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Climate change causes California wildfire

Published : Thursday, 16 January, 2025 at 12:00 AM  Count : 350
The wildfires currently ripping through suburbs of Los Angeles in California and beyond have claimed at least 24 lives so far as well as more than 40,000 acres of land and more than 12,300 buildings structure. They are the most destructive wildfires in the history of the state. As wildfires become more frequent each year around the world, concern from climate scientists that climate change is making them worse is mounting. Since The risk of wildfires grows in extremely dry conditions, such as drought, heat waves and during high winds.

Climate change has contributed to an increase in the frequency, season length and burned area of wildfires, according to a report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As a result of all this, global warming is adding energy to the system, magnifying the wet and dry spells, lengthening the fire season, ramping up all the elements tribute to California's fires cape.

Wildfire smoke is a mixture of hazardous air pollutants, such PM2.5, NO2, ozone, aromatic hydrocarbons, or lead. In addition to contaminating the air with toxic pollutants, wildfires also simultaneously impact the climate by releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. 

With climate change leading to warmer temperatures and drier conditions and the increasing urbanization of rural areas, the fire season is starting earlier and ending later. Wildfire events are getting more extreme in terms of acres burned, duration and intensity, and they can disrupt transportation, communications, water supply, and power and gas services. 

Other natural disasters are linked to climate change. Since the changing climate coupled with poor urban planning and management has exacerbated natural disasters globally,including cyclones, hurricanes and floods. Scientists of climate change believe that if planet temperatures exceed the pre-industrial average by 2C, hurricane age by 2C, hurricane wind speeds could rise by 10 percent. They also say climate change might be slowing the pace - rather than the velocity - at which hurricanes move. This means that storms can dump more water on the places they pass through.

In October last year, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) said that climate change caused by fossil fuel use had increased seasonal rainfall across the Niger and Lake Chad basins by between 5 percent and 20 percent in 2024, causing more flooding.

Asian countries have also experienced intense floods in recent years. In April 2024, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published a report that found Asia has been warming faster than the global average.

Wildfires are expected to worsen with time as a result of climate change and changing land use, according to a 2022 report by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The report projected  extreme fires worldwide will increase by as much as 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by the end of 2050 and 50 percent by the end of the century.
Furthermore, wildfires damage the environment in other ways, too. In terms of the California fires, when  winter rains finally arrive, they could lead to hillside erosion and debris flows suggesting that cleanup after the fire will be messy, long and expensive. The conditions created by humans have also made it difficult to cope with the fallout of environmental disasters.
Wildfires affect wildlife at a large scale since wildfires burn away acres of land rapidly and can have different effects on wildlife inhabiting fire sites. The effects depend on the type of wildlife and its habitat requirements, and the intensity and frequency of the wildfires. Some species can quickly escape as a fire quickly engulfs acres of land. Some animals, especially those that are immobile or too slow to escape, are more vulnerable to the smoke and heat of wildfires. 

As wildfires change vegetation by thinning it, some wildlife can lose their habitat, and the resulting movement of wildlife can throw off the balance of a local ecosystem in a region, snakes as an example as  33 snake species are endemic to California.

California is also home to 700 vertebrate species, which simply put, are animals with backbones and skeletons. This makes the state the US's most biodiverse. However, the running series of wildfire vanish at a macro part and it is the great contributor of the global warming and thus climate change suggesting to the world leader to be urgency to control climate ravage. 

The writer is a student department of Economics, University of Chittagong


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