In other cases, perhaps, the signals may not be so clear, admits Friederike Otto, German climatologist at the Imperial College in London. But in this August in the northwest of the Peninsula, this researcher is “really sure” of the linking of the “climate change” caused by the human being with this tragedy. This is due, among other reasons, that the Mediterranean region is a “” of this crisis with a “very strong increase in temperatures.”
Otto is a recognized climatologist who for years leads the group of scientists (WWA), focused on performing to what degree climate change, triggered mainly by burning fossil fuels, influences how heat waves, floods and episodes of large fires. “Because we continue to burn fossil fuels, and emissions continue to increase, we have a higher global warming rate, and we see it in extreme climatic events,” explains Otto. “The extreme meteorological phenomena are really the end of climate change, where it hits society very strongly,” added the researcher in the presentation, by videoconference, of the study that her group has conducted on the August fires in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula.
The air temperature on the planet’s surface is already 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than in the preindustrial era, that is, before they began to burn coal, oil and gas massively. The WWA study concludes that this 1.3 degree heating creates the ideal culture broth for fire gusts such as the one lived in August in Spain and Portugal. “The climate change caused by man caused the warm, dry and suction conditions that fed forest fires that killed eight people in Spain and Portugal were about 40 times more likely,” the researchers point out in their analysis. Or, explained in another way, with a heating of 1.3 degrees as the current one, conditions as extreme and favorable for fire will occur in the area analyzed once every 15 years. If the planet had not heated, the probability would fall once every 500 years.
To reach this conclusion, researchers have carried out a “supervapid analysis” based on the conditions that are considered conducive to the fire spreading through a specific area. For this they have used a risk index – called DSR – that, based on a set of variables, establishes how complicated a fire is extinguished once the ignition has occurred. And they have limited the analysis on the ten days of August, between 8 and 17.
That period coincided with an extensive and lasting heat wave on the peninsula. According to the State Meteorology Agency (Aemet), in the case of Spain it was the most intense of those registered in the 50 years of which data are available and.
The authors conclude that climate change, in addition to making up to 40 times more likely that there are such favorable weather conditions for fires as views in August, make them up to 30% more intense. In addition, the authors affect that with the current heating rate, a ten -day streak with maximums as high as those lived in the period studied occur once every 13 years. “Before humans heat the atmosphere, such high temperatures would have been extremely rare, only every 2,500 years were expected,” they add.
The authors have pointed out that this “supervoid analysis” is less complex than in other reports they have made. It has focused on “the trends in the climate conditions conducive to fire in the affected area, analyzing only the observations” to fix the links with climate change. But they remember that last week they posted on another wave of fires in July in Turkey, Cyprus and Greece, also in the Mediterranean region, which clearly points to that link between fire and global warming.
The findings of the report on Portugal and Spain “are in line with a large amount of scientific literature that shows strong drought trends and a powerful increase in temperature, as well as increasingly conducive climatic conditions for fire in the Mediterranean,” the WWA affects.
As María José Sanz, director of the BC3 (Basque Center for Climate Change Research), explains to Spain, which she has not been part, is “a very fast exercise that aims to illustrate the changes in the climatic conditions that lead to favoring the appearance and intensity of the fires.” And he adds that “they are useful to reinforce the idea that we have a climatic emergency.”
However, Sanz adds that the situation is “more complex, because there are other areas with major changes and anomalies where these fires have not occurred”, so this expert warns that more factors must be taken into account, such as “the lack of management of forest masses, or better alert and coordination systems.”
Along the same lines, Maja Vahlberg, of the Climate Center of the Red Cross and the Crescent and other authors of the WWA report, have stressed that, apart from climate change, “several factors probably magnified the impact” of the event. Among them, demographic changes, such as rural depopulation and aging that have let it end up becoming fuel for flames.
The authors value the performance of the extinction services of Spain and Portugal in this episode and the support provided by the European Union. Vahlberg, however, has warned that although “responding to fires will always be essential”, preventing them “before they turn on is what really safeguards lives, means of subsistence and landscapes.” For Otto this also has a lot to do with adaptation to the worst effects of climate change. “The adaptation is not following the rhythm of the increase in emissions,” he warns. Because, although a great effort has been made to prepare for the extinction of the flames, there is still the other leg, which includes vegetation management, “which is much more difficult to do.”
On another of the faces of this problem – how fires begin – Vahlberg recalled that “most ignitions derive from daily activities or negligence.” “This underlines the importance of consciousness and shared responsibility, in addition to prevention,” he concludes.
