Eit’s fire weather. More often, longer and longer. And soon everywhere. Also in the north, not only in the hot south. Weather concerns everyone. However, hardly anyone who talks about the weather, the sweltering heat, the drought and the thunderstorms in between, wastes a thought on the fire weather. Neither do the forest walkers who hear the tinder crackle under their feet. It also doesn’t show up in any weather forecast. Only when you can see and hear the drama on the stark news pictures of blazing flames and in the noise with which the drama of the fire weather becomes visible does many people start thinking. Will this happen more often? And closer, with the increasing heating of the earth?
A little over ten years ago, the global research community began to vigorously investigate such questions. Of the more than 8,900 studies that have examined the connection between humans, vegetation fires and global warming since the early 1990s, three quarters have been published in the past ten years alone, and fifty percent have only been published since 2015. That was a terrible year with forest and field fires. At that time, 1,250 people died in Central Europe, most of them directly during the firefighting, and the economic damage was immense: at least two billion euros. Matthew Jones of the UK’s Tyndall Center at the University of East Anglia in Norwich has compiled the horror numbers and lessons of fire records over many decades. Together with international experts, including Gitta Lasslop from the Frankfurt Senckenberg Center for Biodiversity and Climate Research, he worked out the “ubiquitous pressure” in the “Reviews of Geophysics” that, with the spread of fire weather, is becoming part of everyday life for more and more people and for nature becomes.