US wildfires’ smoke reaches Europe
Smoke from the fires devastating swathes of the US West Coast has reached as far as Europe, the European Union's climate monitoring service said yesterday in its assessment of the "unprecedented" blazes.
Satellite data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) showed that the wildfires currently raging across California, Oregon and Washington State are "tens to hundreds of times more intense" than the recent average.
Thanks to strong pressure systems, the smoke from the fires was trapped along the western part of North America for days, making for potentially dangerous air quality in major cities such as Portland, Oregon and Vancouver and San Francisco.
But the weather shifted on Monday, carrying the smoke east along the jet stream. CAMS said that it had tracked the long-range transport of smoke particles from the fires as far as 8,000 kilometres to the east -- reaching northern Europe.
It estimated that the blazes have spewed out more than 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide since mid-August.
The blazes have already burned nearly five million acres across the US West with fears the death toll of 35 may rise.
The disaster has brought the issue of global warming to the forefront of US political discourse a matter of weeks ahead of the presidential election.
Meanwhile, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday reported that the world had lost nearly 100 million hectares of forests in two decades, marking a steady decline though at a slower pace than before.
The proportion of forest to total land area fell from 31.9 percent in 2000 to 31.2 percent in 2020, now some 4.1 billion hectares, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Comments