The others already pointed out that there’s a global, rising trend of climate disasters. I would like to qualify:
This year did exceed everyone’s expectations. It’s the first year of El Niño after years of increasing temperatures, so while it didn’t come as a complete surprise, it could still be an anomaly.
If you ask climate scientists, they’ll tell you lots of climate change effects that could contribute to these wildfires, but yeah, ultimately, they’ll say they won’t know for sure until they’ve seen the following years.
However, these are raging wildfires all around the globe, in regions that don’t normally have them and that aren’t linked to each other. At some point, it stops being “a wildfire somewhere” and starts to become a statistic.
Surface-level ocean temperatures are significantly higher this year, globally, than in previous years. We can’t explain such a global increase without climate change. And obviously, warm water evaporates differently, leading to unusual weather patterns, leading to droughts, which increases the likelihood of wildfires.
So, yeah, while the snowball is simply irrelevant to the topic, the wildfire statistic correlates with all our other statistics. You’d have to ignore a ton of evidence to not attribute the wildfires to climate change until proven differently.
The others already pointed out that there’s a global, rising trend of climate disasters. I would like to qualify:
This year did exceed everyone’s expectations. It’s the first year of El Niño after years of increasing temperatures, so while it didn’t come as a complete surprise, it could still be an anomaly.
If you ask climate scientists, they’ll tell you lots of climate change effects that could contribute to these wildfires, but yeah, ultimately, they’ll say they won’t know for sure until they’ve seen the following years.
However, these are raging wildfires all around the globe, in regions that don’t normally have them and that aren’t linked to each other. At some point, it stops being “a wildfire somewhere” and starts to become a statistic.
Surface-level ocean temperatures are significantly higher this year, globally, than in previous years. We can’t explain such a global increase without climate change. And obviously, warm water evaporates differently, leading to unusual weather patterns, leading to droughts, which increases the likelihood of wildfires.
So, yeah, while the snowball is simply irrelevant to the topic, the wildfire statistic correlates with all our other statistics. You’d have to ignore a ton of evidence to not attribute the wildfires to climate change until proven differently.