Climate change’s raging wildfires
Fast-moving blazes, broiling heat, droughts and bizarrely deadly twists — the new normal.
By now you may have seen the hellish pictures of wildfires raging across Northern California. Over the past three weeks, the fires have engulfed more than 200,000 acres, destroying more than 1,200 buildings and killing eight people, including two children found under a blanket, with their great-grandmother nearby.
“This is climate change, for real and in real time,” The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board wrote last week.
The combination of a hot summer — the warmest on record in some places — and a dry winter have increased the risk of forest fires, Angela Fritz of The Washington Post explains. Besides making fires more likely, the heat also has the potential to make any fire more extreme.
“The wildfires and broiling heat, the parched droughts and bizarrely violent twists in climate are the new normal,” writes The Daily Beast’s Tanya Basu.
I’m glad to see journalists becoming more willing to connect the fires to climate change. For too long, people have been scared to talk about climate change when extreme weather happens. I understand why: The precise connection is usually unclear. Climate change increases risks and affects averages, but it’s impossible to attribute any individual storm, drought or heat wave to climate change alone.
And yet the connection is real — and creates an enormous threat. (For a careful review, read the National Climate Assessment.) In California, seven of the 12 most destructive wildfires on record have occurred in the last three years. Last week, a drought and heat wave in Greece sparked an inferno that killed more than 90 people. Parts of Sweden, Latvia and Scandinavia are also ablaze. In Japan, flooding and landslides caused by torrential rain killed more than 200 people last month.
If vast amounts of scientific evidence — and a consensus in nearly every other country — have not persuaded Americans to take on climate change, maybe the grim march of extreme weather finally will.