Climate change making fires worse, fires making climate change worse

W

hat we see happening in America’s wildfires and their close cousins in Australia, bushfires area positive feedback loop for climate change.

Writing in the shadow of massive fires in America’s west, Grist discusses the feedback loop in its story - “Climate change is making wildfires worse and wildfires are making climate change worse”.
 

It says: “It’s the season when wildfires rage, and this year they’re raging particularly hard: In June alone, Alaska saw 1.1 million acres go up in flames. In California, firefighters had responded to 3,381 wildfires by July 11, “1,000 more than the average over the previous five years,” The New York Times reports in a big feature on wildfires in the state.

“And that’s likely not a coincidence. A study published this week in Nature Communications connects worsening wildfire seasons to climate change, and suggests the trend will continue in the years ahead as climate change rolls forward. “Wildfires occur at the intersection of dry weather, available fuel and ignition sources,” the study’s authors write. Of those factors, “weather is the most variable.”
 

“The study also suggests that wildfires will themselves play a role in driving climate change, creating a nasty feedback loop.”