Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The inconvenient truth about France’s forest fires

Politicians are desperate to blame climate change

(Getty)

Montpellier

Last month the Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, visited the south-west of the country to offer her support to firefighters tackling a series of large forest fires. It was also a good opportunity to broach a subject close to her heart. ‘More than ever,’ she warned, ‘we must continue to fight against climate change and to adapt. A new plan for adapting to climate change will be put out for consultation at the beginning of the autumn’.

Borne isn’t alone in connecting the forest fires that have ravaged much of France this summer to climate change. Newspapers such as Liberation have also linked the two. Last week the paper published an article in which it referenced the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization. According to the organisation’s general secretary, Petteri Taalas, ‘even if emissions are low, global warming is projected to cause an increase in forest fires’.

Aliot stuck to his guns. No, he said, he is not a climate change denier but nor is he a climate change hysteric

Meanwhile the French equivalent of National Geographic magazine, Geo, declared that the conflagrations ‘illustrate that global warming favours forest fires, which have already destroyed more land since the beginning of the year than in the entire year of 2021’. Over 50,000 hectares of forest have been lost to fires in France this year, the most since the infamous heatwave of 1976. Geo magazine quoted Jesus San Miguel, coordinator of the European system of information on forest fires, who said that the summer heatwave was a ‘decisive’ factor in the proliferation of fires and there was a ‘clearly a link to global warming’.

The problem with this theory, however, is the facts. From Bordeaux to Brittany to the Ardeche, investigations swiftly concluded that the majority of fires had nothing to do with climate change.

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