Oliver Morton
speaker
147 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Intelligence from The Economist · Burning questions: a more fire-prone world · 28 Jul 2026
podcast
As of this morning, the twenty eighth of july, the situation seems extremely finely balanced.
The Spanish authorities have talked about the next few hours being absolutely crucial because in the coming days we're expecting to see an increase in temperatures as things get back into true heat wave territory, and that could be very bad for the Fasnia, Bordeaux and those west and northwest of Madrid and Spain.
Well, it's at a different scale for the places where it's happening.
These aren't wildfires that would necessarily get noticed all that much in, say, Australia or Canada.
But it's illustrating a point that is actually applicable more or less all around the world, which is that fire seasons are getting longer, the number of days of intense fire proneness, a very high fire weather index are also going up.
And that means that you're gonna be seeing more fires and bigger fire seasons, but you're also seeing an increase in what some people sometimes call extraordinary fires.
Fires that leap out along one dimension or another of their sheer intensity or their size or the speed at which they spread or the amount of damage that they do.
So in twenty nineteen twenty, we saw these extraordinary
Fires in Southeast Australia mainly, but also across a lot of the rest of Australia, which were called the Black Summer fires.
There were the extraordinary fires of 2023 in Canada, where the burning forest gave out four times as much CO2 as Canada produces by burning fossil fuels in a year.
And then last year the fires in Los Angeles did more.
damage as recorded by insurance companies than any other fires that I think the world has ever seen.
But
Absolutely.
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
Suggests 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.
Showing 81–100 of 147 · page 5 of 8
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