defrost 9 days ago

Climate change absolutely increases the fire risk:

    Fire activity in Australia is strongly affected by high inter-annual climate variability and extremes. Through changes in the climate, anthropogenic climate change has the potential to alter fire dynamics. Here we compile satellite (19 and 32 years) and ground-based (90 years) burned area datasets, climate and weather observations, and simulated fuel loads for Australian forests. Burned area in Australia’s forests shows a linear positive annual trend but an exponential increase during autumn and winter.

    The mean number of years since the last fire has decreased consecutively in each of the past four decades, while the frequency of forest megafire years (>1 Mha burned) has markedly increased since 2000.

    The increase in forest burned area is consistent with increasingly more dangerous fire weather conditions, increased risk factors associated with pyroconvection, including fire-generated thunderstorms, and increased ignitions from dry lightning, all associated to varying degrees with anthropogenic climate change.
The "usual suspects" here being the journal Nature publishing analysis of thirty-two years of satellite data and 90 years of ground-based datasets performed by Australia's national scientific body the CSIRO.

Multi-decadal increase of forest burned area in Australia is linked to climate change, Nature, Nov 2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27225-4

https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2021/november/new-rese...

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  • twelve40 9 days ago

    This is a very convenient global scapegoat for those responsible for mismanaging the forests here and now. Nobody is disputing these studies. But then Newsom comes out and instead if saying "it's my fault for underinvesting in fire prevention, i will personally see that prevention (not just fighting) gets funded properly today", he says "too bad, it's all climate change's fault", how does that look?

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    • defrost 9 days ago

      Language usage wise, something (or someone) is not a scapegoat if it shares responsibility.

      Has he come out and blamed everything on climate change and not invested in both prevention measures (better management, backburning, etc.) and fire fighting?

      That's poor policy regardless of underlying causes.

      Here in Australia there are multiple causes driving bushfires, the single largest cause related to frequency and intensity increases is far and away AGW. This doesn't result in Land Management agencies rolling up shop and giving up.

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    • monomyth 9 days ago

      it looks like he is not fit for the office, which we know since his days in San Francisco :)

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  • _bin_ 9 days ago

    This isn't actually a very good attribution to specifically anthropogenic global warming. But it is a decent one to anthropogenic factors broadly. The metaphor of laying a fire is quite literal here: if global warming increases the number of sparks, that's actually the smaller piece of the problem. The bigger one is mismanagement of forest and ecological disruption leading to more and bigger fires laid for those sparks to catch.

    My guess is there could be future impacts around the condition of forests that leads to susceptibility. Drought comes to mind as a serious risk. But a forest of dry trees is still a much harder environment for wildfires to form and spread than a forest of dry trees and no proper forestry to manage it.

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imoverclocked 9 days ago

> ... to blame the conflagration on 'climate change' ...

Climate change is a significant factor in wildfire statistics. So is forest management.

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