Desenrasco asked: How scared should I be about wildfires?

To consider it in the bluntest of terms, wildfires kill surprisingly few people: perhaps hundreds around the world each year, compared to thousands from floods and hundreds of thousands from heatwaves. That is, of course, of little comfort to the people across Spain and France returning to burned-out homes, or to the families of firefighters, locals and tourists who have died in the past few weeks. But what scares me far more is the smoke. Recent studies peg the global death toll from wildfire smoke at 1.5 million people per year. The wildfire season in Canada three years ago was so bad, one study found, that more than 80,000 people died from smoke inhalation – and 20,000 of them were in Europe, as winds carried the pollution over the Atlantic.

Ugh, no.

What’s scariest is the amount of carbon they’re putting in the atmosphere. And how these extreme fires cause thunderstorms that genereate lightning strikes that perpetuate the fire, dumping even more carbon in the atmosphere.

The positive feedback loop’s long term death toll is much scarier than just tens of thousands of people dying this year.

Random CEO out there: Grok, what am I supposed to understand in this article?