Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers are publishing a series of articles as a kind of postmortem of the Australian bushfires. The series is both a diagnosis of what happened as flames swept across the continent, and a call to action for researchers the world over: Climate change is a crisis for people, the natural world at large—and for science itself.
In particular, some of the research is making a staggering argument: This season’s bushfires were so catastrophic, they caught modelers off guard—way off guard. The models not only hadn’t predicted that bushfires of this magnitude could happen now, they hadn’t even predicted that bushfires of this magnitude could happen in the next 80 years.
“This is perhaps one of the first really big cases where we've seen the real world do something before we've been able to have the capacity to model it properly,” says climate scientist Benjamin Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, who cowrote a piece in the Nature Climate Change package. “This event was worse than anything in any of the models at any point in this century. Only one of the models toward the end of the century started producing things of this magnitude.”
A model does its best to accurately simulate how the world works by estimating how changes to dozens or even hundreds of variables could lead to different outcomes. For example, climate models simulate how much warming might result from a certain increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Political models use data like polling numbers and historical voter turnout levels to predict a candidate’s chances of winning. Fire models use historical observations to make calculations like: In the past, this much vegetation at this level of dryness has led to this kind of bushfire.
Yet as the saying goes: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Scientists only have access to so much data, and there’s just no way to fully represent the complexities of the real world. Modeling fire is also exceedingly complex, because there are a galaxy of factors that determine the behavior of a fire. A model has to take into account, for example, how forests might be evolving, when a world with more CO2 in the atmosphere might stimulate more tree growth. It has to account for how plant communities might change; perhaps some species will grow more abundant and others more rare. And you’ve got to account for how drought and rainfall might result in more or less brush to burn—a wet year produces a lot of vegetation, which, when followed by a drought, produces mountains of dried-out fuel.
“Fires are right at the end of a long sequence of models which have to be pieced together to get the right answer,” says Sanderson. While it’s easier to model some of the smaller changes that might affect an ecosystem, it’s harder to model scores of them all together and still produce an accurate result. “We have very comprehensive models of forests, and the way that the trees will respond to a warmer climate,” he adds. “And we have very comprehensive models of the climate, and models of fire tuned to individual regions. We're not at a stage where we can put them all together and have confidence in the result.”
Another problem: Running models this complex requires supercomputers. And that’s not cheap, which means scientists don’t get to keep test-running their models to fine-tune them. “It takes huge amounts of energy and computation to run a single simulation,” says Sanderson. “We backed ourselves into a corner with climate science where our models are so computationally expensive, we can't really afford to run them more than once.”
As other researchers who contributed to the Nature Climate Change series point out, the unprecedented scale of this season’s bushfires, and the drier and warmer conditions that exacerbated them, are beyond normal parameters anyway. “The widespread and prolonged drought conditions over the last two years have caused the entire eastern Australian forest area to dry out to extreme levels, such that all ‘natural fire breaks’ (e.g. moist gullies, south facing slopes, swamps) have been eliminated and the entire landscape becomes one connected fuel array,” wrote Western Sydney University fire scientist Matthias Boer, who penned one of the articles published today, in an email to WIRED.
A study by researchers at the University of New South Wales is currently underway to decipher precisely how climate change affected these recent fires. But this climate and fire scientists can say for sure: Climate change is making droughts more intense and more frequent, and—on smaller time scales—turning Australia’s landscapes into tinder. Simply put, drier, hotter, windier weather makes wildfires worse, and dry, hot winds can desiccate a landscape, turning it into pure bushfire fuel.
These altogether crispier conditions lead to an even more destructive fire, which was exactly the case this year. Australia’s landscape is dominated by “temperate broadleaf and mixed” forests, themselves dominated by eucalyptus trees. Looking at the last 20 years of satellite data, the median annual percentage of these forests that burned during past fires was 1 percent. This fire season, that figure was 21 percent.
All of that is adding up to another problem for scientists: Studying climate change in general, or its effect on bushfires specifically, is becoming increasingly difficult. University of Queensland conservation scientist James Watson, for instance, studies birds in Western Queensland. “Right now, it's just accepted that we can't do fieldwork in summer anymore out there,” he says. “It's too hot, it's too dangerous, you just can't physically do it. Fifteen years ago, we could have done it quite easily.”
Watson and Lauren Rickards, who co-leads the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Climate Change and Resilience research program, wrote in Nature Climate Change about how Australian scientists are grappling with both climate change and the attendant superfires. Ecosystems under long-term observation have burned to the ground, and bushfires have destroyed facilities and vehicles critical to research. Other extreme weather has brought the assault from above, Watson and Rickards note: Last month, a “cataclysmic hailstorm” damaged 65 greenhouses in Canberra, destroying years’ worth of experiments. Some of those, devastatingly enough, were testing crops’ resilience to climate change.
“As we think about how climate change impacts are ricocheting through society, we’re starting to realize that these impacts are ricocheting through research projects and through research institutions,” says Rickards. And, she adds, there is “this urgent need for researchers to stop pretending that we're distant witnesses of climate change, that were somehow isolated or immunized observers, and recognize that we are being affected.”
Modern science has spent centuries exhaustively cataloging a world that we thought we knew to be fairly consistent—seasons come and go, species migrate, a particular Australian forest burns once every few decades. But scientists now work in a world that is both more perilous and more chaotic. “Your research is going to be severely disrupted if you don't actually recognize the risks posed by extreme climate events, by long term shifts in your research sites, by the pressures that your research participants are under,” says Rickards.
We’ve turned this world into a hothouse, one that’s overwhelming the predictive powers of both human and computer. And Australia’s conflagrations are but a taste of disasters to come.
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