Climate Change
Posted inResearch & Developments

Climate Change Made This Summer’s Canadian Wildfires Twice as Likely

by Grace van Deelen

Wildfires in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and the Northwest Territories have burned more than 3.9 million hectares this summer, prompted widespread evacuation orders, and created poor air quality for not only Canadians, but more than 120 million people across the midwestern and northeastern United States. The fires spread exceptionally quickly, stressing the resources of local response agencies. About 700 fires are still active across Canada.

According to a new analysis, human-induced climate change and its contribution to fire conditions across Canada made these fires twice as likely to occur. The report is from World Weather Attribution, an international climate science partnership.

Posted inResearch & Developments

Climate Change Made Spain Wildfires At Least 20 Times More Likely

by Grace van Deelen

Over the past two weeks, large wildfires in southwestern France and central Spain have burned 255,000 hectares, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and created extremely poor air quality even hundreds of kilometers away. Though firefighters have now contained the major fires, a forecasted heat wave and windy weather are threatening to worsen the situation.

Climate change played a role in creating the conditions for these fires to burn and spread, a new analysis has found.

Posted inResearch & Developments

We’re Getting Better at Knowing When Climate Change Is to Blame, National Academies Report Says

by Grace van Deelen

Scientists have gotten much better at parsing how severe events are linked to climate change, a long-awaited report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.

The report was developed by 14 experts (including climatologists, meteorologists, and atmospheric scientists) and updates a 2016 report on the same subject. That report found that climate change was partly responsible for worsening heat waves, cold events, droughts, and heavy precipitation events, but that improvements to attribution science—a branch of climate science that aims to determine the extent to which individual extreme weather events are caused by climate change—were needed.