https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22082020/california-colorado-wildfires-climate-change-global-transformation
By Michael Kodas
Aug 22, 2020
The wildfires that exploded over the past few days in California and Colorado show clear influences of global warming, climate scientists say, and evidence of how a warming and drying climate is increasing the size and severity of fires from the California coast to the high Rocky Mountains.
They may also be the latest examples of climate-driven wildfires around the world burning not only much bigger, hotter and faster, but exploding into landscapes and seasons in which they were previously rare.
For tens of thousands of Californians enduring evacuations, and millions more suffering through smoke that has brought some parts of the state the worst air quality in the world, the recent fire weather has seemed almost biblical.
The entire state and much of the rest of the West has been, for the last week, in the grip of a "heat dome" that has brought temperatures of 129.9 degrees Fahrenheit to Death Valley, perhaps the hottest temperatures ever recorded on the planet. On Saturday, Aug. 15, the National Weather Service issued its first ever warning for a tornado born of a wildfire, when radar detected at least five spinning vortices in a pyrocumulonimbus cloud rising from the Loyalton fire near the Nevada state line. Witnesses saw a "firenado" dropping from the smoky storm cloud to the ground.
That weekend, nearly 11,000 lightning strikes peppered Northern California and the Bay Area, where thunderstorms are rare, sparking more than 370 new wildfires. By Saturday morning, wildfires had burned more than a million acres in California—an area larger than the state of Rhode Island—and nearly 120,000 residents were evacuated.
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Despite what may look like a new world of wildfire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of California, Los Angeles, said few climatologists and fire scientists have been surprised by the severity of the fires across the West this year.
Federal wildfire forecasters predicted that it's "going to get bad really quickly, starting with Arizona, Utah and Colorado," Swain said. "And then the forecast was that Northern California would start getting bad in August and peak in the fall. Well, up through August, so far, that's looking like an awfully good prediction."
What's more, Swain said, the recent fires in the West fit into a trend of groundbreaking yet predictable wildfires around the world, as warming temperatures and diminishing moisture tip over fire regimes, the term fire scientists use to describe the typical timing, frequency, intensity and duration of wildfires on a given landscape.
"If we go back, this feels like years ago, earlier in 2020, to Australia, all the experts there before that got bad said this looks like it could get bad," he said.
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"Our paper says that climate change has already doubled the risk of extreme fire weather conditions in California," he said, "and it will double them again over the next couple of decades...perhaps more than double. That's a big change."
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Kolden also noted that such unusual fire events are occurring across the country and around the world.
"The thing that I continue to point to when we see these sorts of extreme events, is the frequency of these extremes and that they're happening all over the place in the West simultaneously," she said. "And it's not just the West, this is globally."
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It's no surprise, Balch noted, that the largest of Colorado's fires is burning where the state has shown the greatest average temperature increase. Or that Colorado isn't the only state where hotter temperatures have increased the amount of land burning.
"Across the West, human-caused warming has effectively made fuels much drier and doubled the amount of western forests that have burned since 1984," she said.
And, Udall added, the warming and drying of the West and the impacts on wildfire, are far from over.
"I have, as most scientists do, real worries about what yet additional warming will do to what is already a bad situation," he said.
tags: extreme weather, severe weather,
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