Australian Wildfires and Climate Change

Australian Wildfires- a result of global warming? in-depth article with facts and figures.

Climate change caused Australian wildfires to be more extreme.

Australian Wildfires is due to  warming climate in the region that has caused the risk of wildfires to increase by about 30 percent.

 

In December 2019, wildfires devastated the southeastern region of Australia, claiming at least 119 human lives. Now we’re learning that the occurrence of these destructive fires was at least partially caused by man-made climate change.

A prolonged heat wave in Europe and other part of the world has turned out to be the primary factor raising the fire risk, according to Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. 

He is a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in De Bilt, and a professor of climate change at VU University Amsterdam.

In a study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters and at a March 3 news conference, scientists revealed that the excessive heat wave (anomalous warmth) was part of a broader pattern tied to human-cause climate change. 

Researchers found that these unprecedented temperatures during summer are now roughly 10 times more likely than they were in the early 20th century.

Meteorologists at Berkeley estimate that California’s risk of a deadly heat wave could get worse by more than 30%, if the climate continues to warm. 

If projections are correct, more than 3,600 extra people may have died in the Australia between 2006 and 2010 due to climate change. 

Anja Van Oldenborgh of Climate Analytics stated that, “It’s not just the development of heat waves in Australia or elsewhere that is increasing. It’s also our vulnerability. We can no longer take for granted that when a heat wave happens it won’t be deadly."

Tweets from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service announced on March 2 that southeastern Australia had become completely free of wildfires for the first time since early 2015.

Since early July 2019, fires have been burning around the world, with a significant amount of areas in the southern hemisphere including Brazil, South Africa and Australia. 

The fires have burnt down over 110,000 square kilometers (42,000 miles) of land which roughly equates to the size of Virginia. 

As a result, at least 34 people have been killed and nearly 6,000 buildings were destroyed. The blazes also killed about 1.5 billion animals which include livestock and wildlife like kangaroos for example. 

Researchers are still tallying up the figures to get an accurate picture but it has already been estimated that losses could reach up to a staggering $163 billion US dollars!

How they figured it out?

A new study was conducted by an international team of researchers. It’s known as the World Weather Attribution group. These scientists investigate how much of a role climate change might be playing in natural disasters and what influence it might have on disaster management. 

They spoke to the press fast because they wanted to make sure that people knew their findings as quickly as possible. Given that the subject matter is sensitive, the study has not yet been peer reviewed . However , scientists involved in it are confident about its accuracy .

Explainer: What is attribution science?

Friederike Otto works at the University of Oxford in England. She models climate. “We wanted to bring the scientific evidence at a time when the public is talking about the event,” she said. 

Her group’s study also looked into how climate change altered the Fire Weather Index, which is an estimate of wildfire risk.

A team of researchers ran a number of climate models in order to predict the future effects of climate change. By looking at data from 1910, the team was able to determine that the overall likelihood of having dangerous and severe wildfires has already increased by at least 30% since then. 

Their findings were only able to identify extreme heat as being one of the major contributors to this increase in fire risk, however they couldn’t figure out if there was an impact on or effect caused by extreme drought as well. 

With these results in mind, it's important for us all to start doing what we can right now so as not to delay in reducing our carbon footprint ASAP before these numbers worsen!

According to Wenju Cai, a climate scientist at CSIRO who is based in Melbourne, Australia, it’s reasonable to assume that the link between the droughts and climate change is rather likely. 

He says that while it may not be surprising that extreme droughts are occurring with increased frequency throughout America lately, “It’s always rather difficult to attribute an individual event to climate change.”

The year 2019 was Australia’s hottest and dryest since records first began there in 1910. Summers seem to be getting longer, too, by about a month (on average) compared with summers 50 years ago. 

The Australia Institute is a think tank based in Canberra, in 2 reports of March found that Australian summers have lengthened by up to a month, depending on where people live in the country, compared with the 1960s and 1970s.

Observations going back to 1910 show that the region’s temperatures have gone up by about 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit) on average. 

This has been found because models collected over time tend to stay on or around this number, even if they usually shy away from predicting an increase of 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) over that time span. 

In the past, climate modelers have struggled to explain the difference between recorded temperatures and modeled heat waves. As reported in a new study, which was conducted with Van Oldenborgh and colleagues from the Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

The team noticed similar underestimates in models of the 2019 heat waves in Europe. They found conditions - such as land-use changes, which are not generally accounted for in such regional climate models. 

This may help explain the difference between reality and what the models predicted by changing the way data is interpreted. For example, a change in vegetation cover can have an impact on how hot or dry a region gets.