: Wildfires, Droughts, Pandemics. Is this Our Future? How to Build a Safer World. #WorldNEWS Imagine Massachusetts on fire, literally the entire state engulfed in flames. That is how much land has already

Wildfires, Droughts, Pandemics. Is this Our Future? How to Build a Safer World. #WorldNEWS
Imagine Massachusetts on fire, literally the entire state engulfed in flames. That is how much land has already been ravaged—at least 5 million acres—in the wildfires of California, Washington and Oregon. Put another way, in just a few weeks these fires have burned as much land as was destroyed by a decade of using napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. With temperatures over 100°F, toxic air now blankets tens of millions of people, power outages have afflicted vast regions, and dozens have already died from the blazes. Air quality in West Coast cities has ranked among the world’s worst, with Portland’s air at points being almost three times more unhealthy than in notoriously polluted cities like New Delhi. The scenes of red skies out of America’s West have an unreal quality to them, as if they come from a different planet. In a sense they do—they are portents of the future.

There are many proximate reasons for these forest fires—fireworks, campfires, a stray spark—but there is one large cause that is blindingly clear: human actions that have led to climate change. To put it simply, the world is getting hotter, and that means that forests get drier. A yearslong drought, which ended in 2017, killed 163 million trees in California—and that deadwood proved to be the kindling for this year’s devastation. A scientific study led by Stanford, released in April, found that California’s five worst wildfires—whether measured by deaths, destruction or size—all occurred during 2017 and 2018. And we can be sure of one thing: it’s going to get worse. Temperatures continue to rise, drought conditions are worsening, and the combined effect of all these forces will multiply to create cascading crises in the years to come.
Cascades, in which small sparks cause great conflagrations, are happening all around us. Think of COVID-19, which began with a viral speck that was likely lodged in a bat somewhere in China—and is now a raging global pandemic. While viruses have been around forever, they mostly originate in animals and, when they jumped to humans, remained largely local. But over the past few decades, many viruses have gone global, causing widespread epidemics—SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika and now the novel coronavirus. In a recent essay in the scientific journal Cell, the country’s top infectious—disease expert, Anthony Fauci, and one of his colleagues, David Morens, warn that we “have reached a tipping point that forecasts the inevitability of an acceleration of disease emergencies. ” In other words, get ready for more pandemics.