August 10, 2018: California Ablaze - It's Climate Change, Stupid

 

8/10/18: The Mendocino fire, largest in California history, is burning out of control. More than 305,000 acres have been reduced to ash. The ninth largest fire and the twenty-eighth largest are also active and only partially contained. 

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“It’s not a wakeup call anymore.” 

Cynthia Rosenzweig, NASA scientist

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Combined, the three fires have charred 905 square miles. By comparison, the total land area of Rhode Island is 1,045 square miles. 

As the Los Angeles Times reports, “The fires in July and August have been fueled by record-setting heat [emphasis added here and below], which has left brush bone dry and highly flammable.” 

At least 40 lives have been lost.

Dropping fire retardant on a California inferno.

 

Yet, at the pinnacle of the Trump administration you have a science moron in the Oval Office. Technically, one devastating fire season does not prove climate change is real. One terrible year followed on the heels of another (2017) provides a more compelling warning. In fact, the thirty largest fires in California history have all ignited in a hotter, drier landscape since 2002. 

You can label climate change “a hoax” as our idiot president does. You can listen to the vested interests that push policies friendly to Big Oil and Big Coal, who claim the science is fuzzy. You can’t deny facts: 2018 is on pace to be the fourth hottest year, globally, ever recorded. The four hottest years will be the last four. Seventeen of the hottest eighteen have occurred since 2001. 

You can pretend that climate change isn’t happening, but you have a huge pile of evidence you have to ignore. 

“It’s not a wake-up call anymore,” Cynthia Rosenzweig, who heads the climate impacts group at NASA’s Goddard Institute, said of global warming and its toll. “It’s now absolutely happening to millions of people around the world.” 

Kim Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, offered grim warning. “What we’re seeing today is making me, frankly, calibrate not only what my children will be living but what I will be living, what I am currently living.”

 

Trump and his climate-denier advisers only bury their heads deeper in the golf course turf. The interests of Big Oil and Big Coal get unfettered play. We gain a few jobs in the coal industry. That’s good for the miners, and all sympathy to those who still struggle to find work. 

Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of Americans, born and unborn, and billions round the globe, are going to pay a price for inaction today.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: The year 2019 will eventually set records as the hottest ever, and Australia will be devastated by wildfires. 

In 2020, California will be swept by even worse fires than in 2018. 

The trend lines are clear; and during his entire presidency, Trump either doesn’t see them – because he’s too lazy to study the subject – or does see them and doesn’t care. Historians will mark his failure in flaming letters.