Oliver Morton
speaker
275 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The way in which fires kill most people is through the smoke.
And this is something that I think people are only really beginning to catch on to now, partly because the world was watching the eastern seaboard of the United States when the World Cup was on.
And so when the world's looking at you and you're covered in smoke...
That's a way of thinking that the smoke effects really are quite large.
And some estimates suggest that a quarter of a million people every year die of the smoke effects of fires.
Something like a billion people a year have an air quality event due to wildfire smoke within their houses for at least one day.
And this really does rack up the casualties.
And it's something where we're facing a double acceleration because the people most at risk of this are older people and the world's population is aging.
And also the amount of the world that's burning seems to be going up.
Yeah, as you say, fires release CO2 and that heats the atmosphere further and that's an effect that lasts for centuries unless someone develops a way to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
They also, of course, produce smoke and that can often have a cooling effect and the degree to which wildfires in the boreal forests of Canada and Russia may be
Slowing the warming of the Arctic or even slightly cooling the Arctic is an area of active research.
It's possible that the extraordinary black summer fires in Australia may have contributed to the conditions that kept the Pacific in its La Nina state for three years on the trot straight afterwards.
These are extraordinarily large things at the top end of the fire range, and they can have effects that...
verge on the global.
They also have biological effects.
After the Black Summer fires, there was a huge bloom of phytoplankton in the Pacific downwind of them, where the smoke was fertilizing the seas and the seas were coming alive in response.
And that might slightly reduce the carbon dioxide buildup.
The Earth is, as I believe we discussed, Jason, a pretty complicated system.
The next thing to worry about, I think, is probably Indonesia, because there the fires are not necessarily of the same sort.
Showing 221–240 of 275 · page 12 of 14
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