Climate change (click here) is increasing the vulnerability of many U.S. forests thorugh fire, insect infestation, drought, and disease outbreaks. Forests play an important role in absorbing and storing carbon dioxide, but the rate of uptake is projected to decline.
By Emily Holden and Jimmy Tobias
An aerial view (click here) of a neighborhood destroyed by the Camp Fire on November 15, 2018 in Paradise, California.
'Blatant manipulation' (click here)
Political appointees at the interior department have sought to play up climate pollution from California wildfires while downplaying emissions from fossil fuels as a way of promoting more logging in the nation’s forests, internal emails obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The messaging plan was crafted in support of Donald Trump’s pro-industry arguments for harvesting more timber in California, which he says would thin forests and prevent fires – a point experts refute.
The emails show officials seeking to estimate the carbon emissions from devastating 2018 fires in California so they could compare them to the carbon footprint of the state’s electricity sector and then publish statements encouraging cutting down trees....
...James Reilly, a former petroleum geologist and astronaut who is the director of the US Geological Survey, in a series of emails in 2018 asked scientists to “gin up” emissions figures for him. He also said the numbers would make a “decent sound bite”, and acknowledged that wildfire emissions estimates could vary based on what kind of trees were burning but picked the ones that he said would make “a good story”.
Scientists who reviewed the exchanges said that at best Reilly used unfortunate language and the department cherry-picked data to help achieve their pro-industry policy goals; at worst he and others exploited a disaster and manipulated the data....
By Umair Irfan
Fire authorities (click here) have officially determined that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. was responsible for last year’s deadly Camp Fire in Paradise, California.
...Camp is alarmingly reminiscent of the Carr Fire, (click here) which burned more than 229,000 acres near Redding, California in August. Many of the same factors that made the Carr Fire so calamitous are fueling the Camp Fire right now. In particular, it’s hot, it’s dry, it’s windy, there’s been little rain, and just about all the vegetation around is flammable.
As climate change pushes temperatures up, vegetation like grasses and trees are dying out. This creates ample fuel to burn. Outside of Chico, where the Camp Fire began burning, the flames were then fanned by northern California’s Diablo Winds with gusts topping 70 mph. The fire at one point gained about a football field in area per second.
Though the Camp Fire resulted from a perfect set of extreme fire conditions that all coincidentally came together at the same time, some of those conditions were years in the making.
It’s an example of how forces in the climate that build up over decades can act on the scale of days, even hours, creating a terrifying scenario the likes of which we have never experienced before: The largest, deadliest, and most destructive fires in California history were all within three months of each other this year. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has seen almost double the acres burned across its service territory compared to the same time last year.
Though climate change will never cause any individual event, scientists reported in 2016 that about 55 percent of the dryness in western forests between 1979 and 2015 could be attributed to warming due to human activity. This ongoing warming converges with seasonal variations in temperature and rainfall. “Climate change is increasing the vulnerability of many US forests through fire, insect infestations, drought, and disease outbreaks,” according to the US government’s National Climate Assessment....
