Thursday, December 10, 2015

Amazon on Fire!!!

     Most of the old-timers have been telling me that they don't remember a springtime (September to December here in the southern hemisphere) this warm in over 50 years!
     Add to that the fact that farmers and cattle-grazers have been burning fields and virgin forest all over the Amazon region of Brazil.  The result: smoke and smog for the past month or so!  Sometimes it rises up higher into the atmosphere during the day because of the warmer temperature, but once we hit evening it is like a thick fog outside all through the night until the about 9am the next morning!  Some days it doesn't even go away, there is so much smoke.  So for the past several weeks my clothes and my person (well, everyone, actually) have smelled like campfire smoke.... THICK campfire smoke.
     Finally, the rainy season is really late in arriving this year... I'm not sure why.  El Nino? But this lack of rain is thus causing the temperature to remain up and the smoke to continue hanging in the air.

This was the view outside of my bedroom window this morning at 9am!
(The sun usually comes up at about 6 am... but I haven't seen it recently!)

At my sister's insistence (thanks Michelle!) I went out and bought a mask to wear when the smoke is bad like in the photo above.  I'd rather wear the mask than have permanent lung damage!


No comments:

Post a Comment