THE climate change becomes the main factor behind them forest fires which regularly destroy the western part of USA and human activities are overwhelmingly the cause of these climate changes, according to a survey released yesterday, Monday, while the UN International Conference on Climate Change COP26 in Glasgow.
In the American West, the area destroyed by fires between 2001 and 2018 averaged 13,500 square kilometers per year, ie the double from the one that was destroyed in the period 1984-2000.
“It happened a lot faster than we expected,” she told the Los Angeles Times Rong Fu, a climatologist at the University of California, UCLA, who led the study, the results of which were published in the review of the US National Academy of Sciences.
To understand what contributed to this spectacular deterioration in such a short period of time, the Fu-led team of researchers analyzed a number of factors that contribute to the “vapor pressure deficit” (VPD in English), which reflects the dryness of the air.
VPD represents the difference between the amount of water actually present in the atmosphere and the maximum amount that could be contained in the atmosphere. The higher this deficit, the more ambient air absorbs water from the soil and plants, creating conditions which increasingly favor fires, as broadcast by APE BPE.
What the scientists found
Scientists have found that the rise in forest fires in the western United States is linked to closely with this deficit during the hot period. Between May and September, the number of days with high VPD increased by 94% in the period 2001-2018 compared to the previous period, the research reveals.
According to the calculations of Fu and her colleagues, natural atmospheric fluctuations played a role only on average 32% in this deterioration of VPD.
The rest 68% This increase in atmospheric water deficit over the last 20 years is due to global warming, which is largely caused by human activities.
“Before 2000, we can explain the weather that favors fires using only classic meteorological models,” but that is no longer the case, Rong Fu said in a statement to the LA Times.
According to some models, added to the study, anthropogenic global warming, ie that caused by humans, can explain up to 88% of the abnormalities found in the VPD.
In August 2020, when California faced the largest fire ever recorded in the area – the August Complex Fire– which alone burned almost 4,200 square kilometers, anthropogenic global warming was responsible for almost half of the “unusually high” moisture deficit, the research concludes.
According to climate experts, due to the emissions of greenhouse gases from humans, mainly from the consumption of energy from fossil fuels, the temperature on the planet has already risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. Most of this increase in temperature occurred the last 50 years.
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