Global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, a landmark report on climate change has said. Boris Johnson hoped the report would be ‘a wake-up call for the world to take action now’
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Dramatic images show devastating wildfires around the world as villages are destroyed and thousands evacuated across different countries.
Greece, Turkey, the US and Algeria are among the places where wildfires have caused wreaked havoc in the past few weeks.
The UN climate panel sounded a dire warning on Monday, saying the world is dangerously close to runaway warming and humans are “unequivocally” to blame.
Global warming is close to spiralling out of control, the panel said in a landmark report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It warned the world is already certain to face further climate disruptions for decades, if not centuries, to come.
Boris Johnson said he hoped the report would be “a wake-up call for the world to take action now.”
U.S. President Joe Biden tweeted on Monday: “We can’t wait to tackle the climate crisis.
“The signs are unmistakable. The science is undeniable. And the cost of inaction keeps mounting.”
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AFP via Getty Images)
Greece
More than 500 fires have been burning across Greece, forcing the evacuation of dozens of villages and thousands of people.
Almost 1,000 firefighters, nine aircrafts and 200 vehicles have been sent to Greece from other European countries to help.
Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis apologised for failures in tackling the wildfires that have burned across the country for the past week as authorities began counting the cost in lost homes and livelihoods.
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AFP via Getty Images)
He will chair a cabinet meeting later in the day and his government will announce specific relief measures for those who have lost homes, farms and property.
On Monday he approved a €500 million budget for aid for Evia and the Attica region around Athens.
Sentinel-2 satellite imagery showed swathes of forest scorched by the wildfires in Attica, Evia and the Peloponnese, with the Athens National Observatory estimating that about 650,000 hectares had been burned in total until Sunday.
Mitsotakis promised that forests destroyed by the fires would be restored and climate defences would be built up.
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Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Algeria
Four people were killed and three injured on Monday night in wildfires in mountainous areas east of the Algerian capital, Algiers, state news agency APS reported.
Firefighters and helicopters were still trying to contain several blazes threatening residents in Tizi Ouzou province, some 100 km (62 miles) from Algiers, it said.
Some fires reportedly erupted near homes, forcing inhabitants to flee.
Turkey
In the last two weeks, wildfires have wrought damage on tens of thousands of hectares of forest in Turkey’s Mediterranean and Aegean provinces, killing eight people and forcing thousands of others, including tourists, to flee.
Similar damage could be seen in the village of Bayir and the seaside resort of Turunc, also in the province of Mugla, where both Marmaris and Bodrum, another major resort, are located.
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AFP via Getty Images)
Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said on Monday that the only wildfires continuing to burn were in the Mugla districts of Milas and Koycegiz, with nearly 240 blazes brought under control in the last 13 days.
Until devastated by wildfires, hills near the Turkish sea resort of Marmaris were decked in thick green pine forest.
Now these same hills form a ghostly, grey-brown landscape topped with blackened tree stumps as though sketched in charcoal.
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California
Monday alone saw 500,000 acres of forest burning in California.
A raging wildfire in northern California became the second-largest recorded in state history, officials had said on Sunday.
This was days after the blaze destroyed a historic gold rush town and forced the evacuation of thousands.
The Dixie Fire had grown to more than 463,000 acres, or 724 square miles (1,876 square kilometers), as of Sunday afternoon.
The burned area is larger than the city of Houston.
Only the August Complex Fire of August 2020, which consumed more than a million acres, was bigger.
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Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Russia
By early this month, summer wildfires had already produced a record amount of carbon emissions in Russia’s Siberian region of Yakutia, with still more weeks of the fire season to come, according to the European Union’s Copernicus satellite monitoring unit.
So far, this year’s fires have torn through more than 4.2million hectares in Yakutia.
Enormous plumes of smoke have been sent as far as the North Pole.
