Wildfire seasons are longer … nearly everywhere on Earth

The study also states that wildfires are heavily influenced by whether, which is the largest and prime driver of local fires.

How wildfires are managed can actually mean carbon emissions are substantial when they do strike, says Dr Patrick Gonzalez, climate change scientist for the US National Park Service, who wasn’t involved in the study.

The change, they said, was driven mainly by climate change pressures such as anomalies in sea surface temperature, ocean acidification and ultraviolet radiation – more even than fishing or pollution. Forests in the region have seen their fire season increase by an average of 33 days.

According to Time, the new research indicated that climates that are extremely hot and dry as a effect of world climate change are the cause of the worsening situation of wildfires globally.

“Fire weather season length and long fire weather season affect areas significantly increased across all vegetated continents except Australia”, they reported.

Researchers affirmed that wildfires occur when the humid weather, combustible resources, and available fuel interact with each other.

The researchers used climate data and three indices of fire danger, to produce an overview of fire season length from 1979 to 2013.

Dr. Wardell-Johnson notes, “This research adds to the overwhelming body of knowledge of the increasing costs of doing little about human-caused climate change”.

From this analysis, they concluded that fire weather season has gotten 18.7 percent longer between 1979 and 2013 over a lot of Earth’s surface. The researchers said that climate change can expand the seasons described as fire-friendly, and wildfires can last longer and be more aggressive.

For the study, Jolly teamed up with scientists form the US and Australia and had the support of various universities and institutions. Also, reports show that this year alone as much as 11 million acres have burned across Alaska and Canada.

To put these numbers in a bit more context, the researchers plotted their fire weather season findings on a map of the Earth. “When average fire weather seasons are longer-than-normal or when long seasons impacted more global burnable area, net global terrestrial carbon uptake is reduced”, the authors write.

The study indicated that South America remains the worst hit continent, experiencing vivid increases in the intensity and number of wildfires. Forest fire decreases the number of trees in a region that should absorb the carbon dioxide. “In some of the areas we saw a pretty strong coupling between our metrics of fire weather season length and these connections to the land carbon uptake”, says Jolly. Its forests and savannas are ravaged by wildfires because fire season changed dramatically in the last 35 years.