Yusef Jalali, PhD, PE
Climate change may be defined as the long-term metamorphosis in the earth’s atmospheric weather patterns. Climate change scientists investigate the major factors affecting the weather patterns on earth.
Thus, the question is begged: In light of recent unprecedent wildfires and hurricanes, does climate change science see a connection with global warming? Herein, we’ll try to shed some light on some aspects of this question.
This year in the largest wildfires in California history, no less than 31 persons, including several fire fighters lost their lives, 4% of California land (4 million acres) was burned to ashes, millions of wildlife and thousands of homes were destroyed.
The hottest August in 141 years of recordkeeping registered 130 F in Death Valley in California. Associated Press reported earth sweltered to a record hot September with U.S. climate officials indicating there’s nearly a two-to-one chance that 2020 will end up as the globe’s hottest year on record.
In a recent CBS 60 Minutes program, Wade Crowfoot, head of California’s Natural Resources Agency says “California emerged from a five-year drought in 2016. In that drought, which we called a mega-drought– hasn’t happened at that level in a thousand years.
We experienced communities in California literally running out of water… So that’s an existential challenge… We lost over 160 million trees in the Sierra Nevada mountain range as a result of that drought… And where California dried out is now the site of the largest single fire in state history, called the Creek Fire… The fire that burned the hottest and most dangerous, the Creek Fire, was in the epicenter of that tree mortality. It ran so hot that it created a smoke cloud 50,000 feet in the sky… Fifty million Americans on the West Coast suffered through weeks of the worst air quality on the planet”.
California State Fire Chief Thom Porter tells the 60 Minutes program “The largest fires were ignited by storms, but because the air is so dry the rain evaporated before it reached the ground… leaving the fire fighters fighting dry lightning”.
The number of tropical storms or hurricanes hitting the United States from the Gulf of Mexico this year, has already reached 27, more than double the usual number. ‘Zeta’, the 27th storm of the Atlantic hurricane season made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 2 storm and killed at least 6 people.
The City of Houston has been hit by 500-year storms, five times in the last five years. The biweekly New York Intelligencer writes in the age of global warming this phrase has been alienated from its meaning… There was a time when the phrase meant, based on historical meteorologic data, a storm of this magnitude could happen only once in a span of 500 years…
“Climate change will continue, and those records — high temperatures, historic rainfall, drought, and wind speed and all the rest — will continue to fall. From here, literally everything that follows, climate-wise, will be literally unprecedented”.
The New York Intelligencer reports “On June 20, in the small Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle, a heat wave baking the region peaked at 38 degrees Celsius — just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. In a world without climate change, this anomaly, one Danish meteorologist calculated, would be a 1-in-100,000-year event. Thanks to climate change, that year is now”. In June as a result of permafrost melting, an oil-storage facility collapsed, releasing 21,000 tons of oil, about 2/3 the scale of Exxon Valdez spill, into the local river.
However, a major threat of permafrost melting, which contains twice the amount of carbon that exists in the earth’s atmosphere, is the commencement of microbial activity and photochemical reactions that would result in the release of carbon to the atmosphere.
This positive feedback will in turn expedite the ongoing global warming.
Today the Guardian of London reported on the release of methane gas to the atmosphere from the melting of frozen methane gas reserves within the permafrost on the eastern shores of Siberia within the Arctic circle under the seabed. The greenhouse effect of methane gas in the atmosphere is several times more intense than that of carbon dioxide.
The California Governor’s website indicates that nearly one third of the state is covered by forests and natural lands (about 34 million acres). However, only 3% of these lands are owned by the state (1 million ac.). Some 57% (19 million ac.) is owned by the Federal government agencies (US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, & National Park Service).
The remaining 40% (14 million ac.) is owned by private families and individuals, the native American tribes, and lumber and wood companies. Therefore, from the legal standpoint, the financial responsibility for the upkeep and maintenance of about 97% of the forest and natural lands falls on the shoulders of the Federal government and private owners. However, it’s noteworthy that half of the state budget for fuel management in forests (thinning and cutting trees) is spent in the forests owned by the Federal government!
On August 29 the weekly Grest publication wrote, for more than a century, the policy of the US Forest Service has been limited to fire suppression. Jessica Morse, deputy secretary for forest management at the California Natural Resources Agency said “It had the motto of ‘Fires out by 10 a.m.,’.
It leaves us with the forests we have today: Overly dense, overly stocked and burning with high temperatures and destructiveness.” The Native American tribes effectively prevented huge wildfires for centuries, by thinning the trees and setting up controlled fires in strategic locations to create safe zones.
In the 1980s, the Forest Service attempted to change course, and began to thin out the trees and other fuel to try to contain fires within the confines of the forest.
However, the neo-liberal policies of Ronald Reagan was eying another direction, as it viewed investment in the public and social programs as a deterrent to economic prosperity. LeRoy Westerling, who studies wildfire and climate change at the University of California, Merced, says “So for two generations we’ve been underinvesting in everything … Everywhere you look you can see the effect: The roads are sh.., the health system is in shambles, we are lagging in clean energy, and our forests are burning.”
There is consensus among experts that for public safety and environmental protection in California, about one million acres of forest and wildland need to be restored, annually. Reduction of forest wildfires will not only improve the air quality and public health, but will also improve public safety, the rural economy, job creation, quality of natural water resources, protection of wildlife and biodiversity, and will reduce the emission of global warming gases.
Finally, in August 2020 the USFS signed an agreement with the state of California whereby the former agency agreed to match the activities of California to clear and restore half a million acres annually, for 20 years. That restoration would take the form of thinning trees, chipping up downed wood, prescribed burns, and timber cutting where it makes both ecological and economic sense.
The agreement was welcomed by a wide spectrum of environmental organizations, however, few caveats were also noted by researchers and experts in the field.
In a news article on Sept. 15, 2020, BBC News quotes Professor Stefan Doerr, a wildfire expert at Swansea University (Wales, UK) saying “But the emphasis has been on putting out any fires – and with climate change this has now created a tinderbox of vegetation.
A combination of drier, hotter and windy conditions is the key factor in these recent fires”.
He adds that even in areas where there have been attempts to reduce flammable material in forests, it’s not clear how much difference this would have made, “The bottom line remains that the extreme meteorological conditions are the main drivers for these extreme fires.”