Last week, 18 wildfires were burning at once in California, including its largest in history, destroying over 1,100 homes and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate. The smoke made the air in the state’s Central Valley unhealthy to breathe for a record 15 consecutive days, as I can personally attest.
Donald Trump decided to use the opportunity to renew his war with California by nonsensically blaming the wildfires on environmental laws.
Donald J. Trump?@realDonaldTrumpCalifornia wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump dislikes California. His 2.9m national popular vote deficit to Hillary Clinton is a sore spot, and her margin of victory in California was by 30% and 4.3m votes. California has also long been a leader in developing laws to clean and protect the environment, and Trump despises regulations that benefit public health and welfare at the expense of industry profits.
And so, we got the Tweet bemoaning water being “diverted into the Pacific Ocean” (in scientific terms, they’re called “rivers”). Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire immediately noted that water isn’t firefighters’ problem:
We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires, but let’s be clear: It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires
Although Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), who represents the district encompassing Redding (or what’s left of it) denied the reality of human-caused climate change in an interview with the Guardian, the scientific research clearly shows that global warming is exacerbating wildfires. As one might expect, hotter, drier conditions lead to bigger fires. Zeke Hausfather showed in an analysis for Carbon Brief that there’s a strong correlation between temperatures and the total area of forests burned in the western USA.
Red bars show western US forest area burned (in thousand hectares) using data provided by Prof John Abatzoglou, updated from the data used in Abatzoglou and Williams (2016). Black line shows March-August temperature anomalies relative to a 1961-1990 baseline period for the US west of 102 degrees longitude using data from NOAA. Illustration: Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief
A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 75% of year-to-year variations in area burned by wildfires in the western US can be explained by fuel aridity (a combination of temperature and precipitation), and:
Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests … and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984
July 2018 was the hottest month ever recorded in California. The past four years were the state’s four hottest, and 2018 is on pace to also finish in California’s top-five hottest years. Plus, California just recently emerged from its worst drought in over a millennium, which was likewise amplified by global warming and created plentiful wildfire fuel.
California average annual temperature data from Noaa (blue) and linear trend (red). Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli
Other factors like forest management have also played a role in the growing size of wildfires, but human-caused climate change is clearly a major contributor. Under a high-emissions global warming scenario, a 2011 studyfound that by the end of the century the annual area burned by wildfires in California would increase by about 50%, and would double in heavily-forested Northern California.
It’s also worth noting that forest management is primarily a federal, not state issue, headed by the Department of Interior and US Forest Service. As the Sacramento Bee reported:
The Trump administration’s own budget request for the current fiscal year and the coming one proposed slashing tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Interior and U.S. Forest Service budgets dedicated to the kind of tree clearing and other forest management work experts say is needed.
Ironically, California has been using the $256m allocated to wildfire risks from the state’s carbon cap and trade system revenues. Visiting the state yesterday, Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said:
It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change. What is important is we manage our forests.
But given that global warming doubled the area burned by forest fires over the past three decades, it really does matter that the Trump administration denies climate change and is actively making the problem worse.
Meanwhile, California and the Trump EPA are battling over vehicle fuel efficiency standards, which had not improved for decades until the Obama administration took office and bailed out the American auto industry, whose gas guzzlers became unpopular when gasoline prices spiked.
Posted by dana1981 on Monday, 13 August, 2018
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