As Frozen Land Burns, Siberia Fears: ‘If We Don’t Have the Forest, We Don’t Have Life’
by Anton Troianovski, 7/17/21, New York Times

Last year, the record-setting fires in the remote Siberian
region of Yakutia released roughly as much CO2 as did all
the fuel consumed in Mexico in 2018, acc. to Mark Parrington,
a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring
Service in Reading, England.

Now, Yakutia — a region 4 times the size of Texas, with
its own culture and Turkic language — is burning again.

On some days this month, thick smoke hung over the capital,
Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world, making residents’
eyes water and scraping their throats. Outside the city,
villagers are consumed by the battle with fire, shoveling
trenches to keep it away from their homes and fields,
quenching their thirst by digging up the ice sheets
embedded in the ground.

Life here revolves around the northern forest, known as the
taiga. It is the source of berries, mushrooms, meat, timber
& firewood. When it burns, the permafrost below it thaws
more quickly, turning lush woods into impenetrable swamps.

Some forest fires are normal, but scientists say they have
accelerated to an extraordinary pace in the last 3 years,
threatening the sustainability of the taiga ecosystem.

“If we don’t have the forest, we don’t have life,” said
Maria Nogovitsina, a retired kindergarten director in the
village of Magaras, pop. of ~1,000, 60 mi outside Yakutsk.

As many villagers have done recently, Nogovitsina made an
offering to the earth to keep the fires away: She tore up
a few Russian-style pancakes and sprinkled the ground with
fermented milk. “Nature is angry at us,” she said.
For their part, the people of Yakutia are angry, too. They
say the authorities have done too little to fight the
fires, a sign that global warming may carry a political
cost for govts.

4 days of travels in Yakutia this month revealed a near-
universal sentiment that the Russian govt did not grasp
the people’s plight. And rather than accept official
explanations that climate change is to blame for the
disaster, many repeat conspiracy theories, among them that
the fires were set on purpose by crooked officials or
businesspeople hoping to profit from them.

“I haven’t seen it, but that’s what people are saying,”
Yegor Andreyev, 83, a villager in Magaras, said of the
widely circulating rumors of unnamed “bosses” burning the
forests to further various corrupt schemes. “There’s no
fires in Moscow, so they couldn’t care less.”

In Magaras, Mayor Tekeyanov said he was applying for a
govt grant to buy a drone, GPS equipment and radios.
Riding a bulldozer thru the charred woods outside the
village, a forest ranger, Vlad Volkov, said he was blind
to the extent of the fires because of a lack of aerial
surveillance. It was only when he retrieved a broken-down
tractor left behind a few days earlier that he discovered
a new fire raging in the vicinity. “The fire doesn’t wait
while you’re waiting for spare parts,” he said.

Russia, in some ways, might benefit from climate change
because warmer weather is creating new fertile territory
and is opening up the once-frozen Arctic Ocean to greater
trade and resource extraction. But the country is also
uniquely vulnerable, with 2/3 of its territory composed of
permafrost, which warps the land, breaks apart roads and
undermines buildings as it thaws.

For years, Putin rejected the fact that humans bear respon-
sibility for the warming climate. But last month, he
sounded a new message in his annual call-in show with the
Russian public, warning that the thawing permafrost could
lead to “very serious social and economic consequences”
for the country.

“Many believe, with good reason, that this is connected
primarily to human activity, to emissions of pollutants
into the atmosphere,” Putin told viewers. “Global warming
is happening in our country even faster than in many
other regions of the world.”

Putin signed a law this month requiring businesses to
report their greenhouse gas emissions, paving the way
toward carbon regulation in Russia, the world’s 4th-largest
polluter. Russia hosted John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy,
for talks in Moscow this week, signaling it is prepared to
work with Washington on combating global warming despite
confrontation on other issues.

Yet Russia’s fight is running up against familiar banes:
rigidly centralized govt, a sprawling law enforcement
apparatus and distrust of the state. As the wildfires
spread in June, prosecutors launched criminal investi-
gations of the local authorities for allegedly failing
to fight the fires.
“The people who were occupied with fighting forest fires
were close to getting arrested,” said Aleksandr Isayev,
a wildfire expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences in
Yakutsk. “Their activities were put on hold.”

Then, earlier this month, people in Yakutia were furious
after Russia’s Defense Ministry sent an amphibious plane
to Turkey to help the geopolitically pivotal country battle
wildfires. It took another 5 days until the Russian govt
announced it was sending military planes to fight fires
in Yakutia as well.

“This means that Moscow hasn’t noticed yet,” said Aleks
Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Inst. in
Yakutsk, in an interview before Russia sent planes to region.

One recent Friday evening, volunteers in the village of
Bulgunnyakhtakh, south of Yakutsk, piled into trucks & an
open trailer and bumped thru the mosquito-infested forest
for two hours. They filled up water trucks at a pond and
drove to a cliff side overlooking the majestic Lena River,
where they realized they had gone the wrong way: The fire
was in the valley down below.

Some of the men clambered down the slope, while others
tried to connect fire hoses together to reach them.

“There’s no firefighters here,” one man muttered. “No one
knows how to use these things.”

Working thru the light northern night with backpack pumps,
the volunteers appeared to be containing the small fire,
which they had feared could threaten their village. But to
Semyon Solomonov, one of the volunteers, one thing was
clear: Any victory over the ravages of the changing climate
would be temporary.

“This is not a phase, this is not a cycle — this is the
approach of the end of the world,” Solomonov said. “Mankind
will die out, and the era of the dinosaurs will come.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/europe/siberia-fires.html

"David P." wrote in message
news:97dbcc77-470d-4871-8a0c-a1ee490916f4n@googlegroups.com...
>
> As Frozen Land Burns, Siberia Fears: ‘If We Don’t Have the Forest, We Don’t
> Have Life’
> by Anton Troianovski, 7/17/21, New York Times
>
> Last year, the record-setting fires in the remote Siberian region of
> Yakutia released roughly as much CO2 as did all the fuel consumed in
> Mexico in 2018, acc. to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the
> Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service in Reading, England.

See what happens when you play with
matches, Oleg?: https://tinyurl.com/bjbmaks4

Byker the Shithead, <news:lJOdnZTKkIPgemj9nZ2dnUU7-dHNnZ2d@earthlink.com>
> "David P." wrote in message

>> As Frozen Land Burns, Siberia Fears: 'If We Don't Have the Forest, We Don't
>> Have Life'
>> by Anton Troianovski, 7/17/21, New York Times
>>
>> Last year, the record-setting fires in the remote Siberian region of
>> Yakutia released roughly as much CO2 as did all the fuel consumed in
>> Mexico in 2018, acc. to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the
>> Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service in Reading, England.
>
> See what happens when you play with
> matches, Oleg?: https://tinyurl.com/bjbmaks4

Hey, Shithie, read here <https://tinyurl.com/yhophu4d>

Compare the size of the Russian taiga area vs California etc

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sd5185$3mm$1@os.motzarella.org...

Byker the Shithead, <news:lJOdnZTKkIPgemj9nZ2dnUU7-dHNnZ2d@earthlink.com>
>>
>> See what happens when you play with
>> matches, Oleg?: https://tinyurl.com/bjbmaks4
>
> Hey, Shithie, read here <https://tinyurl.com/yhophu4d>
>
> Compare the size of the Russian taiga area vs California etc

What's keeping you from developing it?

Once global warming thaws out the permafrost,
it ought to become habitable...

On Monday, July 19, 2021 at 4:25:25 PM UTC-4, David P. wrote:
> As Frozen Land Burns, Siberia Fears: ‘If We Don’t Have the Forest, We Don’t Have Life’
> by Anton Troianovski, 7/17/21, New York Times
>
> Last year, the record-setting fires in the remote Siberian
> region of Yakutia released roughly as much CO2 as did all
> the fuel consumed in Mexico in 2018, acc. to Mark Parrington,
> a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring
> Service in Reading, England.
>
> Now, Yakutia — a region 4 times the size of Texas, with
> its own culture and Turkic language — is burning again.
>
> On some days this month, thick smoke hung over the capital,
> Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world, making residents’
> eyes water and scraping their throats. Outside the city,
> villagers are consumed by the battle with fire, shoveling
> trenches to keep it away from their homes and fields,
> quenching their thirst by digging up the ice sheets
> embedded in the ground.
>
> Life here revolves around the northern forest, known as the
> taiga. It is the source of berries, mushrooms, meat, timber
> & firewood. When it burns, the permafrost below it thaws
> more quickly, turning lush woods into impenetrable swamps.
>
> Some forest fires are normal, but scientists say they have
> accelerated to an extraordinary pace in the last 3 years,
> threatening the sustainability of the taiga ecosystem.
>
> “If we don’t have the forest, we don’t have life,” said
> Maria Nogovitsina, a retired kindergarten director in the
> village of Magaras, pop. of ~1,000, 60 mi outside Yakutsk.
>
> As many villagers have done recently, Nogovitsina made an
> offering to the earth to keep the fires away: She tore up
> a few Russian-style pancakes and sprinkled the ground with
> fermented milk. “Nature is angry at us,” she said.
>
> For their part, the people of Yakutia are angry, too. They
> say the authorities have done too little to fight the
> fires, a sign that global warming may carry a political
> cost for govts.
>
> 4 days of travels in Yakutia this month revealed a near-
> universal sentiment that the Russian govt did not grasp
> the people’s plight. And rather than accept official
> explanations that climate change is to blame for the
> disaster, many repeat conspiracy theories, among them that
> the fires were set on purpose by crooked officials or
> businesspeople hoping to profit from them.
>
> “I haven’t seen it, but that’s what people are saying,”
> Yegor Andreyev, 83, a villager in Magaras, said of the
> widely circulating rumors of unnamed “bosses” burning the
> forests to further various corrupt schemes. “There’s no
> fires in Moscow, so they couldn’t care less.”
>
> In Magaras, Mayor Tekeyanov said he was applying for a
> govt grant to buy a drone, GPS equipment and radios.
> Riding a bulldozer thru the charred woods outside the
> village, a forest ranger, Vlad Volkov, said he was blind
> to the extent of the fires because of a lack of aerial
> surveillance. It was only when he retrieved a broken-down
> tractor left behind a few days earlier that he discovered
> a new fire raging in the vicinity. “The fire doesn’t wait
> while you’re waiting for spare parts,” he said.
>
> Russia, in some ways, might benefit from climate change
> because warmer weather is creating new fertile territory
> and is opening up the once-frozen Arctic Ocean to greater
> trade and resource extraction. But the country is also
> uniquely vulnerable, with 2/3 of its territory composed of
> permafrost, which warps the land, breaks apart roads and
> undermines buildings as it thaws.
>
> For years, Putin rejected the fact that humans bear respon-
> sibility for the warming climate. But last month, he
> sounded a new message in his annual call-in show with the
> Russian public, warning that the thawing permafrost could
> lead to “very serious social and economic consequences”
> for the country.
>
> “Many believe, with good reason, that this is connected
> primarily to human activity, to emissions of pollutants
> into the atmosphere,” Putin told viewers. “Global warming
> is happening in our country even faster than in many
> other regions of the world.”
>
> Putin signed a law this month requiring businesses to
> report their greenhouse gas emissions, paving the way
> toward carbon regulation in Russia, the world’s 4th-largest
> polluter. Russia hosted John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy,
> for talks in Moscow this week, signaling it is prepared to
> work with Washington on combating global warming despite
> confrontation on other issues.
>
> Yet Russia’s fight is running up against familiar banes:
> rigidly centralized govt, a sprawling law enforcement
> apparatus and distrust of the state. As the wildfires
> spread in June, prosecutors launched criminal investi-
> gations of the local authorities for allegedly failing
> to fight the fires.
>
> “The people who were occupied with fighting forest fires
> were close to getting arrested,” said Aleksandr Isayev,
> a wildfire expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences in
> Yakutsk. “Their activities were put on hold.”
>
> Then, earlier this month, people in Yakutia were furious
> after Russia’s Defense Ministry sent an amphibious plane
> to Turkey to help the geopolitically pivotal country battle
> wildfires. It took another 5 days until the Russian govt
> announced it was sending military planes to fight fires
> in Yakutia as well.
>
> “This means that Moscow hasn’t noticed yet,” said Aleks
> Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Inst. in
> Yakutsk, in an interview before Russia sent planes to region.
>
> One recent Friday evening, volunteers in the village of
> Bulgunnyakhtakh, south of Yakutsk, piled into trucks & an
> open trailer and bumped thru the mosquito-infested forest
> for two hours. They filled up water trucks at a pond and
> drove to a cliff side overlooking the majestic Lena River,
> where they realized they had gone the wrong way: The fire
> was in the valley down below.
>
> Some of the men clambered down the slope, while others
> tried to connect fire hoses together to reach them.
>
> “There’s no firefighters here,” one man muttered. “No one
> knows how to use these things.”
>
> Working thru the light northern night with backpack pumps,
> the volunteers appeared to be containing the small fire,
> which they had feared could threaten their village. But to
> Semyon Solomonov, one of the volunteers, one thing was
> clear: Any victory over the ravages of the changing climate
> would be temporary.
>
> “This is not a phase, this is not a cycle — this is the
> approach of the end of the world,” Solomonov said. “Mankind
> will die out, and the era of the dinosaurs will come.”
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/europe/siberia-fires.html

This is the kind of article that persuades me to give up reading US media
for non-US news.

"Now, Yakutia — a region 4 times the size of Texas, with
its own culture and Turkic language — is burning again."

Wild fire is basically a natural occurrence. It destroys but its also
clear the under growh such that the forest could renew and become
healthier.

If it is a human story, the size of the region is irrelevant. After all, the whole
region is not on fire. Why can't the author tell how many people are at risk
because of the current fire?

ltlee1, <news:21801966-61f4-43de-99d7-8bd75367ab9cn@googlegroups.com>
> On Monday, July 19, 2021 at 4:25:25 PM UTC-4, David P. wrote:

>> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/europe/siberia-fires.html

> This is the kind of article that persuades me to give up reading US
> media for non-US news.
>
> "Now, Yakutia - a region 4 times the size of Texas, with
> its own culture and Turkic language - is burning again."
>
> Wild fire is basically a natural occurrence. It destroys but its also
> clear the under growh such that the forest could renew and become
> healthier.
>
> If it is a human story, the size of the region is irrelevant. After
> all, the whole region is not on fire. Why can't the author tell how
> many people are at risk because of the current fire?

The wildfires emerge mostly in random order and in random places.
For the large area, it's a business as usual every year, but for
a specific settlement, it's not what happens on a regular basis.
When it suddenly starts burning near your own habitat many people
naturally become nervous or even hysterical, which can provide a
material for unbalanced and alarmist reportings in the news media
with inadequate generalizations.

Also in some years it burns more and in some it burns less. Quite
a hard situation was in 2015, when 34 people were died (in US'
California, 33 were died due to the wildfires in 2020), and those
wildfires in 2015 were affected even China's Inner Mongolia. In
2019, it was burning even stronger, and there was an especially
rampant alarmist hysteria in the media. The government changed
some policies and allocated more budgets for forestry & emergency.
However, there were no reports that someone died due to the 2019
wildfires in Siberia.

Given their hardly predictable random nature, it's discussable of
how the emergency service should be better organized and improved
to provide faster responses where it's necessary. Improvement of
preventive measures for habitable areas, which includes a complex
set of topics, is also discussable. But the claim of a horrible
ecological catastrophe / doomsday alarmism simply aims to unleash
a mass tantrum for a political effect.

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sd7due$m18$1@os.motzarella.org...
>
> However, there were no reports that someone died due to the 2019 wildfires
> in Siberia.

Undoubtedly because no one was living there...

> Byker the Shithead, <news:lJOdnZTKkIPgemj9nZ2dnUU7-dHNnZ2d@earthlink.com>
>> "David P." wrote in message
>
>>> As Frozen Land Burns, Siberia Fears: 'If We Don't Have the Forest, We
>>> Don't
>>> Have Life'
>>> by Anton Troianovski, 7/17/21, New York Times

> Hey, Shithie, read here <https://tinyurl.com/yhophu4d>
>
> Compare the size of the Russian taiga area vs California etc

Canada's data say <https://bit.ly/33iM3Dj> they have, so far, 1.25
million ha of taiga burnt while the most recent Russia's figure was
1.5 million ha (and the Russia's whole area is 1.95 times larger).

Here a local alarmist-activist group of Yakutia's artists says they
have organized "Save Yakutia" charity exhibition and were proud to
collect 160 thousand rubles to support the fight against wildfires
<https://yakutia.info/article/200279> (the media outlet is regional
"liberal opposition"), which implies the governments - regional and
central - do not allocate enough money, so that such an activism is
necessary. This is 1/60,000 from what the Russia's government had
allocated for the firefighting, so their 160,000 is very negligible
against that. The real goal of these artists is attention seeking
and noise - they indecently parasitize on the wildfire-related stir.
They proudly claim that they have sent support requests to Greta
Tumberg and Leonardo DiCaprio, and that the NYT's journalists wrote
the article (posted by David P.) from their words. This example
illustrates why the Russia's majority dislikes "liberal opposition",
and why such folks have absolutely no chance to be elected.

News from Canada <https://bit.ly/2TsiPBF> <https://bit.ly/3x2QWOd>
say things have come to mass-scale evacuations and some settlements
have been left without electric power, while news from Yakutia so
far were so that the main problem for people is smoke, but all the
fires that might affect settlements or infrastructure have been
stopped by the firefighters and volunteers <https://bit.ly/3kKwzD6>
<https://bit.ly/3kL32t9>

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sdciaj$h4k$2@os.motzarella.org...
>
> Canada's data say <https://bit.ly/33iM3Dj> they have, so far, 1.25 million
> ha of taiga burnt while the most recent Russia's figure was 1.5 million ha
> (and the Russia's whole area is 1.95 times larger).

Like in the "Kursk" rescue attempt, we offered you help
but you turned it down: https://tinyurl.com/m6teuftj

On Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 3:52:54 PM UTC-4, Oleg Smirnov wrote:
> > Byker the Shithead, <news:lJOdnZTKkIPgemj9...@earthlink.com>
> >> "David P." wrote in message
> >
> >>> As Frozen Land Burns, Siberia Fears: 'If We Don't Have the Forest, We
> >>> Don't
> >>> Have Life'
> >>> by Anton Troianovski, 7/17/21, New York Times
> > Hey, Shithie, read here <https://tinyurl.com/yhophu4d>
> >
> > Compare the size of the Russian taiga area vs California etc
> Canada's data say <https://bit.ly/33iM3Dj> they have, so far, 1.25
> million ha of taiga burnt while the most recent Russia's figure was
> 1.5 million ha (and the Russia's whole area is 1.95 times larger).
>
> Here a local alarmist-activist group of Yakutia's artists says they
> have organized "Save Yakutia" charity exhibition and were proud to
> collect 160 thousand rubles to support the fight against wildfires
> <https://yakutia.info/article/200279> (the media outlet is regional
> "liberal opposition"), which implies the governments - regional and
> central - do not allocate enough money, so that such an activism is
> necessary. This is 1/60,000 from what the Russia's government had
> allocated for the firefighting, so their 160,000 is very negligible
> against that. The real goal of these artists is attention seeking
> and noise - they indecently parasitize on the wildfire-related stir.
> They proudly claim that they have sent support requests to Greta
> Tumberg and Leonardo DiCaprio, and that the NYT's journalists wrote
> the article (posted by David P.) from their words. This example
> illustrates why the Russia's majority dislikes "liberal opposition",
> and why such folks have absolutely no chance to be elected.
>
> News from Canada <https://bit.ly/2TsiPBF> <https://bit.ly/3x2QWOd>
> say things have come to mass-scale evacuations and some settlements
> have been left without electric power, while news from Yakutia so
> far were so that the main problem for people is smoke, but all the
> fires that might affect settlements or infrastructure have been
> stopped by the firefighters and volunteers <https://bit.ly/3kKwzD6>
> <https://bit.ly/3kL32t9>

US media politicize everything it could and contributes to America's polarization.
The following web page offers some background information on wildfire.
https://askesa.com/2021/07/did-smokey-bear-get-it-wrong/

"Did Smokey Bear Get It Wrong?
Smokey Bear (“Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”) was created by the U.S. Forest Service in the 1940s to enlist the help of the public in curbing human-caused forest fires. At that time, more than 30 million acres of American forest burned annually. By 1988, the annual figure hovered around 7.5 million acres per year until rising to 10.1 million acres in 2020 (40% of which burned in California). It turns out that Smokey Bear may have done too good a job. Ironically, the U.S. Forest Service and their forest management practices have become the primary reason for the increase in devastating forest fires. Why? Because frequent fires burn the undergrowth.. In the absence of frequent surface fires, undergrowth proliferates, increasing the accumulation of kindling, and thus promoting an environment conducive to more devastating fires.
....
When Are Crown Fires a Good Thing?

Yellowstone National Park, arguably the most famous of all the national parks in this country, caught fire on June 14, 1988. Ignited by lightning, nearly a million acres burned. The forest understory was replete with fuel, creating a crown fire and conflagration of epic proportions. Despite the involvement of thousands of fire fighters, the fire was mostly uncontainable. It burned throughout the summer and was only extinguished when November rain and snow smothered the relentless blaze.

Hand wringing continued throughout the summer and fall; people were aghast and fretting about the ecological disaster because fire wiped out untold acres of old forests, formerly choked with dead trees and devoid of any herbaceous understory. But what happened as a result? The following spring, secondary succession (the natural ecological growth process that occurs in the wake of such fires) unfolded. From the devastation sprouted long-dormant seeds of every kind of native vegetation. Rejuvenated, gray landscapes turned green, and, in a few short years, wildlife populations exploded due to the advent of new foliage. In short, Yellowstone underwent an ecological renaissance that has been studied and published in scientific journals for the past 30 years."

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sdcqo2$v5m$1@os.motzarella.org...

Byker the Shithead, <news:0MednW7hl9HqSGT9nZ2dnUU7-fPNnZ2d@earthlink.com>
>>
>> Like in the "Kursk" rescue attempt, we offered you help
>> but you turned it down: https://tinyurl.com/m6teuftj
>
> Watch Byker at 1:34 <https://youtu.be/ZW7Z304Wx6c>

Oleg should be grateful he didn't wind up in the Kolyma gold fields:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgnmWYy-9ds&t=14s