Australia could be in for more forest fires in the coming decades like the ones that have devastated southern Victoria and claimed at least 200 lives so far, besides gutting more than 700 houses.
Climate models based on figures provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict more frequent and extreme fires for southern Australia over the next few decades, reports New Scientist. They suggest global warming could bring temperature rises as high as 6°C for Australia this century, if emission levels across the globe continue unabated.
‘‘Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25%, 50% more. It’s a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change,’’ Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens said.
The current forest fires have come at the back of very high temperatures. ‘‘We had a record heatwave, the worst fire danger index on record, during a record-breaking drought,’’ John Handmer of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre in Melbourne said. Last Saturday, the fire danger index was six times higher than the level classified as ‘extreme’.
The fires are estimated to have released millions of tonnes of CO² into the atmosphere, equivalent to more than a third of Australia’s total CO² emissions of 330 million tonnes in a year.
