As we watch the effects of climate change play out in front of our very eyes, it can be difficult to maintain hope that things will improve in the years to come. Extreme weather, extreme flooding, wildfires, and it’s difficult not to declare that extreme conditions are affecting everything throughout the world. Now, researchers at the Breakthrough Institute have discovered that the frequency of “extreme” wildfires has increased by around 25 percent on average as a result of warming induced by human activity in comparison to the time before the Industrial Revolution.
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This means that we should pay the closest attention to the places and times that historically have experienced conditions just on the moist side of these thresholds but which are being pushed over these thresholds onto the dry side by background warming, explained Patrick Brown, lead author.
Scientists utilized machine learning to investigate the connection between greater average temperatures and drier circumstances and the fires that spread the most quickly; these are the fires that consume over four thousand hectares in a single day. They examined a series of fires that occurred from 2003 to 2020. And here’s the thing. The effects of climate change were different for each individual fire. Additionally, the surface of the Earth has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius.
The results of the study were made public after a summer in which wildfires in Hawaii claimed the lives of at least 115 people and drove 200,000 people from their households in Canada. According to a study on wildfires that was published in 2022 by the United Nations Environment Programme, they are becoming more prevalent as a result of hotter and drier circumstances induced by climate change. This is true even in places that have not traditionally been prone to them. Greece is now battling what officials from the European Union have described as the bloc’s worst wildfire on record over a 10-kilometer front. Europe is also suffering. According to the reports, there were twenty persons who tragically passed away.
The most important thing to do is to raise awareness about the catastrophic wildfires and climate change and to help the scientific field so that more data can be available.
