The wildfires in Australia have been heartbreaking. Many people have lost their homes and some species may never recover from the losses that they incurred during the tragedy. Although the fires were caused primarily by natural weather patterns, the role that man made climate change played cannot be ignored.

Last year was the hottest and driest year for the continent, perfect conditions to help spur on such a tragedy. Although wildfires are very natural in many parts of the world, the severity of them is being increased by the effects of climate change in creating very dry conditions.

As the planet continues to warm, these events will become more and more common and current predictions are that we will have up to 3C of warming by the end of 2100 which doesn’t seem like a lot but it’s a lot. In order to stop this from happening, we need to make a lot of changes to how we live to cut emissions drastically.