More so than in even the large forests at lower latitudes. They are also the 2nd most important forests only to Tropical forests as CO2 scrubbers. What makes it "look" so bad is the forest floor in these areas is a combination of or individually permafrost, peat and/or moss covered which when this specialized forest floor burns gives off copious amounts of smoke. I might also note that, especially in Russia, we are killing these forests at rates they can't recover. The most dangerous aspect of this is exposing more permafrost to an accelerated heating of the climate AND to more intense fire. Permafrost is basically frozen peat and can burn for years. Permafrost could become the greatest releaser of greenhouse gasses, particularly the very dangerous greenhouse gas methane, in the world in the next decade. These forests, while accounting for 1/3 of forests world wide, sequester twice as much in greenhouse gases than all other forests combined. When the frozen peats and permafrost up there finally goes it will release more methane than humans have dumped into the atmosphere in their history. Methane is the greenhouse killer. And when concentrated methane materials burn they release the worst greenhouse gas of them all, water. I have a friend (retired) who worked for the Canadian forestry service studying the Boreal Forests. He said the destruction of those forests by humans scares him more than cars and industrialization etc. by man combined when it comes to global climate change. While I believe we're beyond the tipping point already, runaway methane releases is a bridge too far and will change the planet not for a 100 years or even 500, it could be 10k to 100k years or more before we even get the balance back to today.
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