Posts Tagged → wildfires

NYT: What the Newest Research on Wildfire Smoke Tells Us (It’s not good.) – Gift Link

NYT: What the Newest Research on Wildfire Smoke Tells Us. (It’s not good.) – Gift Link

Research is in the early stages but scientists have found:

That people are being exposed to more toxins than previously known, and beyond damaging lungs, wildfire smoke may affect hearts, brains and other organs. One study in 2025 estimated that smoke could kill as many as 1.9 million people in the United States over three decades.

And

Wildfire pollution is often measured by the concentration of airborne particles known as PM2.5, which can penetrate deep into the lungs.

But that can understate risk, said Kari Nadeau, a physician and dean of the U.C.L.A. Fielding School of Public Health, who is studying the consequences of the 2025 Los Angeles fires. That’s because PM2.5, a primary pollutant measured by air quality indexes, doesn’t reflect other substances that wildfire smoke can contain, including lead, mercury and formaldehyde.

The NYT story will be updated as new research is published. This gift link expires in 30 days; I’ll try to remember to update it once a month but if you cross paths with the post and find that the link no longer works, let me know and I’ll update it.

Link.

NYT: Earth’s Warming Primed France and Spain to Burn, Scientists Find – Gift Link

NYT: Earth’s Warming Primed France and Spain to Burn, Scientists Find – Gift Link

NY Times coverage of last week’s World Weather Attribution report confirming that climate change is driving severe wildfire conditions in France and Spain:

Conditions as hot, dry and windy as those leading up to the giant wildfires in France and Spain this week have become more likely in those countries since humans began warming the planet, according to a new analysis.

A team of scientists examined weather records to see how often the regions around Bordeaux, in southwest France, and Madrid have been as parched and primed to burn as they have been in the past few weeks. The researchers’ findings are the latest evidence that parts of Southern Europe should expect huge fires to become a recurring threat.

The report also references a study published last week in the journal Scientific Reports that found:

that in large parts of Mediterranean Europe, the number of extremely hot, dry and windy summer days more than doubled from 1981 to 2025.

Fire prevention and firefighting capabilities can’t keep up, the study concludes.

The New Yorker: Why Is Europe Burning?

The New Yorker: Why Is Europe Burning?

Recent wildfires in southwestern France and central and eastern Spain have caused record-breaking destruction, burning 285,000 hectares (704,000 acres) and temporarily displacing 300,000 residents and tourists across the two countries in recent weeks. In France, it was the largest peacetime evacuation ever. Writing for The New Yorker, wildfire researcher and journalist M.R. O’Connor reports that climate change, which is fueling record-breaking temperatures, plays an important role, but so do modern forestry management and rewilding practices and rural depopulation in an area (Mediterranean Europe) which historically has experienced hot and dry summers and is “naturally predisposed to burn because of an annual cycle of wetting and drying”.

In June, Stephen Pyne, a former wildland firefighter and an emeritus professor of history at Arizona State University, published his forty-sixth book, “Undying Fire: A Fire History of Europe.” When I called him, he posed me one of his central questions about megafires: “Why is it that countries that we think of as modernized—those that have money, science, technology—are the ones that are being clobbered?” Climate change is, of course, part of the story. “Fossil fuels give you power,” Pyne told me, but burning them “disrupts the climate in ways that make fires more powerful.” Extreme fire weather, exceptionally dry, windy, and often warm conditions, is on the rise globally. That said, climate change is happening everywhere—and, in Pyne’s account, only some areas are experiencing worsening fires. This is one of the mysteries he’s interested in.

O’Connor continues:

I was surprised that in my reporting, experts from different backgrounds agreed about several things. They warned that countries need to involve local people in their fire-management strategies, and to balance suppression with prevention. They argued that communities could reduce wildfire risks by managing lands and not letting them go wild. One way for European countries to prevent fires is by supporting rural livelihoods and traditional practices such as grazing, farming, forestry, and the intentional setting of controlled fires. If people want to keep conflagrations in check, nature needs people. “What people need to realize is that this is a structural issue in society,” a Spanish fire professional told me. “We’ve turned our backs on the mountains, on nature—and cities have never been so affected by it.”

Link.

The Conversation: Wildfires – why media coverage doesn’t always make the climate connection

The Conversation: Wildfires – why media coverage doesn’t always make the climate connection

Doug Specht, an expert in climate communication at the University of Westminster, offers an insightful analysis of how the recent wildfires burning in France and Spain (and elsewhere) have been reported, from both UK and French perspectives.

In the UK, he writes:

Europe’s fires were written up as a combination of holidays spoiled, energy policy rows, domestic civil protection issues and continental emergencies. All the articles were true, but what separates them is how far back each story begins. A fire can be explained by today’s barbecue, yesterday’s wind direction, by a dry spring, by four decades of land use change, or by a century of emissions.

Deciding how a story of a wildfire is placed in history, and in the climate change narrative, is often determined by one of three things. First, which desk the story lands on: travel and news desks usually seek stories of disruption, while environmental desks look for causes. Second, how far away the fire is, and third, where the news outlet stands on decarbonisation.

News runs on novelty – something must have changed since yesterday for it to qualify as a story. That is why the moment of ignition is reportable, but the conditions that led to that ignition are usually not.

In France, Specht notes, there has been a shift in narrative.

Looking at how French media report extreme weather, we can see real change in both language and prominence. Bulletins that once described a canicule exceptionnelle — an exceptional heatwave, an oddity — now routinely call these occurrences symptoms of le dérèglement climatique, climate disruption. This is an important shift: exceptions belong to a day; symptoms imply history and trajectory.

Regional papers such as La Dépêche du Midi and Corse-Matin have managed it best, partly because they are still there after the flames die down, reporting replanting, firebreaks and how to keep older residents safe in the heat. That is where a slow process becomes visible: not in the fire, but in the years either side of it.

What next?

Journalism, and news, will not abandon “the event”. Fires are news and they should be reported, urgently, vividly and from the scene.

The issue is how to avoid readers assuming that a fire is the whole story, when the event is, in fact, just the moment at which a long process becomes attention grabbing. When reporting stops there, it is accurate about the day but misleading about the decade.

It is not the the reader or viewer’s job to supply the causal context an article leaves out. To place media literacy as the solution would concede to the idea that reporting will not improve. It is editors and correspondents who have the capacity to responsibly tell the climate story as both drawn-out and very fast events.

This means treating the conditions beforehand as part of the story, rather than merely background. So, a fire report should carry the spring rainfall figures as routinely as it carries the acreage burned. It also means keeping a running memory, so that each fire is reported in light of the last, rather than in isolation.

It means paying for journalists’ return visits because recovery, replanting and adaptation are where a slow process becomes visible. And it means recognising that a newspaper’s disasters desk and environment desk are describing one world, and should not be left to describe two.

The full article is here.