Warming loaded the dice for fire weather — hot, dry conditions that leave forests ripe for burning — in Canada and in part of the Amazon last year, according to a new report.
Scientists determined that climate change increased the odds of fire weather in Canada threefold and in the Amazon twentyfold. It is “virtually certain” that fires in both regions were larger as a result of warming, said report coauthor Chantelle Burton, a climate scientist with the U.K. Met Office.
Fires in Canada were particularly severe, burning an area roughly the size of Alabama and unleashing an unprecedented volume of emissions. “In Canada, almost a decade’s worth of carbon emissions from fire were recorded in a single fire season,” said lead author Matthew Jones, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.
The report, the first edition in a new annual review of fires, finds that global emissions from wildfires last year were 16 percent higher than the historical average. Last year would have set a record for fire emissions were it not for the unusually quiet season on the African savannah. The findings were published in Earth System Science Data.
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