Real photo from this past week
With the fourth-largest American city under water, and fires raging all along the American West—Greenland has a wildfire for Godssakes—there are many people trying to explain to the people in power that climate change is happening now. You don’t even need a computer model to show you how bad it can get. This past week, people were evacuated from their homes and freeways were shut down as the hills around Los Angeles has been hit with raging wildfires.
Firefighters got some much welcomed relief Sunday from a heat wave that has gripped much of the state for days. Temperatures ranged in the mid-90s and rain fell in some burn areas as monsoonal moisture from Tropical Storm Lidia moved into the region. Winds were also calmer, but officials warned that could change.
“The biggest challenge and risk is the wind,” said Los Angeles Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas.
The fire, which broke out Friday and burned on both sides of the freeway, was 30% contained Sunday night, officials said. More than 1,000 were battling the blaze, and the chief said full containment of the fire is expected within three or four days.
InsideClimate News spoke with climate scientist Daniel Swain about what’s happening around us.
"These unprecedented extreme events, on the daily to the seasonal scale, are exactly the types of events that are more likely due to the global warming that's already occurred," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “That's not so much a future projection, but an observational reality, and that's something we expect to increase in the future. When we get these extremes, there's a human fingerprint."
Higher heats and drought conditions are definitely a big part of the problem but another instigator of these wildfires is the continuing commercial/industrial development of wild areas. This is something that the Trump administration and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke want to expand by privatizing National Park lands. And so while Texas is getting the historic wet storm, the west has been having a historic storm of aridity.
Nine of the 10 worst fire seasons in the past 50 years have all happened since 2000, and 2015 was the worst fire season in U.S. history, surpassing 10 million acres for the first time on record. So far this year, wildfires in the U.S. have burned 7.8 million acres, but the fire season is far from over. (In 2015, 8.4 million acres had burned by early September.) The average fire season is 78 days longer than it was in the 1970s—now nearly seven months—beginning and extending beyond the typical heat of summer. By April of this year, wildfires had scorched more than 2 million acres in the U.S.—nearly the average consumed in entire fire seasons during the 1980s.
And so while idiots and charlatans continue to pretend a) that man made climate change does not exist, and b) if it sort of exists we can’t know anything about it and so we should put our heads in the hot sand and try to buy bigger yachts, the world is on fire and drowning. And the people funding climate denial? They’ve been lying about it for decades, and there’s a paper trail proving as much.
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