CGTN Europe interviewed Dr Emma Hill, Climate expert at Liverpool John Moores University
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00:00Well, 2024 was the hottest year on record. According to the EU's Climate Monitor, their research also revealed the planet warmed more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels for the first time.
00:13Emma Hill is a climate expert at Liverpool John Moores University. Emma, good to see you. Let's just talk about the wildfires in California first of all.
00:22What is the connection, if any, to the broader climate crisis, or is it simply too early to say?
00:30No, it's not too early to say. There is a strong direct and indirect link between fires and climate change.
00:36What we're seeing with the wildfires is a combination of events, if you will.
00:40So we've got very dry conditions in California. They've been experiencing a drought for over a decade now.
00:47They've got very hot summer temperatures, expected rain in the autumn, but I believe they've only had about 0.4 centimetres of rainfall since October.
00:56So you've got these very dry conditions, very hot dry conditions.
01:01If you overlay on top of that the Santa Ana winds that blow in off the desert from east to west, they bring in more dry air and further dry vegetation out.
01:13So it doesn't take a lot to spark a fire in that vegetation.
01:18The wind can then fan those flames, and that's what we're seeing at the moment with very chaotic conditions where firefighters don't know quite where to place their resources because the winds are changing direction.
01:30The embers are being blown, so even though they've managed to damp down the fire in one area, the embers still blow into another where they still have those dry conditions.
01:40And the forecast at the moment is that it isn't going to rain anytime soon.
01:43So we've got to keep that area damp if we want to try and suppress that fire more.
01:49And that's in a context of this rising temperature.
01:52And year on year now, the last 10 years have been the warmest 10 years on record.
01:56So we're just seeing increasing hotter and drier temperatures in places like California.
02:02And as a result of that, we've seen more intense forest fires and wildfires that are increasing in intensity, increasing in frequency and increasing in the areas that they tend to cover.
02:13OK, more broadly, 2024 confirmed as the hottest year on record.
02:18How does that milestone affect our understanding of the climate emergency?
02:26If you think about climate changes as a car or a train on a downward slope with no brakes, climate tends to have sort of an inertia to it.
02:34So we've already put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
02:37We've already warmed the temperature by one to one and a half degrees.
02:42That is hard to stop.
02:44So even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the climate would continue to warm.
02:49And the reason that we set a temperature of one point five is because beyond that, the research showed us that we start to meet thresholds that we cannot turn back from.
02:59So if you think about trying to stop that train on that downward slope, it's very difficult to stop, let alone turn around.
03:05So we start to see things like glacier melt or more glacier melt than we've already seen.
03:11We start to see increased storminess.
03:13So our weather systems and our climate and longer term climate systems become, again, more intense, more frequent.
03:22And those have significant economic and social ramifications.
03:27Emma, good to talk to you. Thank you for that.
03:29Emma Hill, the climate expert at Liverpool John Moores University.