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Yes, Climate Change is Raising the Risks of Extreme Wildfires [1]
['Katharine Hayhoe']
Date: 2024-10
How wildfires are affected by climate change
Multiple studies show that climate change is creating warmer, drier conditions that cause fire seasons in some regions like western North America to last longer and be more active.
One way scientists know some of the world’s forests are getting drier and more susceptible to burning is by looking at vapor pressure deficit. VPD is like relative humidity but calculated with temperature. It’s the difference between the amount of moisture in the air and the amount of moisture that the air could hold if it was saturated. As an area’s VPD increases, so do the risks of wildfire.
One study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of California at Los Angeles looked at VPD across the western U.S. between 1979 and 2020. Researchers found that most of the increase in VPD is explained by human-caused global warming. According to NOAA, “This study shows that western United States has passed a critical threshold since about 2000, and human-caused climate change is now the dominant contributor to the increase of wildfire risk.”
A 2016 study of western U.S. forests found that “human-caused climate change caused over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984.”
Things will get worse if we don’t slow climate change. Projections show that in some types of forests in the western U.S., an average annual temperature increase of just 1 °C (~2°F) would increase the median burned area per year by as much 600%. In the southeastern U.S., models also predict an increase in areas burned by lightning-ignited wildfires.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/tackle-climate-change/climate-change-stories/extreme-wildfires-are-getting-worse-with-climate-change/
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