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A fiery wake-up call for climate science

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 175–177 (2020)Cite this article

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To improve climate resilience for extreme fire events, researchers need to translate modelling uncertainties into useful guidance and be wary of overconfidence. If Earth system models do not capture the severity of recent Australian wildfires, development is urgently needed to assess whether we are underestimating fire risk.

The images from the Australian fires served as a bitter climax to a year that was already dominated by climate change and climate-related extreme events. A natural disaster of breathtaking scale unfolds as large fractions of Australia’s east coast have burned to an extent not seen in living memory, releasing an estimated 350 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere in November and December1, and causing the loss of thousands of homes and the death of hundreds of millions of animals2.

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Fig. 1: Observed and projection of historical and future climate in New South Wales, Australia.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output, with specific contributions from MPI32, CNRM33, ECMWF34 and NCAR35. B.M.S. is supported by the French National Research Agency, ANR-17-MPGA-0016.

Author information

Affiliations

  1. CERFACS, Toulouse, France

    Benjamin M. Sanderson & Rosie A. Fisher

  2. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Benjamin M. Sanderson

Authors
  1. Benjamin M. Sanderson
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  2. Rosie A. Fisher
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Benjamin M. Sanderson.

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Sanderson, B.M., Fisher, R.A. A fiery wake-up call for climate science. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 175–177 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0707-2

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