{"id":396780,"date":"2025-09-04T08:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T08:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/396780\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T08:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T08:33:10","slug":"spain-and-portugal-wildfire-weather-made-40-times-more-likely-by-climate-crisis-study-finds-climate-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/396780\/","title":{"rendered":"Spain and Portugal wildfire weather made 40 times more likely by climate crisis, study finds | Climate crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

The extreme weather that fuelled \u201castonishing\u201d blazes across Spain and Portugal<\/a> last month was made 40 times more likely by climate breakdown, early analysis suggests.<\/p>\n

The deadly wildfires, which torched 500,000 hectares (1.2m acres) of the Iberian peninsula in a matter of weeks, were also 30% more intense than scientists would have expected in a world without climate change, according to researchers from the World Weather Attribution network.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sheer size of these fires has been astonishing,\u201d said Clair Barnes, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-author of the study. \u201cHotter, drier and more flammable conditions are becoming more severe with climate change, and are giving rise to fires of unprecedented intensity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers found that such conditions could have occurred once every 500 years in the preindustrial climate, but in today\u2019s world \u2013 which has been warmed by the heat-trapping pollution from burning coal, oil and gas \u2013 they could be expected every 15 years.<\/p>\n

The effects of climate breakdown on the extreme heat were even stronger, the researchers found. The 10-day maximum temperatures in the region last month were expected to hit every 2,500 years before industrialisation. They are now expected every 13 years.<\/p>\n

The study<\/a>, which has not yet been submitted for peer review, relied on weather observations rather than analysis of climate models that the group usually conducts in the immediate aftermath of destructive weather. A fuller analysis<\/a> of the Turkish and Greek wildfires they published last week found climate breakdown had made the extreme weather conditions 10 times more likely.<\/p>\n

Changes in land use have compounded the rising regional risk of untamed infernos. Several hot Mediterranean countries have struggled to deal with the effects of rural abandonment and ageing populations, as young people moving to cities have left behind unmanaged farmland with overgrown vegetation that can easily burn.<\/p>\n

David Garcia, an applied mathematician at the University of Alicante, said the public debate in Spain<\/a> had focused on the decline of rural activities and the resulting growth of vegetation. \u201cHowever, much less has been said about the effect of climate change on these fires, which, as has been demonstrated, has been immense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pedro S\u00e1nchez, the Spanish prime minister, announced details of a 10-point climate plan<\/a> on Monday to respond to increasingly extreme weather. In an interview<\/a> with the Guardian, the centre-left politician warned that climate action was being undermined by mainstream rightwing parties adopting the narratives of the far right.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe problem that we\u2019re now facing is that there are traditional rightwing parties that perhaps don\u2019t deny the scientific reality, but which act and behave as if climate change doesn\u2019t exist. And this is the biggest problem,\u201d S\u00e1nchez said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The extreme weather that fuelled \u201castonishing\u201d blazes across Spain and Portugal last month was made 40 times more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[728,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-396780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115145107334159347","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}