From Dana Nuccitelli at The Guardian:
Last week, 18 wildfires were burning at once in California, including its largest in history, destroying over 1,100 homes and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate. The smoke made the air in the state’s Central Valley unhealthy to breathe for a record 15 consecutive days, as I can personally attest.
Donald Trump decided to use the opportunity to renew his war with California by nonsensically blaming the wildfires on environmental laws:
"California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading! "
Climate change is making wildfires bigger. Zeke Hausfather showed in an analysis for Carbon Brief that there’s a strong correlation between temperatures and the total area of forests burned in the western USA.
A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 75% of year-to-year variations in area burned by wildfires in the western US can be explained by fuel aridity (a combination of temperature and precipitation).
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| Source: The Guardian |
Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests … and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984
July 2018 was the hottest month ever recorded in California. The past four years were the state’s four hottest, and 2018 is on pace to also finish in California’s top-five hottest years. Plus, California just recently emerged from its worst drought in over a millennium, which was likewise amplified by global warming and created plentiful wildfire fuel.
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| Source: The Guardian |
[Read more here. And by the way, it's worth subscribing, even for just $10 per month. It's an excellent newspaper.]
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