July 22, 2021: The Age of Megafires - Climate Change

 

7/22/21: The massive 617-square-mile Bootleg Fire in Oregon continues to burn, with smoke causing hazy skies as far away as New York City. Seventy homes have been destroyed, 2,000 evacuated. (This is the second year that smoke has traveled so far to the east.) Fire season has come early again in the American West, with at least 78 major fires blazing, Bootleg being the largest.

 

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“The Age of Megafires.”

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People who deal with fire are warning this is the start of another horrible summer and fall, as climate change continues to heat up and dry out large parts of the nation. “I would categorize this fire season thus far as historic in terms of the amount of resources we’ve deployed, how many times we’ve deployed – within a three-week period, we’ve mobilized to six conflagrations,” a spokesperson with the Oregon fire marshal’s office told reporters earlier this week. This “is the earliest and most significant mobilization to date.” 

Fires have wrought destruction across the West. In California, a new fire, near the site of the Paradise fire of 2018, which killed 85 people, has forced a new round of evacuations and blackened 133 square miles. In Idaho, 18 major forest fires are burning. In Montana, families in parts of Missoula County, near Lolo Pass, are under a mandatory evacuation order. The Slough Grass Fire has incinerated 9,700 acres, roughly fifteen square miles. The National Interagency Fire Service calls it “zero percent contained.” The Northern Rockies are at Level 5, the highest warning stage, due to widespread fire activity. Six large fires are active in Alaska. 

In fact, for all you climate change-deniers out there, this screenshot of a map from the University of California for today might give you some sense of what is transpiring this summer. 

And again, we are early in the fire season.

The Bootleg Fire in Oregon has been so massive and intense, it’s creating its own weather. As vast amounts of heat and smoke rise, cooler air is sucked in around the perimeter. This acts essentially like some giant blowing on a giant campfire, causing it to burn ever hotter. Huge updrafts, reaching as high as 30,000 feet into the air create clouds. When the heated air finally cools and the draft collapses, it can create strong, gusty winds in all directions, spreading burning embers everywhere. One huge cloud, estimated to have reached 45,000 feet sparked its own lightning. Freakish winds can also create mini-tornadoes on the ground. 

Or, as experts at Yale explained last year, the world has hit a “climate tipping point” and we have entered “The Age of Megafires.” 

Evidence sited includes the largest fire in recorded human history, the Black Dragon, which destroyed 18 million acres across northern China and southern Russia, the 1988 wildfire in Yellowstone, which destroyed a third of the park, and the fire near Canberra, Australia in 2003 that spawned an F-2 level tornado. Scientists at first found it hard to believe the fire had caused a tornado to form. But in the Carr Fire in California in 2018, F-3 level winds were created.

 

You could find plenty of evidence of growing danger – as climate change altered the basic dynamics of nature. Or you could listen to right-wing deniers, like former-president Donald J. Trump. Ignoring the larger issues, he focused on government regulations requiring us all to buy energy-efficient lightbulbs and dishwashers. 

Meanwhile, the experts kept seeing evidence of danger. A fire in Alaska in 2007 destroyed 270,000 acres of tundra, when fires a hundredth that size had been unheard of in that region. Another massive blaze in Alaska in 2015, generated its own weather and shot out 65,000 lightning strikes, igniting 250 secondary fires. A fire in Canada gave birth to lightning, with one bolt traveling twenty miles and triggering another blaze. In fact, lightning increases by roughly 12% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature. So: more lightning = more fires. Then you had massive destruction that resulted when megafires swept Australia in 2020. Finally, you had record-setting burns in Siberia in 2010, again in 2012, again in 2015, and again in 2019 and 2020.

 

As this blogger understands it: Some of the same conditions that wiped out Pompeii in 79 A.D. are now found out West. The firebombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945 also created similar problems. When vast amounts of heat rise, cooler air is sucked into the spot where the fire is burning, and the fire intensifies. At Pompeii, when the pillar of volcanic ash reached high enough altitudes to finally cool, it collapsed, and rolled down the mountain like a super-heated cloud, blanketing the unfortunate town. With much of Dresden in flames, heat rose, air was sucked into the fire, and high fire-generated winds uprooted trees and blew people into the flames. 

(Don’t quote me, however. I’m no scientist. Still, on this issue, I’m a hundred times smarter than Donald J. Trump)