Climate change expected to fuel larger forest fires
SAN DIEGO — Global warming will likely heighten the risk of large, more difficult to control wildfires scorching the western United States.
It’s the main conclusion of a body of science that, over the years, has increasingly drawn connections in the West between the prevalence of major blazes and the rising frequency of earlier springtime conditions followed by hotter and drier summers.
“Climate absolutely affects fire because it affects how flammable the fuels are,” said LeRoy Westerling, a professor at the University of California, Merced who has been studying climate and wildfires for the past 15 years.
“Your drought years are going to be more extreme because it’s warmer during the drought years, so you have more evaporation, and those preceding years that were wetter are retaining less water,” added Westerling, who has worked on these issues with colleagues at places like UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
They and other scientists from Oregon and Washington state to California and Colorado have collaborated on improving long-range climate projections, developing more sophisticated computer modeling and creating customized equipment to better monitor weather and wildfire conditions, among other projects.
All of this work has continued to proceed despite escalating debate over the scientific validity of climate change forecasting — in the courts between regulators and major companies, in divisive policies from the White House to statehouses to city councils, in dueling marketing campaigns between conservationists and the fossil fuel industry, in testy exchanges among world leaders about whether particular countries are truly committed to lowering their greenhouse-gas emissions.
This year alone, global warming has been the subject of much attention.
In his proposed budget, President Donald Trump calls for slashing the budgets of two federal agencies most associated with climate change research and enforcement — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Then in late May, he announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate change accord, in which almost every country has pledged to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to Earth’s warming. Trump has set off a cascade of voices worldwide praising or denouncing the decision.