Sunday, October 15, 2017

As Deadly Wildfires Rage in California, a Look at How Global Warming Fuels Decades of Forest Fires

So vital to understand the link between climate change and drought and devastating wildfires. These times ask of us all to connect the dots which highlight the larger pictures which are essential to know and act on. - Molly


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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