Is Climate Change Fueling Huge California Fires?

If not, they're a not-so-sneak preview. In fact, the catastrophic SoCal fires are consistent with what climate change models have been predicting for years. They may be a prelude to many more such events in the future, as vegetation grows heavier than usual and then ignites during prolonged droughts, says Ronald Neilson, a bioclimatologist at Oregon State University and with the USDA Forest Service, and a contributor to publications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize:

"This is exactly what we’ve been projecting to happen, both in short-term fire forecasts for this year and the longer term patterns that can be linked to global climate change. You can’t look at one event such as this and say with certainty that it was caused by a changing climate. But things just like this are consistent with what the latest modeling shows, and may be another piece of evidence that climate change is a reality, one with serious effects. In the future, catastrophic fires such as those going on now in California may simply be a normal part of the landscape."

Fire forecast models developed by Neilson’s research group at OSU and the Forest Service rely on several global climate models. When combined, they accurately predicted both the Southern California fires that are happening and the drought hitting Georgia and Florida, causing crippling water shortages. In studies released five years ago, Neilson and other OSU researchers predicted that the American West could become both warmer and wetter in the coming century, conditions that would lead to repeated, catastrophic fires larger than any in recent history.

Got a fire tent?

Oh, and northern California might not get off so easy. IDEA forecasts of particulate suggest the smoke could blow ashore in San Francisco in the next 48 hours.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.

Comments

Human behavior , which evidently cannot accept the reality of cause and effect, is fueling the forest fires along with all the other “natural disaster crisis” in the news. The scenario is the same; natural events occur, human housing built in ill-considered places is destroyed, news crews show up for the “Oprah moment”, the one where the idiot home owner presides over the televised boo-hoo-a-thon in front of their destroyed residence. Finally, government officials, always mindful of the next election cycle, promise whatever amount of taxpayer money needed to “rebuild”, regardless of the wisdom of putting yet another structure in a stupid, ill-considered place.

What would really help is to STOP:

Building cities below sea level
Building on fault lines.
Building in tinder boxes
Building in slide zones
Building on flood plains
Expecting taxpayer resources to continually bail your stupid ass out of a jam you got yourself into.

People are free to build where they please , but the risk should be theirs, and if you choose to live in a picturesque tinderbox, take the next logical step and buy insurance.

Posted by: Ivanhoe on 10/25/07 at 5:47 AM Respond

I was listening to the news this afternoon, and authorities are now saying that there's at least one arsonist involved in all of
this, so no, you can't chalk
it all up to climate change,
there's dry seasons and wet
seasons in all parts of the
world, but when someone does
something either deliberately
or out of negligence, well,
Al Gore can't do anything about that...

Posted by: Bert on 10/25/07 at 7:42 PM Respond

The weatherman can not even forecast the weather. Last year in SoCal they forecast an El Nino, rain more than normal, what did we get, the biggest drought, they missed the forecast big time way. This year they say ElNina, below normal rain. What will we get, based upon their forecasting track record, lots of rain and mud slides. God just laughs at the arrogance of men.

Posted by: Betty Sue on 10/26/07 at 7:49 AM Respond

general suggestion: try actually reading the post before you comment. Betty Sue, we're not talking about "weathermen" here, whatever they are. Bert, did the post mention starting the fires? The head clearly states "fueling." doesn't matter who starts them, if there's a ton of flammable timber for an ever escalating cycle of rain and drought, any fires, starting any which way you please, will burn bigger, hotter, for longer, and at a much much bigger cost to you & me & everyone else who pays insurance rates in this country. Iavnhoe, you've got a little problem with cause & effect here. yes, more people will be impacted by the increasingly bigger fires coming to the west from climate change. more of them will be on fire lines. however, this does not change the fact that the overall conditions fueling bigger & more ferocious fires are growing -- not as a result of where people build their houses (fire happily burns houses, brush, and forests) -- but as a result of an escalating cycle of more severe droughts followed by heavier rains. there's no morality here. just smart or stupid reponses to a serious problem.

Posted by: julia whitty on 10/26/07 at 9:51 AM Respond

The human brain is wired to only perceive immediate danger, not unseen danger than can happen tomorrow. We will never convince humans to take action until they actually see the dire consequences. Al Gore, being Al Gore did make some exaggerations to get people's attention, but humans do not like to think about unpleasant things. When they see in front of their face, then they will believe it. "We are told global warming was responsible for the hurricane summer of Katrina and Rita that devastated Texas, Mississippi and New Orleans. Yet Dr. William Gray, perhaps the nation’s foremost expert on hurricanes, says he and his most experienced colleagues believe humans have little impact on global warming and global warming cannot explain the frequency or ferocity of hurricanes. After all, we had more hurricanes in the first half of the 20th century than in the last 50 years, as global warming was taking place.

“We’re brainwashing our children,” says Gray. “They’re going to the Gore movie (’An Inconvenient Truth’) and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous. … We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was.”

Gray does concede that for a scholar to question global warming can put his next federal grant in mortal peril"

Posted by: IceMan on 10/26/07 at 10:55 AM Respond