Comment by derekdahmer
1 day ago
Climate change is real and contributes to this but there have been massive fires in this region for over a century - primarily from the artificially planted Maritime Pine forests. The 1940s were particularly bad. Look up the Great Fire of 1949.
Never on that scale. This is unprecedented. France asked other EU members for help as the firefighters are overwhelmed and the fire uncontrollable. There hasn’t been an evacuation this large since WW2 (300k people displaced so far, 0.5% of the country’s population)
This isn’t a “it’s summer, and fires burn” type of a deal. Even though most fires are set by idiots on purpose, it spreads so well because everywhere is dry. Most parcs and fields look like savannas instead of the usual green.
The sources I can readily find place the total extent of forest fires in France this year at 40,000 hectares, still less than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Landes_forest_fire .
And the context is that at the time, they had no way to fight those fires. So yes, it burned 50,000 ha. That was the starting point of devising ways to efficiently fight forest fires. Today we have plenty of specialized trucks, trained firemen, planes, helicopters, who have been fighting for 5 days, and already 42,000 ha are gone. 32,000 ha 4 years ago. After a very wet winter.
Climate is changing drastically, exactly as predicted.
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Once in a hundred year (or more) event that was beaten in lethality twice in the past two decades. Hmmmm. Can’t possibly be a pattern there. Not like we have models predicting what happens and that reality is progressing far worse than the scientists are allowed to officially report.
0.5% you mean? France population is over 60 million people.
France has more than 6 million people. I think you meant 0.5%
Yes
The Landes region has a long history of devastating wildfires, and the 1949 fire is a tragic example, that's correct.
But that's not really the point being debated. Nobody is claiming climate change invented wildfires. But it is making the conditions for extreme fires more common. The IPCC concludes with high confidence that fire hazard conditions, including heatwaves and fire weather, have increased across Europe since 1980, particularly in southern and western Europe, even though ignition sources and land management still matter.
Climate change is increasing the odds that fires become larger and harder to control.
Western Europe has also experienced increasingly frequent and severe droughts in recent years. Those prolonged dry conditions leave forests and vegetation far more combustible, making fires spread faster and burn more intensely once they start.