Northern California’s Dixie fire this weekend swelled to become the single largest fire incident the state has ever recorded, a mammoth that has leveled mountain towns, produced flames that shot more than 60m in the air, and scorched through more than 2,000km2.
“It is just the perfect storm,” California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) public information officer Rick Carhart said, adding that the difficult and steep terrain, parched vegetation and hot, dry weather had all come together to fuel the conflagration that has sent flames more than 60m into the sky.
He said that the Dixie fire was just one of a series of large blazes that have affected the area in the past few years.
Illustration: Lance Liu
“It has been giant devastating fire after giant devastating fire,” he said.
Researchers are concerned that the Dixie fire’s record would not hold for long. The parched landscapes and increased temperatures that set the stage for bigger blazes this year are not anomalies — they are trends.
The conditions will get worse.
Drought, extreme heat and destructive infernos are each devastating in their own right, but together they cause calamity. The combination augments their effects and causes each individual condition to intensify. Scientists say they are seeing the trifecta more frequently in the US west and that climate breakdown is the key culprit.
“This is what climate scientists have been warning about for years now,” said Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Drought and fire have always been part of the climate in the western US, but increasing heat, which scientists say is directly attributable to human-caused climate change, has had a devastating impact.
“These things amplify each other,” Williams said, adding that the effects exponentially increase.
The climate conditions do not act alone, and fire and water policies play a part in increasing risks and determining the outcome as well.
Most fires are still started by people. The expansion of communities in forested and fire-prone areas adds new dimensions that complicate containment efforts when blazes get big. What is happening in the environment has made fires much harder to fight.
That is why new records do not just nose out the old ones — they obliterate them. Last year, the 1.7 million hectares that burned in California was nearly triple the previous record. This year, fires have burned more than three times as much land as they had by this point last year, according to Cal Fire.
“And there’s really no end in sight for the capacity for that type of thing to happen again,” Williams said.
Heat affects drought in several ways. Higher temperatures cause precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow. Snow that does fall melts away much more quickly, leaving less to trickle into streams, rivers and reservoirs. People, plants and animals depend on the snowpack to feed the water systems and with less available, the landscape and anything living in it or off of it would feel the strain.
Heat also bakes moisture right out of the landscape. The hotter it is, the more water plants and animals need to regulate themselves, and that increases water scarcity even further. What makes all this more complicated is that the relationship works in the other direction as well — drought conditions increase heat.
“Heat is both a response to drought and also a driver of drought,” said Andrew Hoell, a meteorologist for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s physical sciences laboratory.
Dry soil radiates and reflects the sun’s energy that otherwise would be used in evaporation. That pushes surface temperatures even higher.
“Just like we get cold when we climb out of a swimming pool, the earth cools off when water evaporates,” Hoell said. “When soils are dry, when it’s hot out, there isn’t as much water available to evaporate. That means the earth doesn’t get to cool off.”
That is why Hoell calls climate change a “threat multiplier.” As the region becomes hotter and drier, the risk of small sparks quickly igniting into enormous and erratic wildfires magnifies.
New research also suggests that the wildfires themselves will increase drought and heat, adding a new dimension to the catastrophic cycle.
Researchers are discussing hypotheses that smoke and aerosols released into the atmosphere by wildfires can alter weather patterns, Hoell said.
There are already studies that show that wildfires influence the formation of clouds in the sky and could decrease precipitation.
“It is very dynamic and very complicated, but that’s where we are going as a science community — we are trying to figure out how wildfires feed back on to drought,” he said.
Researchers are also investigating how reduced canopies from forests decimated in fires expose the snowpack that was once shaded to the sun.
Although more research is needed to better understand these complex relationships, the scientific record is clear that rising heat would lead to an increase in extreme events.
“Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth report, released on Monday, which went on to detail and list the expected increase in both frequency and intensity of hot extremes, ecological droughts and the reductions in arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost, along with other catastrophic conditions.
“Under all future scenarios and global warming levels, temperatures and extreme high temperatures are expected to continue to increase,” the report said of North and Central America, attributing the rise to “human influence.”
Models show that extreme heat waves are expected to happen more frequently, more intensely and across larger areas of land in just the next three decades.
“Historically we have had between four and six extreme heat events in any given year,” said Steve Ostoja, director of the US Department of Agriculture’s California Climate Hub. “By 2050, we expect that number to go somewhere between 25 and 30 events. That’s a huge difference. That basically means it is going to be that hot all the time.”
The trends are already being felt. About half of the contiguous US is in drought, according to federal agencies.
The entire state of California is experiencing drought conditions, with more than 88 percent of the state in the “extreme drought” category, as determined by the US Drought Monitor.
Meanwhile, dozens of climate stations across the west documented the warmest June and July on record, as extreme heat waves spiked temperatures across the region.
Stressed ecosystems have already become more vulnerable. The disasters have taxed trees, which are being ravaged by diseases and pests. Studies show that about 150 million trees died in the last period of drought and billions of creatures living along the coasts perished during heat waves this summer.
Climate scientists say that there is still time to make big changes, and there is a chance that the worst effects of the changing climate can be staved off, but there is no time to lose.
In the west, the wildfires, drought and heat are already wreaking havoc.
Williams said that there are clear indications that places like California would not look like they do now for much longer.
The landscape is growing arid, and as it gets drier and hotter, there would be more fires. That would lead to fewer forests and more grasslands, shrublands and deserts.
“Fire has been around for hundreds of millions of years and it is a critical part of the Earth’s system,” he said.
The fires of the future would do much more than clear the underbrush.
“Now the fires we are seeing are eliminating giant patches of forest entirely,” he said, adding that many tree species had not evolved to repopulate the giant gaps quickly.
“It could take hundreds of years for ponderosa or Jeffrey pine — which we see a lot of in the Sierra Nevada — to actually reoccupy giant patches of forest,” he said. “By that time the climate might be totally inappropriate for those species anyway.”
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