The pictures are frightening
The headline is misleading again, high temperatures can’t cause fires. (250-300°C required to burn vegetation) You need two things: dry stuff and someone to light that, temperature is irrelevant. That’s why fires during winter exist, it’s just that less people are out during that time to do stupid.
Edit:
June/July/August are on average the driest months in southern Italy. If the soil is already dry because it hasn’t rained in two months there shouldn’t be anything left to evaporate. My point is, it should be communicated clearer that it’s burning not because it’s hot (people really think fires can randomly start by themselves), but because of arson, negligence or intention.
Edit 2: German newspaper (FAZ) literally writes this about wildfires in Greece:
It is hoped that on Thursday the temperatures should fall back to normal values of about 35 degrees Celsius for the season. In the two weeks before, the temperatures were between 40 and 45 degrees.
Like how is that supposed to help with the fires if it still doesn’t rain?! That’s why temperature is pointless to mention in the same sentence.
The drier the vegetation the more flammable it becomes
Correct?
High temperatures increase the rate of evaporation, causing soil moisture levels to decrease. This dries out the vegetation, turning it into potential fuel for fires.
June/July/August are on average the driest months in southern Italy. If the soil is already dry because it hasn’t rained in two months there shouldn’t be anything left to evaporate. My point is, it should be communicated clearer that it’s burning not because it’s hot (people really think fires can randomly start by themselves), but because of arson, negligence or intention.
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It just sounds better to include the temperature, gets them more clicks. Wildfires happen every week there, big or small, but when it’s only 30 degrees then they won’t care to include that in the title. Except for cooler places like Germany where 30 degrees would magically be enough to be mentioned in the title again 😅
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Let’s look at Palermo Airport’s weather station data: https://meteostat.net/de/station/16405?t=2023-06-01/2023-07-26
The last noteworthy rain fell on June 16. Since then, temperatures have slowly risen, but were mostly between 26-35°C. Only for the last two days, temperatures reached 43/44 and 42 degrees (today it’s even been a steady 28 degrees). First miss-information in the title: 47°C were actually reached on the mainland, not where the fire started. Why pick a totally irrelevant temperature? Generates mores clicks.
Evaporation is not only dependent on temperature, isn’t air humidity almost more important? To be fair, humidity was especially low during these two days with as low as 10% for a few hours. It all comes down to this: Is two days enough to have such a huge additional effect on evaporation compared to the 38 days without rain before?
Adding to that, I found a german source that says the fires around Palermo started on July 24 (apparently during the night after the first 40+ day), leaving even less time for significant evaporation. Haven’t had the time to find a map that shows fires by date yet.
To be totally clear, it is 100% another heat wave caused/made possible by climate change. But I just think putting the (wrong) temperature in the title, when the deciding factor and cause would be drought (normal during this time of year) and arson, is misleading and doesn’t accurately represent the primary factors contributing to the incident.
By the way, for which country did you check wikipedia articles for? Here is a list with plenty in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wildfires
Thank you. I’ve been a volunteer firefighter for a few years so discussions about wildfires always hit a nerve and I hate how many of them are used to steer public opinion towards very specific problems, while ignoring how complex the topic really is.
I live in a European country that’s practically known by its summer wildfires. We’ve had enormous fires ever since before I was born and before temperatures got this high in the summer. Our own stats show that around 70% of occurring fires happen due to human action - both negligent (people who insist on using electrical machinery in the woods in the summer) and criminal (loonies who like causing chaos and watching firefighters). The remaining percentage is mostly fires in which we can’t pinpoint the cause, and few of them actually occur “naturally”, simply because of high temperatures.
Most of our forest has been abandoned over the years, partly because the people who own it moved to more urban areas, partly because a lot of economical activities linked to the forest have become financially unfeasible for the average person. State forests get abandoned as well because state budget usually gets discussed outside of wildfire season, when everyone forgets that wildfires exist. We’ve also lost a lot of volunteer firefighters in rural areas because of a lot of immigration to other European countries for better job opportunities.
Every year, by this point of the year, the news cycle turns towards wildfires and the same old discussion about what causes them starts all over again, with most political actors - and the public themselves - attributing the causes to whatever problem they identify with the most. By october, no one in my country - or on here, most likely - will be talking about wildfires anymore.
That’s exactly the time in which we should begin clearing forests, doing maintenance work on access roads and fire stopping strips, and in general discussing what needs to be done to stop this - but by then most of the public forgets that wildfires exist and any attempt to finance those things ultimately fails as public opinion moves on and suddenly switches from “oh no, we’re all going to burn” to “we’ll deal with wildfires next year, we have plenty of time left!”. Any attempt at gaining public support to finance the necessary work to prevent wildfires is constantly shut down because, outside of summer, no one really cares about wildfires.
I’ve seen this cycle happening year after year for most of my life. We’re in the “thing I don’t like is the only cause of fires and we should stop it!” phase, and in a few months everyone will collectively stop giving a shit and move on. Fires are getting harder to fight, both because of rising temperatures and because of a collective unwillingness to act - it’s getting harder and harder to get people to volunteer at fire stations, likewise for every charity I volunteer at. Though every stat we have shows people are supposedly more politically active than ever before - or at least it appears so judging by their online activity - less and less people everyday are willing to go out and actually do something useful for their community. It’s all talk and no game. But not to worry! Only two months left till october when we’ll all pretend wild fires haven’t been destroying our landscapes for years and years.
Thank you for the insight! But still one question: how can you pinpoint that a fire started simply because of high temperatures? How is that physically possible?
The main cause of natural fires over here are lightning strikes. There’s some phenomenon in which high temperatures can cause thunderstorms which are fairly “fast”, as in they don’t last very long, and a strike in the middle of the forest combined with hot temperatures and dry forests can cause a natural fire. But that’s actually fairly rare in my country at least.
In the past, I’ve seen studies that mixed natural causes with unknown causes, which made the number of fires happening from “natural causes” seem impossibly high - leading to the thing you pointed at in your first post, where some people actually believe that a fire could just start from nothing.
It’s Yahoo News, I don’t expect much more to be honest
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