Devastating Hawaii fires made ‘much more dangerous’ by climate change

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/11/hawaii-fires-made-more-dangerous-by-climate-crisis

By Oliver Milan, The Guardian. 

Excerpt: Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that global heating is causing vegetation to dry out, priming it as fuel for an outbreak of fire. “Climate change doesn’t usually start the fires; but it intensifies them, increasing the area they burn and making them much more dangerous,” Hayhoe tweeted. ...Nearly a fifth of Maui, the Hawaiian island where the fires have occurred, is in severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. The island has experienced other serious fires in recent years, with blazes in 2018 and 2021 razing hundreds of homes and causing the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists. Experts say that wildfires in Hawaii are now burning through four times the amount of area than in previous decades, in part due to the proliferation of more flammable non-native grasses but also rising global temperatures. ...Hawaii is experiencing increasingly dry conditions, with scientists calculating that 90% of the state is getting less rainfall than it did a century ago, with the period since 2008 particularly dry.... See also New York Times article How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

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