Recently the number of ways in which global climate change has presented itself, rising waters, more sea-related natural disasters, higher temperatures, have been accompanied by new kinds of effects–extinction, and even political upheaval in places like the arctic sea. However, recently, a new study has proven that wildfires have been significantly aggravated, increasing in frequency worldwide due to the increasingly hot and arid climates climate change has induced.
WILDFIRES, TREES & COMMON SENSE
Even a child knows that trees absorb carbon in the atmosphere, and as these wildfires continue to increase in frequency, so too will the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere reduce at a slower rate, or rather, increase at a faster rate.
The study mentioned above was published in the journal Nature Communications, and it explains that wildfires’ global coverage has risen to more than a quarter of the planet’s total vegetated surface between the years of 1979 and 2013. Moreover, fire weather season has grown in duration by almost 19% worldwide.
“Fire weather season length and long fire weather season affected area significantly increased across all vegetated continents except Australia. If these trends continue, increased wildfire potential may have pronounced global socio-economic, ecological and climate system impacts,” explained the researchers who authored the study.
In this study, researchers analyzed climate data according to three indices of wildfire danger. This in turn eased the process of mapping wildfire patterns back to the late 70’s. Humidity, rainfall, wind speed and temperature play interlocking roles in creating wildfires, and each one is being exacerbated by climate change.
Now it can be said that wildfires are a natural, healthy, and even necessary part of the lives of forests, clearing out weeds, dead trees and improving the space for animal grazing, but this intensity and frequency of wildfire is not helping anyone. The season for such fires to kindle has actually grown to encompass 11.4 million square miles (29.6 million square kilometers) of the planet’s vegetated surfaces. So far, the US has spent roughly $1.7 billion dollars per year for the past decade to combat the spread of wildfires.
BUT ONLY YOU CAN STOP THE SPREAD
Global climate change once fell under the purview of biologists, geologists, but broadly within the scientific world. Now we are seeing a de-differentiation, as many mutually disparate categories of human knowledge and practice, who previously each had their own reactions to climate change as a distant threat, are now becoming subject to its direct effects, whether they accepted its existence in the last century or not. In other words, wildfires are a great example of how global climate change is not just a threat to ecology, but the economy, science at large, and even the arts and free expression.
