in California, where 17 wildfires are raging across the state. The Mendocino Complex fire in Northern California is now the largest wildfire ever recorded in the state’s history. It has already scorched more than a quarter of a million square acres and is still burning. Firefighters say it is expected to burn uncontrollably for the rest of this month and is currently the size of Los Angles. Fires have also forced the indefinite closure of much of Yosemite National Park. Meanwhile, the Carr fire near Redding, California has destroyed more than 1,000 homes and taken at least six lives.
Of the 20 largest wildfires in California history, 15 have occurred since 2000. Since 2012, there has not been a single month without a wildfire. The three biggest fires currently burning in California all started in July, which was the state’s hottest month on record. Experts say climate change has increased the length of fire season. This year’s fires have already burned nearly three times as many acres as the same time last year.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, six youth activists were arrested after holding a sit-in protest at Governor Brown’s office to demand action on climate change.
This comes as smoke from the massive California wildfires continues to move north into Washington and east to the central part of the United States.
Michael Mann talking:
In fact, some of the networks have started to connect the dots when it comes to climate change and the role that it’s playing with these wildfires. NBC Nightly News the other night did have a segment where they did make that connection. It is not rocket science, OK?
You warm up the planet, you’re going to get more intense and longer heat waves. You’re going to get drier soils because that heat is baking the soil. It’s baking the surface of the earth. So you’ve got hotter temperatures, you’ve got drier soils, you’ve got less winter snowpack, which is less snow falling in the winter in the Sierra Mountains, and the storms are getting diverted north of California.
And we think that that jet stream behavior itself may have a climate change connection. So you put that all together and you sort of have a perfect storm of consequences when it comes to wildfire. You’ve got all of the ingredients coming together, and so it is not a surprise. It’s not a surprise that we are seeing these record wildfires in California, in the Arctic, around the Northern Hemisphere this summer, as a consequence of heat and drought caused by human-caused climate change.
– On Sunday, just hours after the Trump administration declared the California wildfires a major disaster, President Trump tweeted, “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount 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!”
This is, unfortunately, the sort of diversion that we’ve often seen from the president, a misdirection. Because the irony here of course is what what we’re seeing has nothing to do with environmental regulations. In fact, it’s Trump’s effort to eliminate environmental regulations and policies to act on climate change which are putting us in a precarious position. These wildfires will only get worse as we continue to warm the planet by burning fossil fuels and increasing the concentration of these warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the Trump administration is doing everything it can to scuttle international efforts and domestic efforts to act on climate.
The basic factors are easy to understand here—hotter temperatures, drier soils, less runoff, less water running off from the Sierra Mountains. Obviously, those create the conditions conducive to these wildfires. But there is this other ingredient that we think is involved here and in this whole array of unprecedented extreme summer weather events that we are seeing over the past month around the entire Northern Hemisphere—unprecedented floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires.
What is happening here is that these weather systems are not moving along the way they normally do. The jet stream is this band of strong winds that blow from west to east, and if you’re flying a jet, it is faster flying from west to east across the United States than in the other direction because you’ve got that tailwind. So that’s the jet stream.
The jet stream also pushes weather systems from west to east. What is happening as we melt the sea ice in the Arctic, believe it or not, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. That warming in the Arctic is actually changing temperature patterns in the atmosphere in a way that slows down the jet stream. The jet stream is actually driven by the contrast in temperature from the warm equator to the cold polar regions. When you decrease that contrast by warming the poles more than the rest of the planet, you slow down the jet stream. Now, there are other physical processes that are involved, but that’s really the key process here. And so you have these large meanders in the jet stream, you see the jet stream really wiggling vigorously north and south, and that gives you extreme weather events.
But the added ingredient here is that the jet stream isn’t moving along, it’s not pushing those weather systems along, so the same locations get rained on day after day or get baked by the sun, day after day. And that’s when you see unprecedented extreme weather events like what we’re seeing around the Northern Hemisphere this summer. The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. We are seeing them play out this summer in real time on our television screens.
– “hothouse state”
That article, it’s more of a commentary than an original research article. The basic science that is discussed there is science we have understood for some time. James Hansen, the former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, made this point a number of years ago, that if we keep CO2 levels elevated even at current levels and we allow the climate system to equilibrate to those high levels of CO2, then over many centuries, we lose the ice sheets, forests start to migrate, we fundamentally remake the planet and it turns out that can add a whole lot of extra warming. And that isn’t always taken into account in these projections you see of the warming we can expect over the next century or so. There’s is this longer-term commitment.
Much of that CO2 that we’ve put into the atmosphere is going to remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years. If we keep that CO2 elevated at levels they are now or even higher than they are now, then we could see major disruptions in the climate. Again, the science there isn’t new, but it is important, and what it tells us is not only do we have to cut our emissions dramatically to avoid warming the planet more than a catastrophic two degrees Celsius, 3.5 degree Fahrenheit—we can still do that; Paris will get us halfway there—we have to improve on Paris to get all the way there. We can do that. But it is not enough just to level off those CO2 concentrations. Ultimately, we’re going to have to pull that CO2 back out of the atmosphere. If we leave it at current levels for centuries, we will commit potentially to catastrophic changes in our climate.
Too often, we allow the problem of climate change to be framed as if there’s some tipping point—there’s a certain amount of warming that we go beyond and then, you know, we suddenly have a calamity on our hands. It is much more like a minefield. We’re walking out onto this minefield already, and we are starting to set off some of those mines. But what we know is the further we walk out onto that minefield, the more of those mines we are going to set off. So the only sensible strategy is to stop moving forward out onto the minefield. We’ve got to go back to where we came from. We’ve got to bring those carbon emissions down.
Again, the Paris Accord gets us about halfway to where we need to be to stave off the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, but we’re already seeing dangerous climate change now. If you talk to people in California, if you talk to the people of Puerto Rico, people in Europe, people all around the world, in many respects, dangerous climate change is already starting to arrive. We’re on this highway, this carbon highway, and we have to get off at the next available exit.
_____
Michael Mann
distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.
— source democracynow.org