"Our paper says that climate change has already doubled the risk of extreme fire weather conditions in California," he said, "and it will double them again over the next couple of decades...perhaps more than double. That's a big change." #ClimateCrisis insideclimatenews.org/news/22082020/…
“Swain said he also sees surprising changes in where and what the current fires are burning. "What's so interesting about the fires in Northern California right now is they're burning an incredibly diverse range of ecosystems," he said, pointing out that in addition to...”
“...chaparral, brush and grasslands that routinely burn in August, the fires have overtaken areas that rarely catch fire.”
"The earlier disappearance of snowpack gets compounded by a warm, dry summer and the failure of the monsoon to materialize," he said. "Those switches are tending to turn on more often than not."
"It's burning in the coast redwoods which have almost no modern fire history," he said of the forests of huge, moist trees. "That's kind of incredible that that's happening at all, but especially in August, in the complete absence of any offshore winds."
"The thing that I continue to point to when we see these sorts of extreme events, is the frequency of these extremes and that they're happening all over the place in the West simultaneously," she said. "And it's not just the West, this is globally."
“You've got to pull in some other factor to explain why these stream flows are so low and that other factor is, of course, temperature, because it increases the evaporative load of basically everything. This year was like a supercharged version of that."
