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Opinion: Record-Setting Heat Wave Shows That Climate Change is Creating Hell on Earth

/in , /by /Los Angeles Times by The Times Editorial Board

The record-breaking heat wave baking the West Coast is another painful sign that climate change is here, and we have to adapt.

The Pacific Northwest has been sizzling, with conditions forecasters have described as unprecedented and life-threatening. Portland, Ore., hit 113 degrees Monday, breaking the previous all-time high of 112 degrees, set Sunday. About 100 miles to the south, in Eugene, the U.S. track and field Olympic trials were halted Sunday afternoon, and spectators were asked to evacuate the stadium, due to the extreme heat.

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Drought Woes in Dry US West Raise July 4 Fireworks Fears

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Lindsay Whitehurst

Many Americans aching for normalcy as pandemic restrictions end are looking forward to traditional Fourth of July fireworks. But with a historic drought in the U.S. West and fears of another devastating wildfire season, officials are canceling displays, passing bans on setting off fireworks or begging for caution.

Fireworks already have caused a few small wildfires, including one started by a child in northern Utah and another in central California. Last year, a pyrotechnic device designed for a baby’s gender reveal celebration sparked a California blaze that killed a firefighter during a U.S. wildfire season that scorched the second-highest amount of land in nearly 40 years.

Some regions of the American West are experiencing their worst drought conditions in more than a century this year, said Jennifer Balch, director of Earth Lab at the University of Colorado.

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Wildfires Threaten Urban Water Supplies, Long After the Flames Are Out

/in , , /by /The New York Timesby Henry Fountain

Wrangling a 25-foot-long tube of straw up a steep hillside studded with charred pine trees, three volunteer workers placed it in a shallow trench that had been dug along the slope.

Locked in place with wooden stakes, the sausage-like tube was part of an effort to avoid a potentially large and long-term problem with the drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people to the east. The tube, with others above and below it, should help prevent the hillside, made unstable last fall by a large wildfire, from choking the water supply with sediment when the thunderstorms known as monsoon rains arrive as expected this summer.

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Intensifying California Drought Promises ‘Very Concerning’ Fire Season

/in , , /by /The Washington Postby Diana Leonard

California is entering its summer fire season with a high level of flammability. The hottest and most fire-prone months of the year are ahead. Conditions in the state are a striking example of escalating fire potential in the drought-stricken West.

How the season unfolds will depend on a number of factors, including where ignitions occur and the duration of summer heat waves.

But the outlook is poor at this time, given deepening drought, abundant dry fuels and hot early-season temperatures.

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As Drought Intensifies, California Seeing More Wildfires

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Don Thompson

As California sinks deeper into drought it already has had more than 900 additional wildfires than at this point in 2020, which was a record-breaking year that saw more than 4% of the state’s land scorched by flames.

The danger prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to propose spending a record $2 billion on wildfire mitigation. That’s double what he had proposed in January.

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Grim Western Fire Season Starts Much Drier Than Record 2020

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Seth Borenstein

As bad as last year’s record-shattering fire season was, the western U.S. starts this year’s in even worse shape.

The soil in the West is record dry for this time of year. In much of the region, plants that fuel fires are also the driest scientists have seen. The vegetation is primed to ignite, especially in the Southwest where dead juniper trees are full of flammable needles.

“It’s like having gasoline out there,” said Brian Steinhardt, forest fire zone manager for Prescott and Coconino national forests in Arizona.

A climate change-fueled megadrought of more than 20 years is making conditions that lead to fire even more dangerous, scientists said. Rainfall in the Rockies and farther west was the second lowest on record in April, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

 

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Wildfires Threaten River Networks in the Western U.S.

/in , /by /PHYS.ORGby Kim Delker

A new study conducted by researchers from The University of New Mexico has found that wildfires—which have been increasing in frequency, severity and extent around the globe—are one of the largest drivers of aquatic impairment in the western United States, threatening our water supply. The research, “Wildfires increasingly impact western U.S. fluvial networks,” was published recently in Nature Communications.

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California and the West Are in for Another Tough Fire Year, Federal Officials Forecast

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Anna M. Phillips

After a 2020 fire season that shattered records and killed 33 people in California, federal wildfire experts predict another tough one for the state due to widespread and worsening drought conditions.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told reporters Thursday that they had been briefed by government wildfire experts at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, to expect another extremely active fire season complicated, for the second year, by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With nearly half of the United States gripped by a severe drought, officials said that Americans living throughout much of the West should plan for a year of “above average wildfire potential.”

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Wildfires are Contaminating Drinking Water Systems, and it’s More Widespread than People Realize

/in , , /by /The Conversationby Andrew Whelton

More than 58,000 fires scorched the United States last year, and 2021 is on track to be even drier. What many people don’t realize is that these wildfires can do lasting damage beyond the reach of the flames – they can contaminate entire drinking water systems with carcinogens that last for months after the blaze. That water flows to homes, contaminating the plumbing, too.

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Opinion: There is No Drought

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Times by The Times Editorial Board

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency last month in Sonoma and Mendocino counties because of severe drop-offs in the winter rains that once had been counted on to fill reservoirs in the Russian River watershed, north of the San Francisco Bay Area. Like most other California reservoirs, those human-made lakes were built in the 20th century, an unusually wet period when compared with more than a thousand years of climate records reconstructed from studies of ancient tree rings and geological evidence.

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