A power on a global scale
That of Tenerife is just one more example of the power that fires are acquiring on a global scale due to the increase in temperatures that is already 1.2 degrees compared to the pre-industrial period. Canada, the two coasts of the United States, Greece or Hawaii have been victims of this new generation of fires. The sixth, as experts have called it. What it means is, basically, “that the fires come to generate their own microclimate, so they do not follow the logic of meteorology”, as Viñas reveals.
This means that their movements become unpredictable and their behavior is, as the president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Rosa Dávila, defined in a press conference, “erratic.” “The fire creates local winds different from the prevailing ones, which creates a mess in the planning of extinction of the fire,” Viñas insists. This is what makes these fires especially bloody, since the extinction tasks can endanger the lives of the troops. «A few years ago in Portugal, the fire took an unexpected turn. He returned to the place to which the authorities had asked the population to flee. There were dozens of deaths,” summarizes Viñas.
