Australia fire
On 1 January, the air in Canberra was the worst of any city in the world. With unprecedented bush fires raging nearby, a thick blanket of smoke smothered Australia’s capital for weeks, sending a surge of residents to the hospital with breathing problems. The toxic haze got so bad that Sophie Lewis, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra, took her toddler and boarded a plane to Tasmania.
“I almost wept with relief in Melbourne, on the way to Hobart, simply from seeing the sky,” she says. After weeks in the smoke, her daughter had grown used to all the people walking around with “bird beaks”, Lewis’s name for the masks everyone was wearing.
From Hobart, Lewis fielded e-mails from concerned colleagues overseas. Like the rest of the world, they were stunned by the scale and severity of the fires ravaging Australia (see ‘A country aflame’). Since September, more than 10 million hectares have burnt — an area greater than the size of Austria — and the fire season doesn’t end for several months in some states. So far, the conflagrations have killed at least 32 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes across 3 states. Through it all, people have been asking Lewis: did climate change have a role in these catastrophic fires?
Lewis and a handful of her collaborators were busy discussing that very question. They work in a small but growing field called attribution science, which calculates the likelihood that an extreme event such as a heatwave, a flood or a catastrophic bush-fire season was made worse by climate change. In a study published last December1, Lewis and her colleagues linked catastrophic 2018 fires in northeastern Australia to climate change, and they are now planning an attribution study for the fires that have gripped large parts of the country over the past few months (see ‘A country aflame’).
0 Comments