Bushfires and zombie science
A leading climate scientist has called it “zombie science” (such a cool term, meaning an idea that won’t die no matter how many times the science says it’s wrong): the belief that global warming has led to more extreme weather. It hasn’t. So I wrote this:
There is currently a hot debate in Australia about whether recent bush fires are due to global warming, poor management of fuel load in forests, or just a horrible fact of life (Australia regularly has bushfires).
Each of these views may have some truth but what newspapers don’t mention is the good news that globally wildfires have been decreasing. And the proportion of the world’s population affected by fire has massively decreased.
Academic studies on damage due to weather and Australian bushfires report no increasing trend and conclude that “there is no discernible evidence that [the losses] are being influenced by climatic change due to the emission of greenhouse gases”.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology’s website provides a mass of easily accessible data. These charts show no trend in the frequency of droughts over the past 100 years. Nor in total rainfall in New South Wales.
Perhaps future warming will increase fires in Australia. What we know today is that planet has warmed by almost 1 degree Celcius over the past 100 years, but climate scientists can’t see any correlating trend towards drought nor bushfires (nor hurricanes, nor floods). This strongly suggests that the impact of global warming on extreme weather events is small.
If (I prefer when) we solve global warming Australia will still unfortunately have bushfires. What will always matter is where people build houses and how we plan and manage fires. Which leads me to my last piece of good news, the trends show, all around the world, we are much becoming massively more resilient to natural disasters thanks to technology and planning.
Climate Science References:
Crompton et al (2010) “Influence of Location, Population, and Climate on Building Damage and Fatalities due to Australian Bushfire: 1925 – 2009”, Weather, Climate and Society Vol 2, American Meteorological Society.
Doerr and Santin (2016) “Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: perceptions versus realities in a changing world”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0345
McAneney et al (2019) “Normalised insurance losses from Australian natural disasters: 1966 – 2017”, Environmental Hazards, Vol.18 issue 5.
