Rare May wildfires are igniting across Siberia. The regions of Omsk and Tyumen in Western Siberia have had firestorms since late April. The early start to the fire season is worrying as it followed a record-breaking fire season in 2021. Most fires are in the Taiga, the southern forested area of Siberia. But not all - video evidence shows tundra fires as well.
According to reporting from the CBC, the southern forests are abnormally dry and contain a massive amount of fuel-ready vegetation to burn. The CBC notes that the forests burning in Siberia are similar to what North Americans experience at the end of June. Trees, shrubs, and grasses are the fuel that drives conditions that are difficult to control.
The vast expanse of the Russian steppes is similar to our Great Plains. The fires in the steppes burn out of control with grass and shrubs as the fuel.
Then there are the zombie fires that smolder underground in peat over the winter and reemerge on the surface when conditions are favorable.
The dark smoke of these fires drifts and eventually settles in the Arctic, where snow, sea ice, and glaciers are covered with black aerosols that melt the ice faster by increasing solar absorption in a devasting feedback loop.
Additionally, the fires thaw the permafrost adding yet another feedback to the loop.
Residents and indigenous people have been left to fight the fires by themselves in Russia. The enormous swathes of empty land will be left to burn out of control. Unless Putin's war ends quickly, the devastation to the climate will only bring us that much closer to the tipping point.
In North America, we have these kind of legions of trained wildland firefighters at provincial levels, at state levels and at federal levels. This is not the case in Russia. In fact, many of the largest fires are fought using military personnel and military equipment.
So the aerial tankers that we would use, say to drop water or fire retardant, in the U.S., those are civilian. And in Canada, they're civilian planes. In Russia, they're almost exclusively military.
And oftentimes in Siberia, how that request is made is that the governors of each okrug, of each krai, of each republic, they would request from Moscow that this equipment be sent to fight the fires.
Right now, those requests are not being made. There's no equipment being sent. The fires are being left to burn. And as we progress into the summer season and the fires move even farther north, the population also gets more sparse and so there's fewer people on the ground to fight the fires.
And you absolutely need, essentially, personnel deployed by the military because of this reliance on military personnel. It's not 100 per cent, but it's a lot.... Some of these fires are just simply not going to be fought, but they're going to be left to burn.
What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. South Asia has been enduring deadly heat temperatures since March. A new brutal heatwave is expected in days. The Himalayas are producing vast amounts of meltwater as a result.