It's been a horrific wildfire season in British Columbia. The Village of Lytton burned to the ground on June 30 after it set Canadian temperature records on three consecutive days.

The latest community in danger is Logan Lake, whose 2,000 residents were evacuated on August 12 due to the massive Tremont Creek wildfire. It's grown to more than 36,000 hectares about 8.5 kilometres southeast of Ashcroft.

As a result of this and other wildfires, 660,071 hectares have burned across B.C. this year, according to the provincial government, 

But as bad as this situation is, the wildfires are causing even more havoc in Siberia—even worse than 2020, which were triggered, in part, by a historic heat wave. 

According to one estimate, about 500,000 square kilometres—or 50 million hectares—of land have burned in this part of Russia.

That's more than all the other land burned this year in wildfires around the world.

The European Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service estimates that as a result of the Siberian wildfires, about 505 million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere in Siberia.

In comparison, B.C.'s gross emissions were 67.9 million tonnes in all of 2018, the last year for which figures are available.

A World Weather Attribution analysis noted that the average temperature in Siberia in the first six months of 2020 was more than five degrees warmer than the average between 1981 and 2010.

Some scientists suspect that this could be linked, in part, to a slowdown in the jet streams, which are rapid air currents in the troposphere. This leads these jet streams to flow in large loops, which create hot zones known as heat domes. 

According to this theory, this is brought about in the Northern Hemisphere in the summer by diminishing differences between temperatures in the Arctic and the the level of heat in areas on the southern side of the jet streams.