Reacción a "An attribution study links climate change to the intensity of extreme fires in Spain and Portugal in August 2025"

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) has conducted a brilliant study on the devastating wave of fires associated with an extreme heatwave that took place in the summer of 2025 in Spain and Portugal. The study summarises the impact (almost 400,000 hectares burned, 3% of the country in the case of Portugal, at least 8 deaths), analyses its extreme and anomalous nature (for example, a heatwave of this magnitude would only occur once every 2,500 years in normal situations, and now one is expected to occur every 13 years) and investigates the contribution of climate change to this combination of extreme heat and devastating fires. In fact, this is the main contribution of the study, known as an attribution study: to quantitatively estimate the relationship between climate change, the heatwave and the fires. The results are clear and highly significant: weather conditions conducive to intense fires are now about 40 times more frequent and about 30% more intense compared to the pre-industrial climate, and the ten-day heatwave was 200 times more likely and 3°C hotter due to climate change.

It is very important to understand both the statistical significance of an attribution study (it is not a simple correlation, let alone an informed opinion, but a complex mathematical analysis based on simulations and models that yield probabilities) and the extraordinary contribution of climate change to the extreme and sustained heat in August and to the extensive and intense fires.

The study should prompt equally extraordinary measures by governments, the private sector and citizens to urgently adapt to the new climate and the extraordinary fire risks that are affecting more and more people. And it should lead us to establish agreements between all sectors, political forces and public administrations to jointly and coordinately address these disasters and prevent their frequency from continuing to increase in the future. This has a name and has been proposed by the scientific community for 40 years: climate change mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation involves, first and foremost, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and drastically decreasing the use of fossil fuels.