Siberia’s wildfires are bigger than all the world’s other blazes combined | Hacker News Reader

Siberia’s wildfires are bigger than all the world’s other blazes combined

washingtonpost.com

190 pointsbelter51 comments

> Last year, Russian fires burned 4.7 billion trees, seven times more than were planted, according to a Greenpeace study using satellite images. In one month, Russian fires emitted carbon equal to Sweden’s total CO2 emissions for the year.

Wow pretty amazing facts.

Currently in some locations of Siberia the PM2.5 level is in excess of ~1000 micrograms per cubic meter [1]. That's >85x the annual and >28x the 24-hour level (12 and 35 micrograms per cubic meter respectively) standards set by the EPA in 2013 [2].

> PM2.5 (particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter) can penetrate deeply into the lung, irritate and corrode the alveolar wall, and consequently impair lung function [3]

I feel sorry for those who can't escape the pollution and disaster. Not sure if it's fair to blame climate change for the recent drought, but maybe.

[1] https://www.windy.com/-PM2-5-pm2p5?cams,pm2p5,57.504,123.047...

[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2013-01-15/pdf/2012-3...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4740125/

What happens in Siberia (and Canada and Alaska) has everything to do with climate change. It will be the most affected region in the world and is already heavily impacted by warming. The Arctic is projected to be sea ice-free in the summer within 15 years, which represents an absolutely enormous change. It will be very fair to pin the coming fires and methane releases on climate change. Geopolitically, Arctic countries are going to receive big benefits on balance from climate change, including new land use options, new oil and gas exploration and new commercial shipping routes.

Source: worked on Arctic land and ocean conservation for 3 years.

> new oil and gas exploration

Ugh... Positive feedback loops.

Only as long as the stuff is still worth something. Carbon taxes and alternatives could make this a lot less profitable over time. The Russian economy is very sensitive to the price of oil and gas. If demand collapses, prices go down below the point where exploiting these resources is cost effective. The problem is that that is true for everybody else too.

That's why prices are high currently because the same is true in Texas where expensive fracking only makes sense as long as prices are very high because fracking is expensive. Which is why everybody else (including Russia that can produce cheaper) is pressured to limit supply. Occasionally, one country (Russia last year) decides to start dumping oil on the market and panic kicks in. It's the one geopolitical tool Russia has left and they wield it well.

That's why the baltic gas pipeline is a big deal as well. The Germans built that to not get pressured into buying expensive US liquid gas while they (slowly) untangle their domestic infrastructure from natural gas. However, that's going to take decades but Russia's behavior is bringing a sense of urgency for getting that done.

The good news is that high prices make renewables much more attractive and high price volatility makes oil/gas investments a lot more risky and unpredictable. With prices swinging between too high and too low, Investors have been voting with their money for a while now and moving their wealth elsewhere. Russia can't help of being part of the solution here by basically acting against everybody else, they accelerate the demise of oil/gas, cause price instability, and cause their main customers to question the wisdom of their dependence on Russian resources. The last decades of this industry in demise are going to be ugly though.

> Geopolitically, Arctic countries are going to receive big benefits on balance from climate change, including new land use options, new oil and gas exploration and new commercial shipping routes.

And now we have exactly why Russia has been considerably invested in spreading Climate Change denialism with their twitter and facebook bot farms. Their entire economy is already dependent on oil exports and they're sitting on a largely inaccessible landmass full of it.

I'd say it probably has to do with the more mundane reasons like having an extractive economy than outright welcoming global warming because they're banking on settling Siberia, but they're in pretty good company there.

Russia spreads climate change disinfo because it destabilizes liberal democracies more than it destabilizes the economic interests of Russian oligarchs.

Those oligarchs aren't playing any sort of long game -- they're psychopaths who don't care what happens to anything once they're dead. If they actually cared about the long term standing of Russia they wouldn't have raided the country of trillions of dollars and left their people and military in a permanently desperate state.

Greater than 1000 PM2.5 is not that uncommon. Every time there is a dust storm in Beijing it would get that high when I was living there. That also includes a lot of PM 10 (the dust is varying size I guess).

Right now Ulaanbaatar is at 414, I’m guessing they are effected in Mongolia?

PM1 (1 micrometer and less, not even 2.5) levels reached 2000 in hot spots[0], but thankfully no one lives there.

[0] According to https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/bio/surface/level/anno...

…and, so, it exceeded those levels in the city in the past couple of days. I’m very upset. From what I know, only a small percentage of people use air purifiers or proper masks there.

It's hard to understand the scale of this until you compare it on a map to California's:

Siberia: https://www.windy.com/-PM2-5-pm2p5?cams,pm2p5,62.895,94.307,...

California: https://www.windy.com/-PM2-5-pm2p5?cams,pm2p5,41.870,-93.164...

It's basically an area the size of France, all burning at once. And it's siberia, so it's very very dense coniferous forest. Absolutely terrifying.

Zoom out and center it around the pacific ocean if you want to actually compare them.

That doesn't work with the Mercator projection, which Windy uses, as the distortion is specific to the latitude, regardless of where the map is centred.

Contrast:

Orthographic: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

Equirectangular (closely resembles Mercator): https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

Patterson (less distorted than Mercator): https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

Waterman Butterfly (minimal area distortion over land): https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

Winkel-Tripel (spherical variant, minimal distortion): https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

An equirectangular projection distorts the scale considerably at high latitudes, increasing apparent size, as does Patterson But even with non-distorted projections, the Siberian wildfires dwarf North America's.

Mercator projection probably makes the fire look bigger than it is.

According to Google, as of a few days ago, the fires in Siberia burnt about 4 million acres. France is 159.087 million acres.

In 2020, though, fires in Siberia burnt through 47 million acres, which is apparently bigger than the entirety of Greece[1].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wildfires-sibera-russia-burned-...

If you look at the Nullsoft links I've posted elsewhere in this thread, they're using an orthographic projection.

The Siberian wildfires dwarf anything in North America.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

They dwarf anything I've seen in North America over the past 3--5 years or so.

Cool, thanks for the links.

wow, compare it with current fires in Greece

I've been watching the Siberian wildfires for a few years now. The Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser is an excellent tool, especially its particulates and CO channels. Here are conditions from both as of an hour ago:

CO (direct combustion): https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

PM1 (particulates/smoke): https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/particulates/...

Note that the heaviest CO concentrations are usually directly above (or within tens of miles/km) points of combustion. It's not clear to me whether or not this is the case shown, or if CO concentrations are high enough to be sustained even when windblowen. The size of the high-concentration region is staggering though. Contrast with US/Canadian Pacific Northwest fires:

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/08/11/0100Z/chem/surface/...

What also seems to be the case is that Siberia is experiencing multi-years-long fires. They flare up in the summer time, but continue burning, much as coal fires do, in roots or sheltered regions throughout the winter, to flare up again in the summer time.

Mind that with lightning and human activity this needn't be the only ignition source, but it seems to be contributing.

Video showing a "zombie fire" near Yakutia in January, 2021:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BbR7IyshWkA

> What also seems to be the case is that Siberia is experiencing multi-years-long fires. They flare up in the summer time, but continue burning, much as coal fires do, in roots or sheltered regions throughout the winter, to flare up again in the summer time.

Yep, peat fires [1]. I believe the bulk of them got started in the 2010 fire season [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat#Peat_fires

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires

My understanding is that it's not just peat, but may be either surface trees or roots burning. I don't have good information on that though.

Poking through Windy's data channels, there's a "fire intensity" (W/m^3), which confirms that the actual combustion seems to be over a much smaller area than the high CO concentrations Nullschool are showing.

See: https://www.windy.com/-Fire-intensity-fires?fires,63.276,129...

Contrast:

PM2.5: https://www.windy.com/-PM2-5-pm2p5?cams,pm2p5,63.276,129.639...

CO concentration: https://www.windy.com/-CO-concentration-cosc?cosc,63.276,129...

I'm interested if anyone can compare this to fires in CA / PNW, specifically the claim that forest mismanagement (eg "putting out every fire", logging restrictions allowing fuel buildup, etc) is a primary contributing factor to forest fires.

Is Siberia a useful counterfactual, where the typical criticisms are more along the lines of too much logging (deforestation) and not fighting fires in the wilderness?

Or are these environments just too different?

>Or are these environments just too different?

the most important factor in public perception of those events - domestic politics (and thus resulting media propaganda spin in particular) - are very different.

The main real factor is the same in both cases though - it is climate change, and whether too much or too little of logging, whether active fire suppression is practiced or not is just a noise compare to the ground-shifting effects of the climate change.

In either case giving current climate there should be different type forest than what is there now - the forest just hasn't been able to adjust naturally that fast. Thus the various ways of catastrophic adjustment including by fires and die-offs.

I would guess the difference in population density (Wikipedia gives me 3/km² for Siberia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Siberia) and 33/km² for the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...)) makes a difference.

That means natural fires will be about three times as far away from firefighters in Siberia. Siberia likely also has fewer roads/km², making it even harder for on the ground firefighters to reach fires.

Also, warmer summers have increased the number of thunderstorms in the Arctic. https://wtop.com/weather-news/2021/03/as-the-arctic-warms-li...:

“Arctic lightning has tripled in just the last decade […] In the Arctic Circle there was an even greater increase in lightning strikes in the Eastern Hemisphere, specifically over Siberia“

(I think I’m not misquoting this by cutting out text, but corrections welcome)

Even though that text plays it down, I think that seems a likely explanation for an increase in forest fires.

I thought fire danger was primarily related to the weather conditions. Despite there being no forest management in many forests, they aren’t in danger of forest fire (e.g. because it’s too wet). Or you could have a managed forest that is bone dry, which still has enough fuel to go up in flames.

This fire danger page from the park service seems helpful.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/understanding-fire-danger.htm

It's a strong counterargument, yes, and I'd argued that a few days ago on HN.[1]

I'm strongly sympathetic to the argument that the US and Canada have mismanaged their forests in a way that increases fire risk. However it's also clear that climate itself is playing a major role, with forsts burning earlier and later in the year, hotter, and more frequently, than in the past, as well as in places where forest-management practices really don't much come into play. The fact that wildfire prevalence is increasing worldwide, including where total fire suppression has NOT been practiced seems to be the fatal blow to forest mismanagement as a principle cause.

Again, I don't at all doubt it contributes. But the global trends suggest something more at hand.

________________________________

Notes:

1. See e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28083657

The situations aren't really comparable. The core issue in Siberia is that the cold slows decomposition and builds up a layer of peat [1]. As the ecosystem experiences higher average temperatures and droughts, the peat not only dries out and combusts, it smolders underground for months or years at a time, sparking wildfires every time the humidity drops long enough to dry everything out again.

At one point, more than a third of the USSR's electricity (if not power) came from peat fueled generators so we're talking millions of square miles of almost completely inaccessible forest floor covered with a meters thick layer of material that is literally a precursor to coal deposits and dirtier to boot. The only feasible way of mitigating these fires (burning the peat for power) accelerates the very environmental effects causing them!

By comparison, California's ecology doesn't support peat formation and the PNW's access to the coast dampens the extreme weather that causes such extreme buildup (though it's becoming more and more of a problem). However, as you get deeper inland into Canada, Idaho, and Montana, the more the land starts to resemble Siberia so it's only a matter of time before we get similar wildfires.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat

Hopefully it doesn't get as bad as 2010 which affected the global price of grain and some argue it helped trigger the Arab Spring revolutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires

https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-a...

I guarantee that climate-related food production and price issues are not going to be a rare occurrence.

They have been for some time, present-day Sicily, Libya and Tunisia used to be the bread-basket of the Romans. Climate change took care of that.

We haven't even really had a extreme global weather event strong enough to destroy a large portion of the calories on the field before they're ready to harvest. The PNW "heat dome" of a few days already killed some more sensitive agricultural plants. Things are going to get a lot more chaotic in the next few decades.

The PNW heat dome was accompanied by cold weather in Europe. I've spoken to farmers who say that roughly 50% of their crops were destroyed by hail. Of course this is region-specific, but it's not just heat we need to worry about.

Time to start my Fantasy draft picks for next North African dictators

Except for Australia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...

Seems that Siberia and California are having fires bigger than those in Amazon.

how much Is realistic the idea of new pathogens coming from the permafrost? That sounds more scary short term that all the methane released.

Our only hope is reduction. Population and consumption reduction until we flatten the curve. Unfortunately nothing else is working and geoengineering trade offs are too much risk. Reducing consumption and population has less risk and immediate impact.

Time to release the next virus.

Easy there, Mr. Rabbit.

I'm not sure how you're defining "risk" if your "less risky" option would seem to imply killing a lot of people.

The charitable reading would be that they're suggesting we encourage smaller families.

Every time I see paywalls on articles like this I wander why would I pay to read something that's telling me what I should think.

Though bears are not koalas I wonder why there's no compassion campaign in the worldwide media? Nobody gathering financial aid and doing any other such things.

That's what happens when mafia running things there only cares about filling their pockets from deforestation which messes up local ecosystems.

If they profit from deforestation, wouldn’t they want to avoid the whole forest going up in flames?

Profit from the result, not the action.

Mafia doesn't have long term mentality. It's rip off everything now, let it be dead desert tomorrow approach. They'll have enough to fill their pockets at present, even with fires raging.

Illegal logging was mostly happening in Russian Far East, and not Siberia at the time I left in 2007.

Siberia is way too far away from any transportation, and most importantly China, and seaports.

And yes, indeed, the forestry industry was synonymic with mafia back then.

Currently, fires are blazing in extremely unreachable places, and too way up far north to be a result of commercial activity.

Siberia is mostly pine forest. Pine is not the most valuable lumber. Russian Far East have much more valuable tree species.

There being an energy imbalance in the world comes from somewhere. It could not have come, at least not so fast, without an imbalance in the human psyche for the last couple of hundred years.

How much is enough, when is enough enough, what is my purpose for existing, how can I be of service while not being taken advantaged of, and without unreasonable demands?

This crisis may be of a more spiritual nature than is evident on the surface.

There is a need for reckoning, though it needs to start from within.

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