Smog Over Chile

Like all of my readers, I’m sure, I’ve been reading over these last weeks about the bushfires (what we in North America call “wildfires”) that are burning out of control across Australia. But it was one single detail that I came across earlier this week that somehow grabbed me and made me fully understand just how important what’s happening in Australia is now and surely will soon be for the rest of us. And that detail had to do with smog. Not the smog that is smothering Canberra and Sydney or that has turned the skies bright orange over New Zealand, a mere 1,300 miles away, but the smog that has turned the skies over Chile, a cool seven thousand miles to the east, dark gray with soot. And further to the east still is Argentina, where the sunset skies over Buenos Aires have turned bright red because of the pollution from Australia that has reached the eastern coast of South America. For some reason, that got my attention.

Mind you, the other statistics are horrendous enough without having to reference the air quality in Chile. The fires have so far burnt up about 26,000,000 acres (about 41,000 square miles), a space roughly the size of South Korea or Iceland. Something like eight thousand buildings have been destroyed, more than two thousand of which were people’s homes. It seems possible that half a billion animals have been killed, which figure does not include insects but does include about eight thousand koala bears, a third of the koala population in the affected regions. Nor is there any question that all of the above numbers will rise, and dramatically, over the next days and weeks. And although the worst fires are in New South Wales in the southeastern corner of the country, there is no region in Australia left unaffected, as this heatmap based on NASA satellite imagery makes clear:

To say that this is an ecological disaster is really almost to say nothing at all. But even though only twenty-eight people have so far died in the fires, which figure includes four firefighters, the damage to the ecosystem in Australia has been catastrophic and will only become more devastating as the days pass without the fires being brought under control. This is most definitely not just a bad thing happening somewhere else to other people. Yes, for the moment it’s about them. But if the kangaroo is just this week’s version of the canary in the coal mine, then it’s fully about us too. And it’s nowhere near over. 

Of course, the big question is whether this still-unfolding disaster is or isn’t the result of climate change. There are, as you can easily imagine, very strong opinions on both sides of the debate. Nor is this a simple matter to unravel even for scientists. I’ve been reading widely on the question to prepare myself to write to you today, and I have to say that the situation is far more complicated than I anticipated it was going to be.

I started by reading carefully a blogpost published on the website of Scientific American by Nerilie Abram, a professor at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University. (To read the essay in its entirety, click here.) She begins by observing that what’s new this season is the intensity of the fires, not their mere existence—and that Australia has had very hot summers before as well as devastating wildfire seasons. (For a list of such fires in Australia going back to 1851, click here.) So you could argue that this kind of catastrophe is merely part of Australia’s ecological profile and thus simply part of Australian reality. But that is not what Abram argues. She begins by pointing out that wildfires require four things to burn at all: that fuel to burn be available, that it be dry, that weather conditions be conducive to its spreading beyond its original perimeters, and that there be something available to ignite the fire. It is specifically the middle two factors—dryness and weather—that she finds related to climate change.

The Australian climate has warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius in the last century. To most laypeople, this doesn’t sound too serious—who can really tell the difference outdoors when it’s a single degree or two warmer or cooler than the day before?—but climatologists see in even a single degree’s increase the framework for increased dryness and thus for the presence of massive amounts of dry brush to burn. On top of that, rainfall in Australia has decreased dramatically over the last decades—by about 20% per annum since the 1970s. This too is what scientists call “anthropogenic,” i.e., human-caused—for reasons that Abram explains in detail in her article. The whole relationship between meteorology and climatology is complicated. Just following her explanation of the relationship between something called the IOD—the Indian Ocean Dipole, which by cutting off one of Australia’s main sources of moisture has induced the kind of drought that gave way to the fires currently raging—and the SAM, the Southern Annual Mode that has driven the traditional cold fronts that result in winter rainfall away from Australia is complicated for non-scientists like myself fully to understand. But the forcefulness with which she argues her point that her nation’s leaders are literally fiddling while their nation burns is crystal-clear and unequivocal. It’s a strong, well-argued piece of writing and I recommend it to all who are interested in learning more.

Lots of people don’t agree. The Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, continues to maintain that there is no direct link between Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and the currently raging wildfires. That is not entirely inconsonant with Abram’s argument—she does not specifically address the question of whether Australia itself is responsible for the fires or if the blame is more reasonably to be assigned to the general condition of planet (i.e., as contributed to by all the nations of the world who have failed to meet their own carbon-emissions reduction goals) is more reasonable. (I could list the nations that haven’t met those goals, but it would take up far less space just to list the countries that actually have met the commitments set forth in the Paris Accords of 2015 since there are only two: Morocco and Gambia. Click here for more details.) For a detailed exposition of the relationship between Australian and global responsibility for the fires published just two months ago on the Time Magazine website, click here.)

So while the political issue occupying Australian politicians is what specific role their nation plays in its current misfortune, the more interesting issue for us non-Australians is the larger one: are these fires just a national disaster like horrific tsunamis or earthquakes, or are they specifically a function of our earth-wide failure to address climate change. That, it seems to me is the question worth asking.

What seems indisputable is that the world—and Australia along with it—is getting warmer. And warmer means dryer. And dryer means more prone to catching fire. Nor does there seem to be any serious opposition in the scientific community to the notion that human activity has contributed to the rise in temperature, which it turn has led to the dryness and weather conditions that have set Australia ablaze.

For a good exposition of the latest scientific thinking on the matter, I’d like to recommend a BBC News article simply entitled, “Is Climate Change to Blame for Australia’s Bushfires?” (Click here to see the whole article.) Opinions from a broad spectrum of viewpoints are cited at length, but what I myself came away thinking after weighing all of these many opinions and trying to puzzle out the science for myself can actually be summarized in just a few words. As the earth warms due to a general failure of the nations of the world to do their part to prevent the earth from warming any further, the effects on all nations in the biosphere will be real. In some cases, like in today’s Australia, they will be devastating. In other contexts, they may be noticeable but less horrific. But the general trend as we continue to be more concerned with our own nations’ abilities to compete in the global marketplace and less concerned with the bigger issues facing the planet is going to be one of ever-increasing risk. A Pew Research Center poll from 2017 yielded the result that a full 74% of Americans believe that our country should “do whatever it takes to protect the environment.” My guess is that that number would be even higher today. Whether the three-quarters of all Americans who claim to be ready to do what it takes to preserve and protect the environment actually have the collective will to take that sentiment and make it into a make-or-break issue for the 2020 election, of course, remains to be seen.