Climate Change Fueling Blazes Around The World; Coal Mining Ingrained In Polish Town.
ALLEN: From the Western U.S. to the Arctic Circle to Brazil, this year has seen record-breaking fires around the world. Some scientists say the climate crisis is making these fires more frequent and more ferocious. For more, here's Cyril Vanier.</s>CYRIL VANIER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Now familiar scenes from the U.S. West Coast. An orange haze shrouds the skies above some of California's most populous cities as dozens of wildfires blaze through millions of hectares of land.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I mean, it's gone, it's gone.</s>VANIER (voice-over): The landscape changing wildfires break records in the region yet again.</s>GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): This is a climate damn emergency. This is real.</s>VANIER (voice-over): An emergency in the western U.S., part of a climate crisis worldwide, as 2020 sees record fires rage around the globe. Fires across Latin America tear through the world's largest tropical wetlands at unprecedented rates. Brazil's Amazon rain forest continues to burn, brought on in part by deforestation. In Bolivia, drought and high temperatures are fueling wildfires while land clearing in Argentina led to blazes now out of control. Australia began the year emerging from its worst fire season on record, destroying thousands of homes and killing as many as 3 billion animals. The fires may have begun naturally but researchers found that climate change played a major role in how fast and wide they spread.</s>PROFESSOR RICHARD BETTS, THE MET OFFICE HADLEY CENTRE: Australia's warmed faster, Australia's 1.4 degrees warmer than it would have been without a human impact on climate.</s>BETTS: So when you get hot, dry conditions, as this occurred, they're even hotter because of global warming.</s>VANIER (voice-over): Around the world, fires have also raged this year in Indonesia, Russia, Portugal, Greece and in the Arctic Circle, which scientists say is heating at rates more than twice the global average.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We always say what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. It does affect our weather in different parts of the world, where hundreds of millions of people live.</s>VANIER (voice-over): Vegetation burning in the Arctic has released record amounts of carbon dioxide into the. Air this year. Those CO2 emissions helping make conditions warmer and drier on a planet becoming too hot in places to live.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Research shows polish in the proceedings in National Academy of Sciences last year projects that about a third of the planet's population will soon live outside of this ideal band of temperature and precipitation that has proved ideal for humans for the last 6,000 years.</s>VANIER (voice-over): Scientists say that reducing emissions is key to help slow global warming, now making fires around the world more frequent and ferocious than ever before -- Cyril Vanier, CNN.</s>ALLEN: Well, economies that are hooked on coal are a big cause of the world's carbon emissions problem and Poland is one of them. Phil Black shows us why the transition to cleaner energy there will be a long and painful process.</s>PHIL BLACK, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The rough track turns the corner and we descend into a vast, unnatural space. A monument to humans' ability to change the Earth. It's a sight sure to make climate activists despair: Poland's Turow Coal Mine and Power Station sitting together, locked in a high-carbon, long-term relationship that's not ending soon. Here at the pit's face, giant bucket wheel digging machines gouge the Earth away. Lignite or brown coal is sorted from waste and swept by conveyor belts directly into the belly of the power station, where it burns, generating eight percent of Poland's electricity.</s>BLACK (on camera): What they pull from the Earth here has provided energy for the Polish people, fueled their economy for more than 70 years, but it's also a source of security, of national pride, and cultural identity. Whole families and communities have been built on this, and they will not give it up easily.</s>BLACK (voice-over): Five thousand plus people are directly employed in the mine and power station. Many more live around them. The whole region's economy feeds off them. Jamash and Marta Kukuch (ph) have worked in the mine for decades. So did his parents and his grandfather before them. They tell me they're proud miners who know action must be taken to slow down global warming, but not at the expense of everyone who relies on the mine. That feeling runs deep here, even with the members of the 69th Yachting Scouts Group. Like many teenagers around the world, they say they love nature and worry about the Earth's future. They're also proud to say they recently collected signatures for a petition to save the Turow Coal Mine. They don't see a contradiction. Emilia Tukatesket (ph) says, supporting the mine doesn't mean we don't support the environment. Turow has permission to keep going for another six years. The state-owned operators don't want to close until 2044.</s>SANDRA APANASIONEK, SPOKESWOMAN, PGE GROUP: We go definitely this way. But we have to do it, you know, slowly. Just slowly, not in one year, not in two years. We need a little bit more time for it.</s>BLACK (voice-over): That logic sustains Poland's dirty fuel habit. Around 75 percent of the country's energy comes from coal. There is gradual investment in renewables, but the government says coal power is here to stay until at least 2050. And while energy analysts say COVID-19 was an opportunity to close loss-making coal mines, Poland, instead, successfully lobbied against linking the release of the European Union's pandemic recovery funds to green policies. This all matters because independent analysis by scientists at Climate Action Tracker shows the E.U. is already a long way behind achieving its emissions targets under the Paris Agreement, the global accord thrashed out to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Like many countries, Poland faces difficult decisions. Breaking coal dependence will inevitably hurt people and change lives. But governments transitioning too slowly risk allowing far greater suffering across our warming planet -- Phil Black, CNN, in Southwestern Poland.</s>ALLEN: Thank you for watching this hour. I'm Natalie Allen. I invite you to follow me on Instagram or Twitter. I'll be right back in a moment with another hour of CNN NEWSROOM continues.