tingilinde

climate change and california

A NY Times piece on the current and future challenges.

 

 

the coming american climate migration

It will certainly happen and further separate rich from poor.

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Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in The Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that one in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.

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the age of megafires

Is the world entering a phase of awful new normals?

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“Unprecedented and devastating bushfires in Australia this past fire season burned over 45 million acres,” said Flannigan, director of the newly created Canadian Wildfire Strategic Network. “Arctic fires are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases and the [Arctic] area burned has exceeded 3 million acres for the first time in the modern record — and much of the fire season still lays ahead. We expected these increases in fire activity, but they are happening faster than anticipated.”

Indeed, just as global warming has propelled the Arctic Ocean past a tipping point that is expected to lead to a largely ice-free Arctic in summer in the coming decades, wildfire scientists say that rising global temperatures and worsening droughts mean that the world has entered a new era of megafires. Scientists say that wildfires are behaving in unprecedented ways and that the traditional methods of fighting them are proving inadequate to this new reality.

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poetry

One of the Oregon GOP state senators who fled to prevent a quorum on a climate change bill just lost his house to one of the fires.

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Oregon Republican state senator Fred Girod was one of 11 Republicans who made headlines when they walked out of the senate – some even leaving the state – so that a quorum could not be achieved for a climate change bill.

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“Fred Girod stood near the edge of a steep drop between what remained of his house and the Santiam River, grasping the destruction days after the Beachie Creek wildfire destroyed homes, businesses and landmarks along the canyon.

The walls of the one-story home had collapsed, leaving two stone columns and a chimney that rose out of the rubble. The heat and flames had twisted the frame of the deck where he would sit to watch bald eagles, ospreys and sunrises.

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a tip of the hat to Alex

 

parts of earth are becoming unsurvivable for humans

From last Spring..

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Extremely humid heat that is more intense than most Americans have experienced — approaching a crucial, immovable human survivability limit — has more than doubled in frequency in some coastal subtropical regions of the world since 1979, according to a study published Friday.
The study is the first to find that wet-bulb temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) — which render ineffective the human heat response of sweating to shed heat through evaporation, leading to hyperthermia — are already occurring for short periods of time at a few weather stations.

These tend to occur in parts of the Persian Gulf shoreline and coastal southwest North America, where sizzling lands border sultry seas, as well as in northern South Asia, where extreme heat and humidity combinations overlap just before the annual monsoon season begins.

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the human impact on california wildfires

A very readable open access paper published in the AGU Earth's Future. 

 

Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California

 

A. Park Williams John T. Abatzoglou Alexander Gershunov Janin Guzman‐Morales Daniel A. Bishop Jennifer K. Balch Dennis P. Lettenmaier

Abstract
Recent fire seasons have fueled intense speculation regarding the effect of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in western North America and especially in California. During 1972–2018, California experienced a fivefold increase in annual burned area, mainly due to more than an eightfold increase in summer forest‐fire extent. Increased summer forest‐fire area very likely occurred due to increased atmospheric aridity caused by warming. Since the early 1970s, warm‐season days warmed by approximately 1.4 °C as part of a centennial warming trend, significantly increasing the atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD). These trends are consistent with anthropogenic trends simulated by climate models. The response of summer forest‐fire area to VPD is exponential, meaning that warming has grown increasingly impactful. Robust interannual relationships between VPD and summer forest‐fire area strongly suggest that nearly all of the increase in summer forest‐fire area during 1972–2018 was driven by increased VPD. Climate change effects on summer wildfire were less evident in nonforested lands. In fall, wind events and delayed onset of winter precipitation are the dominant promoters of wildfire. While these variables did not change much over the past century, background warming and consequent fuel drying is increasingly enhancing the potential for large fall wildfires. Among the many processes important to California's diverse fire regimes, warming‐driven fuel drying is the clearest link between anthropogenic climate change and increased California wildfire activity to date.

Plain Language Summary
Since the early 1970s, California's annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 2017 and 2018. This trend was mainly due to an eightfold increase in summertime forest‐fire area and was very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human‐induced warming. Warming effects were also apparent in the fall by enhancing the odds that fuels are dry when strong fall wind events occur. The ability of dry fuels to promote large fires is nonlinear, which has allowed warming to become increasingly impactful. Human‐caused warming has already significantly enhanced wildfire activity in California, particularly in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and North Coast, and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades.

the west and climate action

It's written for California, but much of the West is in the same boat.

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Take housing: In California, more than 60 percent of new residential development in the state since 1990 has been in wildfire-prone areas — housing for those who can’t afford to live in the dense regions like greater Los Angeles and the Bay Area — and more than 1 million buildings in the state are already vulnerable, given wildfire conditions in the state today. Across the American West, one study found that 32 million homes were built in the wildland-urban interface between 1990 and 2015. These building patterns, long expected to continue and even accelerate, must stop — and though it remains scary to say it — perhaps even reverse, if the next generations of Americans are to feel truly safe in their homes and not terrorized by the threat of fire. In parts of the West, there has been some limited movement, including stricter safety regulations on new homes in dangerous areas, for instance, and a general new urbanist embrace of housing density. But in California, where the threats are bleakest and the housing market most pinched, the lesson has not yet been learned — perhaps because the threat of wildfire has been normalized; or for reasons of old-fashioned liberal NIMBYism; or the reflexive patterns of American suburban sprawl, with its culture of single-family homes and car-oriented living; or perhaps even because Californians like to believe their state is a little dangerous. The state’s modest housing reform bill SB50, designed to alleviate California’s broader housing crisis and championed by state senator Scott Weiner, has failed multiple times for the sin of requiring merely some amount of density, paltry by the standards of the East Coast, around California’s transit hubs.

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and this for more commentary

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Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said many people did not understand the dynamics of a warming world.

“People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’” he said. “I always say no. It’s going to get worse.”

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on california heatwaves

Following the trend - it's likely to get worse.

 

dealing with fire

A piece from last year by Susie Cagle - how native people have managed fire.

 

 

seems reasonable:(