You can’t fight fire with ignorance

The following is an excerpt of an editorial that ran in the Washington Post.

California, the nation’s most populous state and the world’s fifth-largest economy, is on fire. In a state already known for monster conflagrations, the past month has been unusually destructive. The Mendocino Complex fire north of San Francisco is now officially the largest in California’s history, having burned an area about the size of Los Angeles.

President Donald Trump tried to lay the blame on “bad environmental laws” and wasted water, claims that experts quickly debunked.

As much as the president might prefer to point fingers elsewhere, it is impossible to talk about California’s blazes without considering the role of climate change. Four of the five largest conflagrations the state has had to battle have come since 2012, and that is probably no coincidence.

A 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that humancaused climate change is responsible for about half the additional drying that researchers have found since the 1970s, resulting in a doubling of the area forest fires have consumed since 1984. Climate change may also increase lightning strikes, which are a major source of wildfires, and generate the high winds that can drive big blazes. Earlier springtime melting means the land has more time to dry out over the warmer months. Global warming will increasingly prime the environment for spectacular disasters. Lawmakers should examine the many ways they can help prevent another summer like this one.