The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy – ideal to spark extreme wildfires – has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.
And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated.
What this means is that as the world warms, more places across the globe are prone to go up in flames at the same time because of increasingly synchronous fire weather, which is when multiple places have the right conditions to go up in smoke. Countries may not have enough resources to put out all the fires popping up and help won’t be as likely to come from neighbours busy with their own flames, according to the authors of a study in Wednesday’s Science Advances.
In 1979 and for the next 15 years, the world averaged 22 synchronous fire weather days a year for flames that stayed within large global regions, the study found. In 2023 and 2024, it was up to mor​The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy – ideal to spark extreme wildfires – has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.
And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated.
What this means is that as the world warms, more places across the globe are prone to go up in flames at the same time because of increasingly synchronous fire weather, which is when multiple places have the right conditions to go up in smoke. Countries may not have enough resources to put out all the fires popping up and help won’t be as likely to come from neighbours busy with their own flames, according to the authors of a study in Wednesday’s Science Advances.
In 1979 and for the next 15 years, the world averaged 22 synchronous fire weather days a year for flames that stayed within large global regions, the study found. In 2023 and 2024, it was up to mor ​Latest News [ SOBAN NEWS: International and National ]