The fire no longer waits its turn
The photo is clear and chilling. The days when the weather becomes a fuse ready to light—heat, dryness, wind—have practically tripled in the last 45 years worldwide. And the trend is even more pronounced here, on our American continent.
What a new study published in Science Advances reveals is even more compelling: more than half of this explosive increase is due to human-caused climate change.
“These types of changes increase the probability in many areas that there will be fires that will be very difficult to put out,” said John Abatzoglou, co-author of the study.
A global synchronization problem
Here is the real crux of the matter. The planet is warming so uniformly that now several regions reach the ideal conditions to burn at the same time. It is as if fire is no longer waiting in line.
In raw numbers: the world averaged 22 days of this synchronized ‘flammable’ weather annually between 1979 and 1993. By 2023-2024, that number exceeded 60 days.
The practical consequence is terrifying: countries could run out of resources to put out all the simultaneous disasters. Mutual aid between neighboring nations, a common practice, becomes nearly impossible when everyone is fighting their own flames.
“And that’s where things start to go wrong,” Abatzoglou said.
The researchers did not analyze real fires, but rather the meteorological conditions that fuel them. But as Mike Flannigan, a Canadian scientist not involved in the study, pointed out, this extreme weather is the main factor behind the increasing impact of fires globally.
The figures that hurt: America on fire
The study breaks down data by region and the conclusions for our hemisphere are brutal.
In the continental United States, the annual average went from 7.7 days (1979-1988) to 38 days in the last decade.
But the dismal record is held by southern South America. The region went from an average of 5.5 annual fire days to a staggering 70.6 days in the last decade. In 2023, it recorded 118 days.
“More than 60% of the global increase can be attributed to climate change resulting from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas,” stressed Cong Yin, lead author.
They know this because they compared simulations of the real world with those of a fictional planet without our excess emissions. The difference is abysmal and has its own name: us.
Only one region in the study showed a decline: Southeast Asia, probably because it is getting wetter. A tiny relief in a global panorama where the fire has found its rhythm… and does not plan to lose it.
