![]() Experts say that California’s vegetation in 2021 is reaching new levels of dryness. One obvious connection between two climate-related crises in California is the link between drought and wildfires. ![]() The reason for all of this, NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus told Slate, is that climate change goes well beyond rising atmospheric temperatures, and is rife with “complicated, non-linear processes.” Every outcome of climate change is connected to every other in a massive and largely unpredictable sequence of interlocked crises that becomes exceedingly difficult for even the most sophisticated models to predict. Not only are wildfires worse in 2021, so was the melting of polar ice caps, and the “heat domes”-extreme heat waves caused by high pressure systems that descended on the Pacific Northwest and large swaths of California. The severity of wildfires in the summer of 2021 is exceeding even the most pessimistic predictions of climate scientists, according to a report by Slate. And faster.īut why? What was causing 2021 to shape up as possibly the most catastrophic wildfire year in California’s history? And not only were the 2021 fires burning more land than in prior years, they were burning hotter. The Beckwourth Complex Fire-a combination of the Sugar and Dotta fires centered in Plumas County, north of Lake Tahoe-had burned 100,531 acres all by itself, as of July 15, according to data posted on the Plumas National Forest Facebook page. 1 and July 6, 2021, 4,902 wildfires were known to have started in California - a total up by more than 700 compared to 2020. In 2020, wildfires burned as much land as in 2018, another year of record-setting fires in the state.īetween Jan. By the same date in 2020, “only” 38,889 acres were up in flames. By July 12, according to a CNN report, 142,477 acres had already burned in the state. ![]() And the wildfires of 2021 appeared as of mid-July to be on track to become even more devastating than the 2020 blazes, which ended up incinerating 4.1 million acres by the time “fire season” wound down. “OK, well, I don’t think science knows, actually,” he said. When Crowfoot remarked that science did not agree with him, Trump was again dismissive. You just watch,” Trump stated with familiar yet disconcerting self-assurance. Gavin Newson and several top environmental officials, including Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, who implored Trump to cease his dismissal of evidence that the warming climate was behind the epidemic of fire.īut Trump’s response made excruciatingly clear that he was not ready to take climate change seriously. In September of 2020, as frighteningly hot temperatures and high winds blew wildfires across the state setting more than 2.5 million acres of California land ablaze, then-President Donald Trump paid a visit.
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