Burning issues!

Fires in Greece. Fires in central Portugal. Fires in Corsica. Here is a link to pictures.

Fire makes for strangely beautiful photos.

But it’s serious stuff. Over 70 people died in Greece. Others had to be rescued from the sea where they took refuge. A whole holiday village was destroyed. Some of this has been going on within 20 miles of Athens.

Frightening!

I recently read about wildfires raging inside the Arctic Circle, which we imagine to be cold all year round! Sweden called for emergency assistance from the EU. (Another reason why we should not be leaving but trying to make the EU better so that we can help each other.)

In western Sweden, they had an extra problem because of unexploded ordinance in an artillery training range. The stuff might explode!

As if they did not have enough problems.

It’s all down to the jet stream apparently. Blowing around up there, not just disrupting flight paths for planes but doing odd things to weather all over the place. The UK is sweltering but Iceland has had an unusually dull and stormy summer so far. Here is a link to an article with technical explanations.

Some people are moaning about the heat in the UK but I think most are enjoying a good summer, positively basking in it. But if some of the changes were to become permanent then the UK would become a very different place. It might no longer be possible for the Spaniard who once told me England was “too green” to say that any longer.

Looking at the wider picture too, some parts of the world could become barely habitable, leading to a different sort of migration problem. It’s time we cooperated to find a world solution, a way of at least preventing things from getting any worse. Time to forget about each of us putting our own interests first (America First! Britain First!) and to start putting the world first. We only have one and it’s only in science fiction stories that you can get in a space ship and find a new planet.

Here is Galicia there has been drama of a different sort and, fortunately, of a less serious nature, although it did send plumes of,black smoke out over the sea, a catamaran, on a tourist trip, collided with another boat off the island of La Toxa, just a but further up the coast, beyond Sanxenxo. It collided with the other boat and then burst into flames. Some passengers threw themselves into the sea and had to be rescued. Five people were reported injured but there were no fatalities.

And that is the end of today’s gloomy and smoky blogpost.