Opinion
Environment
The climate crisis has already arrived. Just look
to California’s abnormal wildfires
In the last decade, amid drought and searing heat,
California has entered the ‘era of megafires’ and has become the ‘examplar for
climate change extreme events today’
Alastair
Gee and Dani Anguiano
Fri 21 Aug
2020 11.30 BSTLast modified on Fri 21 Aug 2020 18.21 BST
There’s an
idea that when the climate crisis begins, we will know it. Movies present it as
a moment when the world’s weather suddenly turns apocalyptic: winds howl, sea
levels surge, capital cities are decimated. Climate messaging can bolster this
notion, implying that we have a certain number of years to save the day before
reaching a cataclysmic point of no return.
Living in
expectation of a definitive global break can blind us to the fact that
gradually, insidiously, the climate crisis has already arrived.
In few
places is this as clear as California, where extreme wildfires have become the
new abnormal. There is currently a “fire siege” in northern California, with
wildfires burning in every one of the nine Bay Area counties except for San
Francisco, which is entirely urbanized. Tens of thousands of residents have
evacuated and people are choking on smoke.
The
circumstances of these blazes are unusual. They began with a tropical storm
deteriorating in the Pacific Ocean, spinning off moisture in the direction of
California. As it made landfall in the San Francisco region over the weekend,
it sparked a remarkable lightning storm, and 10,849 lightning strikes were
tallied in three days.
Over
millennia California’s landscape has adapted to burn, with some tree species
requiring the heat of flames to open their seed cases, and lightning-sparked
wildfires are not unusual. But the state has been experiencing unheard-of heat,
and just logged what may have been the hottest ever temperature recorded on
earth: 129.9F in Death Valley, a few hundred miles southeast of the Bay Area
lightning swarm. Vegetation is achingly dry and primed to ignite.
California’s
governor announced on Wednesday that there were 367 fires, and conflagrations
have grown so rapidly that there are not enough firefighters to tackle them
all. Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist, told us in an interview that he was
watching the current fires with “incredulity”.
“It seems
like every year re-ups the previous year in terms of pushing the envelope, in
terms of how much fire we’re seeing in the landscape and how severe that fire
is,” he said.
There were
also, by the by, several fire tornadoes at the weekend. Witnessing these
phenomena, another fire expert remarked that California “is the exemplar for
climate change extreme events today”.
In the last
decade, amid drought and searing heat, California has entered the “era of
megafires”. Our new book, Fire in Paradise, tells the story of a town that was
almost entirely wiped out by a fire of unheralded speed in 2018. It killed 85
people, making it the deadliest ever fire in California. Other notable blazes
include a 1,000-ft wide fire tornado that churned through the town of Redding a
few months before the Paradise catastrophe, and fires in California’s Wine
Country that killed 44 people.
All of this
is why, as we scan the headlines for the planetary shift that will mark the
true arrival of the climate crisis, we risk losing sight of the fact that
places like California are already experiencing it.
This is not
entirely surprising. According to the ecological theory of “shifting
baselines”, we do not notice the degradation of the natural world because
little by little we get used to it, like a frog in hot water. We think that it
has always been this way.
Once, for
example, the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America,
perhaps the world. Observers in the 19th century described great flocks so loud
that you couldn’t hold a conversation and so large they obscured the sun: “The
light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse”.
Yet slowly,
as a result of overhunting and habitat destruction, they vanished into
extinction, and most of us do not miss them because we have never known
anything else. Our expectations of the natural world are simply different.
When it
comes to California wildfires, the ground has been moving under our feet for
decades, as heat rises, snowpacks shrink, and plants dry out. The baseline has
shifted. How long before we forget that it was ever otherwise?
 |
The
harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.
|
There is no
precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of
Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was
swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and
killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination,
taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the
news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee
crisis that continues to unfold.
Fire in
Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds
of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific
experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who
have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal
the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got
out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their
accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home
on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it;
the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the
police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would
be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12
hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the
chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the
science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company
PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from
the ruins.
This is the
story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift―of a remarkable
landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to
trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also
the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable
kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is,
finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never
witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was
unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts,
it will surely happen again. |
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