While wildfires in California and Australia make international news on a regular basis, this goes well under media radar:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...s-drought-heat

Devastating wildfires have broken out across across Paraguay, as drought and record high temperatures continue to exacerbate blazes across South America.

A total of 5,231 individual wildfires broke out across the country on 1 October – up 3,000 on the previous day. Most of were concentrated in the arid Chaco region in the west of the country, but thick yellow smoke had reached as far as the capital, Asunción.

Paraguay’s outbreak came as the southern hemisphere heads into summer and neighbouring countries also face unprecedented wildfires. The Brazilian Amazon is recording its worst blazes in a decade, with numbers up 61% on the widely reported fires of last year, and separate fires in the southern Pantanal region.

Argentina has also seen record numbers of fires devastate the wetlands along the Paraná River, with multiple areas of the country continuing to experience aggressive blazes.


Guillermo Achucarro, climate policy researcher at Base-IS research centre in Asunción, said weather conditions were accelerating Paraguay’s wildfires.

One of the country’s worst droughts of recent decades has seen the River Paraguay –one of its main waterways – drop to 50-year lows. Meanwhile, the country is going through a heatwave, registering a record high temperature of 45.5C (113.9F) last Saturday.

Achucarro said these phenomena were directly linked to Paraguay’s environmental record, which sees cattle ranching fuel some of the world’s highest rates of deforestation in the ecologically important Chaco.

“There is terrible, inefficient, non-existent environmental management in all areas: water, forested areas, waste management,” he said. “Now, we’re literally tasting the environmental crisis: we’re breathing smoke.”
And this goes largely unreported, as well:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/im...res-in-siberia

Abnormally warm temperatures have spawned an intense fire season in eastern Siberia this summer. Satellite data show that fires have been more abundant, more widespread, and produced more carbon emissions than recent seasons.

The area shown in the time-lapse sequence above includes the Sakha Republic, one of the most active fire regions in Siberia this summer. The images show smoke plumes billowing from July 30 to August 6, 2020, as observed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA/NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Strong winds occasionally carried the plumes as far as Alaska in late July. As of August 6, approximately 19 fires were burning in the province.

“After the Arctic fires in 2019, the activity in 2020 was not so surprising through June,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “What has been surprising is the rapid increase in the scale and intensity of the fires through July, largely driven by a large cluster of active fires in the northern Sakha Republic.”

Estimates show that around half of the fires in Arctic Russia this year are burning through areas with peat soil—decomposed organic matter that is a large natural carbon source. Warm temperatures (such as the record-breaking heatwave in June) can thaw and dry frozen peatlands, making them highly flammable. Peat fires can burn longer than forest fires and release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Parrington noted that fires in Arctic Russia released more carbon dioxide (CO2) in June and July 2020 alone than in any complete fire season since 2003 (when data collection began). That estimate is based on data compiled by CAMS, which incorporates data from NASA’s MODIS active fire products.
But hey, there's no such thing as climate change, right?