Climate change is now the main driver of increasing wildfire weather, study finds
LOS ANGELES — In a finding scientists believed was still decades away from becoming reality, California researchers say that climate change is now the overwhelming cause of conditions driving extreme wildfire behavior in the western United States.
As world leaders gathered in Scotland this week to discuss plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a study released Monday said that global warming was essentially two-thirds to 88% responsible for the atmospheric conditions fueling increasingly destructive wildfires.
And that’s a conservative estimate, said study author Rong Fu, a climate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“It’s happened so much faster than we previously anticipated,” she added.
The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks at what’s known as the vapor pressure deficit, which basically describes
