Climate scientists warn Australia’s fires could become routine

LONDON (Reuters) — Bushfires ravaging Australia have provided a foretaste of the kinds of conditions that could become normal unless the world moves rapidly to curb emissions of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, scientists have warned.

Although Australia’s government and parts of its media have attempted to downplay the role of man-made climate change in making the country more vulnerable to wildfires, a review of 57 scientific papers published since 2013 suggested clear links.

“We’re not going to reverse climate change on any conceivable timescale. So the conditions that are happening now, they won’t go away,” Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts Research at Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre, who co-authored the review, told a news conference in London on Monday.

The review found that climate change had led to an increase in the frequency and severity of what scientists call “fire weather” — periods with a high fire risk due to some combination of hotter temperatures, low humidity, low rainfall and strong winds.

The effects had not only been observed in Australia, but from the western United States and Canada, to southern Europe, Scandinavia, the

Amazon and Siberia, the review found.

Globally, fire weather seasons have lengthened across about 25 percent of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in about a 20 percent increase in the mean length of the fire weather season, according to observational data.

Betts said Australia was particularly vulnerable to fires since its land area had warmed by more than the rise in average global temperature of about 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times.

The World Meteorological Organization says the global temperature increase could hit 3-5 C this century — more than three times limits agreed in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement — if nothing is done to stop rising emissions.

“Temperature conditions in Australia are extreme at the moment but they are what we expect to happen on average in a world of three degrees of global warming,” Betts said. “It brings it home to you what climate change means.”

The review was carried out using ScienceBrief.org, a new online research platform set up by Britain’s University of East Anglia and Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research.