Future concern of Australia Bushfire (free report)by Asmita Gaire | 07-03-2020 04:25 |
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 Australia experiences bush fires almost every summer, but the latest event was unprecedented in its severity and scale. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) project sought to measure global warming¡¯s contribution to the dangerous bush-fire conditions experienced in southeast Australia over several months. Fires in the region were particularly severe, and killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes. ¡°This is a highly conservative assessment,¡± says David Karoly, a climate scientist based in Melbourne at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation who was not involved in the analysis. Future concerns The group assessed bush-fire conditions with a index that tracks ¡®fire weather¡¯. This calculates the chance of fire in a location based on variables such as temperature, humidity, wind and rainfall. The analysis did not consider non-weather factors, such as how a fire started. The researchers also say the result is conservative. Models have mostly underestimated the rise in temperatures that has been observed since the Industrial Revolution, says Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, and co-author of the WWA analysis. Even accounting for model uncertainties, Karoly says that the fire conditions experienced in Australia this summer are a baseline for what is possible in the world¡¯s current climate, which has warmed by around 1¨¬C compared with pre-industrial levels. But conditions are going to get a lot worse as the planet warms by another degree or two, as is expected, he says. The team also examined whether climate change influenced two of the components that are used to measure fire-weather: extreme temperatures and drought. The results, which have not been peer reviewed, suggest that while human activity doubled the chance of heatwave conditions during the fires, the models did not show that climate change contributed to the extremely dry conditions that Australia experienced. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/14/australia-bushfires-harbinger-future-scientists |
