This is excerpted from
the transcript of this Democracy Now! program:
AMY GOODMAN: The
wildfires come after the U.S. Forest Service warned last year an unprecedented
five-year drought led to the deaths of more than 100 million trees in
California, setting the stage for massive fires. Climate scientists believe
human-caused global warming played a major role in the drought.
For more, we’re joined by Park Williams, who is a bioclimatologist at
Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He’s the co-author of a
2016 report showing
global warming is responsible for nearly half the forest area burned in the
western United States over the past three decades.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s
great to have you with us. So, explain what is happening right now in
California. The devastation is just incredible.
PARK WILLIAMS: Yeah,
it is. So, these fires that are getting the attention right now in California
are very different from the big forest fires that had been getting our
attention for the last several years. These fires are burning through towns.
And the fires are really being driven by a big high-pressure system that is
sitting over the coasts of the U.S. and driving winds from the east to the
west, bringing very dry, warm air from the deserts of Nevada and Arizona out to
the coast. And by the time the air gets to the coast, it’s compressed down to
sea level. It’s very warm and very dry. It pulls the moisture out of
vegetation, makes it ready to burn.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And
you said, before the show began, that part of the problem may have been the
rains that came earlier this year?
PARK WILLIAMS: Yeah.
So these fires out on the coast are very different from forest fires, in that
out near the coast of California there’s not a whole lot to burn oftentimes. We
actually didn’t hear a ton about fires occurring near the coast of California
during the big drought, simply because it was so dry, there wasn’t much growing,
so not much to burn. This year, though, follows a record-breaking wet or near
record-breaking wet winter in California. And anybody who was in California in
the spring knows it looked like the English countryside, with green, lush grass
growing everywhere. Well, that’s the stuff that’s burning right now. Grass is a
very effective carrier of fast-moving fire. And all you need to do is dry the
grass out, add a flame and add very strong winds, and that’s what’s going on
now.
AMY GOODMAN: So,
you have said, in this 2016 report that looks at the link between climate
change and forest fires, that since 1980—well, how much of the fires can be
attributable to climate change?
PARK WILLIAMS: So,
when we concentrate on forests, we find there’s a very strongly link between
drought and the amount of area that burns in any given year. And one really
important part of the drought link is temperature. And we can actually
mathematically determine the relationship between drought and fire, and
therefore temperature and fire. And we know from climate modeling that the
western U.S. has increased in temperature by two to two-and-a-half degrees
Fahrenheit over the last century because of human-caused climate change trends.
And from that value, we can back out the amount of area that has burned due to
human-caused climate change, and we find that about half of the area of forest
in the western U.S. that have burned over the last 35 years is attributable to
that warming trend. And that half is really big. It equals the size of Massachusetts
and Connecticut combined.
Please
go here to continue this transcript, or to watch the full video
interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/11/as_deadly_wildfires_rage_in_california
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