their country’s emissions.

Increasingly serious fires are not beyond our control. Indonesia and Brazil have much stricter environmental protection policies that appear to be helping to reduce deforestation. Fewer dead trees means less fuel for forest fires.

Southeast Asia and the Amazon were expected to experience massive fire seasons, partly due to the El Niño climate pattern, which tends to dry up vegetation in those regions. Although fires are raging, so far there have been fewer fires than many experts expected.

According to Bowman, tracking and reporting forest fire emissions could help the world get a handle on the situation, “rather than fatalistically accepting that fires are out of control.”

The Catalyst Crime Wave

Catalytic converters, which remove pollutants from car exhaust, are a success story in environmental technology. But the cutthroat market for the rare metals they contain has led to a violent billion-dollar epidemic of catalytic converter thefts.

In 1970, as concerns increased about deteriorating air quality, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which included a provision requiring all vehicles manufactured after 1975 to greatly reduce pollutants.

Researchers at a New Jersey company realized that platinum group metals could catalyze or convert unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides into less harmful compounds. They coated a ceramic honeycomb screen with a thin layer of platinum, palladium and rhodium – three of the rarest and most expensive metals on earth, known as platinum group metals – and placed it in a metal container through which the engine’s exhaust fumes passed.

“It ranks as one of the largest technological interventions to protect the environment in history,” said Ken Cook, chairman of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group.

The precious metals are recyclable. A single converter contains only a small amount, but millions of them end up on the scrap heap every year. A thriving underground network of thieves has also taken root. Last year, approximately 600,000 devices, also known as cats or autocats, were stolen.

The Times investigation found that the stolen devices ended up in the United States and abroad through middlemen, smelters and refineries. Gradually, their origins become opaque, providing the beneficiaries of the thefts with plausible deniability.

—Walt Bogdanich Isak E. Hüllert Eli Tan

Read the full story here.

Other climate news

The weather forecast

A storm system dumped up to 12 inches of heavy rain over parts of Southeast Florida and knocked out power to thousands of people this week. The storm weakened early Thursday and moved further east, away from the coast.

A confluence of storm systems developing in the Gulf of Mexico and off the east coast of Florida caused the severe weather. Five to eight inches of rain continued in the Miami area beginning early Wednesday and continuing through the night.

Schools were closed Thursday in Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale. Power outages spread across the region, with Florida Power & Light reporting early Thursday that there were more than 59,000 outages in Miami-Dade County, more than 24,000 outages in Broward County and 21,000 in Palm Beach County.

Wind gusts of up to 100 kilometers per hour in the coastal areas of these three provinces caused warnings until Thursday afternoon, meteorologists said.

—Judson Jones