GLOBAL FIRE MAP
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Wildfires are becoming more dangerous – here’s why
Source: Imperial College London, UK: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/241572/wildfires-becoming-more-dangerous-heres/
From London to the Arctic, wildfires are an increasing threat we have to understand better, says Professor Guillermo Rein.
Wildfires are getting bigger and more intense – and are burning in places never seen before. A big contributing factor is global warming drying vegetation and soil out, and creating more combustible material.
But wildfire science has only relatively recently become a part of climate change discussions and science.
To find out more, we spoke to Professor Guillermo Rein, Professor of Fire Science in the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Science and Society.
Wildfires in Greece
HOW IS CLIMATE CHANGE INFLUENCING WILDFIRES?
Not all fires are bad – we need wildfires in our ecosystems and there has always been a significant number of wildfires on every continent except Antartica. Now though, we are seeing an increase in the size and severity of wildfires. When a fire is very large it can affect whole regions and ecosystems – it impacts more people and causes more damage. These are the bad sort of wildfires.
WHAT WILL BE THE IMPACT OF THESE FIRES IN THE FUTURE?
I don’t know one single fire scientist who is not concerned about what is coming. We are bracing ourselves for more frequent, larger fires, more evacuations, more damage, for lives lost, more ecosystems damaged, and more emissions, and the fire service very stressed.
It’s very scary to realise there is this force of nature that is growing and we don’t know what it is and we don’t really know how to stop it.
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Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/27/europe/greece-wildfire-athens-intl-climate-cmd/index.html
A losing battle to save the lungs of Athens as wildfires grip Greece
In Agia Paraskevi, one of the villages dotted around Mount Panitha, just 15 miles north of Greece’s capital, Athens, we found a familiar sight: a woman standing in front of a burned house, its black, skeletal roof beams reaching imploringly into the smoldering sky as if begging for mercy. Tears streamed down her face as she contemplated what she lost. She cried softly in almost resigned despair. Greece is once again in the grip of wildfires, and this year they are worse than ever.
Hours earlier we were standing in the same village, talking to Nikos as he stood outside his home, eyeing the advancing smoke. He was spraying a thin stream of water through a skinny hosepipe, dousing parked cars and soaking the ground around his home, in what surely seemed a futile attempt to ward off the impending danger.
Nikos told me he had been doing this for two days. He had packed a bag with a few clothes and, along with his wife and their dog, was prepared to leave – if the authorities forced him to do so. “Only if someone puts a gun to my head,” he told me. Like so many in these villages, he had poured his life into this little house.
In the event, no such persuasion was needed. The police arrived to evacuate the village, and Nikos in tears, reluctantly did as he was told, leaving his house with just a little damp earth and the faintest of hopes to protect it.
This 300 square mile national park, filled with verdant forests and ancient archeological sites, is known as “the lungs of Athens,” and with good reason. As well as offering city dwellers a haven from the ancient city’s cloying summers, its vast woodlands perform the twin tasks of cleaning the polluted air and absorbing the intense heat that often grips the metropolis.
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Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66620230
The indiscriminate devastation of Canada’s raging wildfires
Joanna Kelly is a barrister in the Kelowna law courts – this week she’s been given permission to appear in legal cases by video-link partly because she has very few formal clothes to wear. They, and most of her other possessions, went up in flames last week.
On her mobile phone, Joanna watches a grainy video of what used to be her house with Duncan Vickers – her friend and neighbour for decades. They’re now evacuees in Canada’s worst ever wildfire season.
Joanna says they had never seen anything like the inferno that tore through their Okanagan valley community, in the western province of British Columbia, destroying almost everything in its path, including their homes.
“It was blindingly bright and then it would get into a house,” says Joanna, as she describes watching the wall of fire from a vantage point on the other side of the lake. “There was a raging fire going through a skeleton-like building and it went from one to the next until there were dozens of destroyed structures.”
Her next-door neighbour Duncan, who emigrated to Canada in the 1970s, lost most of what he had built and owned – including his father’s World War Two medals. But, says Duncan, showing some of his native Yorkshire stoicism, his family is safe and everything else has to be put into perspective.
“I got my cars out, which is important,” he says. “It’s terrible, but you’ve got to be philosophical about these things.”
It’s still too dangerous and risky for Duncan, Joanna and other residents who lost their homes to return and pick up the pieces. But, from the vantage point of a boat on the lake, the devastation is clear to see.
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WESTERN UNITED STATES
Wildfire climate connection
Source: https://www.noaa.gov/noaa-wildfire/wildfire-climate-connection
Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last two decades. Wildfires require the alignment of a number of factors, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels, such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change.
A 2016 study found climate change enhanced the drying of organic matter and doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015offsite link in the western United States. A 2021 study supported by NOAA concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weatheroffsite link in the western United States.
Drought and persistent heat set the stage for extraordinary wildfire seasons from 2020 to 2022 across many western states, with all three years far surpassing the average of 1.2 million acres burned since 2016. Extreme fire behavior during this period shocked many wildfire managers, as several huge blazes burned for months, others incinerated entire communities, and still others erupted during nighttime wind events, when firefighters could normally count on working the fire line. In the Sierras of California and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, flame fronts threw embers over the crests of mountain divides, across miles of rocky and inflammable terrain, one more behavior never before observed by wildfire managers.
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Wildfires and Climate Change in the U.S. West
Source: https://www.c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climate-change/
Climate change has been a key factor in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the Western United States. Wildfire risk depends on a number of factors, including temperature, soil moisture, and the presence of trees, shrubs, and other potential fuel. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change. Climate change enhances the drying of organic matter in forests (the material that burns and spreads wildfire), and has doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States.
Research shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions. Increased drought, and a longer fire season are boosting these increases in wildfire risk. For much of the U.S. West, projections show that an average annual 1 degree C temperature increase would increase the median burned area per year as much as 600 percent in some types of forests. In the Southeastern United States modeling suggests increased fire risk and a longer fire season, with at least a 30 percent increase from 2011 in the area burned by lightning-ignited wildfire by 2060.
Once a fire starts—more than 80 percent of U.S. wildfires are caused by people—warmer temperatures and drier conditions can help fires spread and make them harder to put out. Warmer, drier conditions also contribute to the spread of the mountain pine beetle and other insects that can weaken or kill trees, building up the fuels in a forest.
Land use and forest management also affect wildfire risk. Changes in climate add to these factors and are expected to continue to increase the area affected by wildfires in the United States.
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