this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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You can't have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn't happening because it's snowing...
"That's weather not climate!"
When there's a wildfire somewhere...
"That's global warming!"
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can't attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
No, but we can point at increasing number of forest fires, hurricanes, and other disasters. That's not local, that's global.
You're right, we need to look at global tends rather than individual events.
Global trends are showing that the forest fires are getting worse every year.
The others already pointed out that there's a global, rising trend of climate disasters. I would like to qualify:
This year did exceed everyone's expectations. It's the first year of El Niño after years of increasing temperatures, so while it didn't come as a complete surprise, it could still be an anomaly.
If you ask climate scientists, they'll tell you lots of climate change effects that could contribute to these wildfires, but yeah, ultimately, they'll say they won't know for sure until they've seen the following years.
However, these are raging wildfires all around the globe, in regions that don't normally have them and that aren't linked to each other. At some point, it stops being "a wildfire somewhere" and starts to become a statistic.
Surface-level ocean temperatures are significantly higher this year, globally, than in previous years. We can't explain such a global increase without climate change. And obviously, warm water evaporates differently, leading to unusual weather patterns, leading to droughts, which increases the likelihood of wildfires.
So, yeah, while the snowball is simply irrelevant to the topic, the wildfire statistic correlates with all our other statistics. You'd have to ignore a ton of evidence to not attribute the wildfires to climate change until proven differently.