Apocalypse Now: Fires

Fires detected over the past year, 2018-2019:

...Continued from yesterday:
    Dear Future Cyberchivist:
     By the year 2019 the world has become too hot.
     Human's excessive burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal, natural gas - over the last few decades to inexpensively feed our existence such as it is has caused the formation of a layer of carbon gases called greenhouse gases that traps too much heat of the sun in our lower atmosphere. 
    This has subsequently raised the temperature of the earth to a dangerous level.

    Hence our too-warm oceans now spawn behemoth hurricanes,

...that leave in their wake horrifying devastation and death.

    And while coastal areas and islands in the sea are being ravaged by hurricanes and floods, fires of historic proportions are burning around the world.
     Over the past few weeks, monster wild fires have been raging across Europe, in France,

...Spain,

...Greece,

...Turkey,

...and Russia.

     Fires are flaming in the jungles of Indonesia and across the African Savanna.
    Wildfires are raging in cold places where fires rarely burn: Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, the Arctic Circle.

     Meanwhile the layer of ice at the top of the world known as the Polar Ice Cap is melting. The sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting. The glaciers, moving frozen rivers of ice in polar regions, are melting. All the ice in the world is melting.
      And here in the United States of America, my country, while Hurricane Dorian besieges our East Coast (see yesterday's post), our West Coast burst into flames yesterday from a new wild fire in the city of Murrieta, south of Los Angeles in the state of California.
        1,000 acres have already been destroyed by that fire.

      Scientists see this plague of fire as being driven by the earth's rising temperature; but the fires are in turn exacerbating the heating of the earth by releasing more heat-trapping greenhouse gases and killing the trees that help remove those climate-warming gases from the air.
       And so its a vicious circle: the global warming causes the fires which cause more global warming.
     But the most tragic and destructive fire currently ravaging the planet is, ironically, not one that has been cause by global warming, but one that has been set by humans.

     The Amazon, the world's largest tropical rain forest,

...covers much of South America and has been called "The Lungs of the Earth" because its two-million square-miles of cooling trees and plant life release oxygen into the atmosphere,

 ...and remove carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is a major cause of global warming. The thousands of rivers that flow through the Amazon bring cooling humidity to the planet and rain to the surrounding areas.
       However in recent years cattle and soybean farmers in the country of Brazil, where most of the Amazon rain forest is located, have been deforesting the Amazon, cutting down the vegetation then burning the area to turn it from jungle to cattle grazing and farmland,

...to feed the world's voracious appetite for beef and soy.
        Brazil is the world's largest exporter of beef cattle. The United States used to be the world's largest exporter of soy beans, which thrive on the fertile plains of the American West and Midwest.
          However the current President of the United States of America, .a foolish, greedy, power-hungry rich old man named Donald Trump (see yesterday's post),

...has plunged our country into a reckless trade war with China, to the end that China, the former consumer of a quarter of all soybeans produced in the United States, no longer buys soybeans from our farmers, but has turned to Brazil for its soy bean imports.
       Subsequently American soy bean farmers are going bankrupt while their fertile fields lie fallow and Brazilian farmers are burning down more of the Amazon rain forest to produce more soy beans to send to China.

       The fires set in the Amazon are up by 80% this year over previous years and the Amazon is being destroyed at a record-breaking rate..

     Scientist warn that if the loss of the Amazon passes a certain threshold it may never recover and will no longer be a rain forest,

... but could become a savanna, a grassy area with few trees.

       In that case, we're told that the death of the Amazon rain forest would release billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere that had previously been absorbed by the rain forest vegetation, making the planet even hotter and dryer.
       And so, dear Future Archivist, that is where we stand today, September 6, 2019.
       Scientists tell us that if we are to preserve the planet as the green, verdant, life-filled, productive, beautiful gift given to us by our Creator  we must act now to clean our atmosphere of fossil fuel emissions, clean our waters of the pollution, plastic and chemicals we've dumped into our rivers and oceans - well, that's another global problem besides the warming - and change our life styles to become better stewards of the Earth.
       Scientists say this is the moment. Some say it's already too late.
       Of course, only you of the future know.
       And yet at this moment in the history of humankind there is still hope on the horizon..
       To be continued...

References
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/climate/fire-amazon-africa-siberia-worldwide.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/americas/amazon-fire-brazil-bolsonaro.html

https://www.vox.com/2019/8/22/20828219/amazon-rainforest-wildfire-photos-fire-greenland

https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-images-show-africa-has-five-times-more-wildfires-burning-amazonheres-why-theyre-1456382

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/26/unprecedented-more-than-100-wildfires-burning-in-the-arctic-in-worst-ever-season

https://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/goodbye-flying-rivers-amazon-rainforest-drying/

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-rainforest-experiencing-record-breaking-deforestation-2019-7

https://www.edf.org/climate/will-wildfires-keep-spreading-climate-change