California – As New Zealand’s summer approaches, it is sobering news from a new study confirms climate change has been the main cause of the growing number of large wildfires.
Last year, a bushfire that destroyed most of Lake Ōhau village destroyed 50 of the South Island village’s 70 homes and 4600 hectares of land.
Now US research by scientists from UCLA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount large wildfires on the US’s west coast over the past two decades.
They say the trend is likely to worsen in the years ahead. The record fire seasons in recent years are only the beginning of what will come, due to climate change.
The dramatic increase in destruction caused by wildfires is borne out by US. geological survey data. In the 17 years from 1984 to 2000, the average burned area in 11 western states was 1.69 million acres per year.
For the next 17 years, through 2018, the average burned area was about 3.35 million acres per year and last year the amount of land burned by wildfires in the west reached 8.8 million acres.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Researchers analysed the so-called August Complex wildfire of 2020, which burned more than a million acres in northern California. They concluded that human-induced warming explains 50 percent of the unprecedentedly fires in the region during the month the fire began.
They expect wildfires to continue to become more intense and more frequent in the western states overall, even though wetter and cooler conditions could offer brief respites.
And areas where vast swaths of plant life have already been lost to fires, drought, heatwaves and the building of roads would not see increases in wildfires despite the increase of the vapor pressure deficit.
Western United States appears to have passed a critical threshold — that human-induced warming is now more responsible for the increase of vapor pressure deficit than natural variations in atmospheric circulation.
Their research shows the change has occurred since the beginning of the 21st century, much earlier than they anticipated.
