These NASA images leave the impression that all of central Africa and Madagascar are on fire! Almost the same as the rest of the world combined!

From here;

NASA | LANCE | FIRMS

Global picture:

(another NASA view here: Fire (nasa.gov))

Such a bright red fire blanket in central Africa!! As big as the entire US!

Zooming in:

And a little more right in the middle of central Africa:

Holy moly! This place is on fire!

I wonder what the sensitivity of the representation is. Does it pick out cooking fires or a single tree burning or an acre of fire? I suspect it is somewhere between 50 pounds and 200 pounds of bio-mass. Just a guess.

From here:

MODIS Web (nasa.gov)

“Many hundreds of fires dotted central Africa in early June 2023. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a true-color image spanning the continent from Lake Tanganyika to the Pacific Ocean. Each red “hot spot” marks an area of actively burning fire, and they are abundant in Zambia (east), Democratic Republic of Congo (north and central), and Angola (west).

The widespread nature of the fires, their location, and the time of year all suggest that people are intentionally setting most of these fires for agricultural purposes. People in Africa have used fire for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years as an agricultural and land management tool. In the dry season, they set fires to clear brush and dead vegetation from farm and grazing land and to deal with household trash. The dry season in central Africa spans roughly May through September, with fire season peaking in July through August.”

Although not mentioning central Africa, here is a global view from Dr David Martin

(100) Why Are There So Many Fires? Dr. David Martin Unveils What He Thinks Is Behind It (substack.com)

“The whole world seems like it's on fire. Fires are ravaging Maui, Canada, Greece, France—you name it. But when you dig deeper, something's off. Government mismanagement, questionable land acquisitions, and even newly minted laws raise eyebrows. Are we witnessing a bad wave of natural, runaway wildfires, or is there something else going on?”

“That's what it's about. It's about reappropriating land. And the best way to reappropriate land is to have a fire. That has been the case since the Old Testament. So, this is not a new thing.”

Here a take from the UN:

Central Africa faces ‘turning point’ amid multiple crises | UN News

My bad, no mention of fire as a turning point amid multiple crises as of June 2023.

Onwards!

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