Reacción a "Extreme fires have doubled in the last 20 years "
Cristina Santín Nuño
Senior scientist at the CSIC and head of the Department of Biodiversity and Global Change of the Joint Institute for Biodiversity Research (University of Oviedo-CSIC)
The press release reflects the study accurately. The study is of good quality, the only thing that strikes me is that, despite having 'climate change' in its title, they do not make any kind of analysis that directly relates their results to global warming. In other words, the authors see that in recent years there has been an increase in extreme fires globally and understand that this is related to climate change. Although there is no doubt that the two phenomena are related (at least I have no doubt), it would have been nice if they had presented some analysis to prove it.
This work corroborates what we already know: the fire problem is getting worse in many regions of the world. The problem is not that there are more or less fires in the world, but that fires are becoming more concentrated in some regions and are becoming larger and more intense. This increases their danger for both society and the environment.
The methodology of the work is correct. MODIS hotspots are widely used for such studies. In fact, two of the three authors of this study had already carried out a similar analysis for a shorter time series (2002-2013), but in that case they had not found trends (Bowman et al. 2017 Nature Ecology & Evolution).
We are facing increasingly extreme, large and dangerous fires, many of which are 'above extinction capacity'. That is, they cannot be extinguished by human means (they are extinguished when the weather changes and/or when they reach areas where there is no more vegetation to burn). These fires burn huge areas in a very short time and at a very high intensity, making them very dangerous both for the extinguishing devices and for the people living in those areas. Moreover, their environmental consequences are often also very negative, as the ecosystem has a hard time recovering.
The type of fire we face is changing. It is important that we, as a society, are aware of this and know how to act. Not knowing how to do it, not preparing for it, can cost us a lot: human lives, environmental disasters and great economic losses.