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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Intelligence from The Economist · Burning questions: a more fire-prone world · 28 Jul 2026
podcast
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
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 CO two and that heats the atmosphere further, and that's an effect that lasts for centuries unless someone develops a way to take the CO two 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 cooler.
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 had biological effects.
After the Black Summer fires, there was a huge
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 build up.
And the Earth is, as I believe we discussed, Jason, a pretty complicated system.
To worry about, I think, is probably Indonesia, because there the fires are not necessarily of the same sort.
They're often deliberately set because of slash and burn agriculture.
And we have two seemingly unrelated things happening.
One is that the Miss Bogotan war in the Gulf means that demand for biofuels, which drives some of the slash and burn, is going up.
And at the same time, we have an El Nino effect, the opposite of
Lanina, which is drying out that part of Southeast Asia.
And so people worried about Indonesian wildfires are looking at a very bad second half of this year.
There's also the risk, as there always is, that there'll be something quite dramatic in Australia.
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