Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[donsutherland1]

4 hours ago, WolfStock1 said:

 

Look at the context here though - the climate change discussion thread.

If this were a "weather events" thread - I would agree that there's no implication of a tie-in between the big France wildfire spike, and I wouldn't have made my point about having to look at the bigger picture.   

But since this is in fact a climate change discussion thread, and since there are lots of assertions out there that CC causes increase in wildfire activity - it seems reasonable that there's an assertion of implied tie-in with that set of stats that was posted; vis a vis France's big spike in wildfires being due to CC.   My point then of course being that no - it's not due to CC (the context of the thread), it's due to a localized weather event (and possibly other factors such as bad fire control management).

The extreme heat was more the focus of climate change in my post, which merely noted that France was "wildfire-swept." At least for now, my understanding is that the connection between climate change and extreme heatwaves is stronger than the more complex linkage between climate change and wildfires. Nevertheless, there is a fairly prominent link.

Since my initial post, World Weather Attribution (WWA) has published a rapid attribution report. Consistent with the expectations from a growing body of scientific literature, including one Nature piece talking about the future that I posted, climate change contributed. Excerpts:

In Spain, January 2026 was the wettest January of the last quarter of a century (AEMET, 2026). In particular, in the area affected by the Ávila–Madrid–Toledo fire, rainfall was 175% higher than usual, which allowed a great accumulation of plant biomass. The summer of 2026 began with record-breaking temperatures and a severe drought, both conditions exacerbated by human-caused climate change (WWA, 2026a; WWA, 2026b). This sequence resulted in high fuel loads that then dried to become highly flammable, increasing the intensity of the fires...

In 2025, WWA conducted two rapid attribution studies on fires in Spain and Portugal (WWA, 2025a) and Turkiye, Cyprus and Greece (WWA, 2025b), alongside a retrospective analysis of the entire wildfire season in several European regions (Keeping et al., 2026b). Across all three studies, we found that human-caused climate change was a key driver of the fire weather conditions, primarily through its influence on exceptionally high temperatures, but also by exacerbating drought conditions...

The weeks leading up to the fires were characterised by a succession of extreme heatwaves and low rainfall across much of Western Europe, despite it still being comparably early in the season. Recent studies have shown human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of these hot and dry antecedent conditions, which were essential for the development of the extreme fire weather that enabled the fires...

In both study regions observations show strong trends of increasing likelihood and severity with global warming. DSR7x values as extreme as those observed in central Spain in July 2026 are now at least 20 times more likely than in a pre-industrial climate. In the French regions the statistical model fits the data less closely and may underestimate the return period of the event, thus the result of an increase in likelihood by at least a factor two in southwest France is a conservative estimate...

A recent attribution study has shown that climate change is increasing the likelihood of severe soil moisture drought through higher atmospheric evaporative demand, while the same sequence of above-average winter rainfall followed by exceptional spring drying was identified as a key driver of the 2025 Iberian wildfires. 

Finally, the WWA rapid attribution report cites and links to a fairly large number of papers on fire weather in Europe, many of which have relevance to the impact of climate change.