Thread by @dwallacewells

"What can be done?" The California fires are now almost twice as destructive as those of 2018, which set records. The fire season is far from over. This is climate change, but climate action isn't enough to stop it. We must adapt, too. A thread (1/x). nymag.com/intelligencer/…

The great fires of California’s past marked time generation by generation, horrors lingering in memory for decades before they were surpassed. In recent years, the procession has been annual, horrors arriving nearly every fall. This year, this week, it was day by day...

...the fires blurring into one another from the vantage of anyone far enough away to be following by social media rather than rear-view mirror.

It was hard to keep the fires straight, coming one after the other, three of the worst four fires in state history still burning when a whole new wave of burning began, this one powered by Santa Ana winds. The smoke didn't stay separate, either.

Instead, it formed a toxic cloud a thousand miles wide, up and down the east coast and as high as 50,000 feet in the sky. It was blown out into the Pacific and to the East Coast, in patterns the National Weather Service said were "beyond the scope of our models."

You can’t outrun a wildfire burning at full speed; some grow an acre a second, some three times faster. And you can’t outdrive flames carried by winds traveling 60 miles per hour. In 2020, you can't fly above them, anymore, either—the smoke 20,000 feet above cruising altitude.

"The Bear Fire, in Northern California, burned through 250,000 acres in a day—around 400 square miles. Up the coast, in Oregon, five separate towns had been “substantially destroyed,” said Governor Kate Brown, with smoke and fire carried by near-hurricane strength winds."

Parts of the state which as recently as 2018 had been modeled to have a zero percent chance of ever burning were now on fire.

"In Oroville, in California, where historic floods had threatened a local dam and forced the evacuation of more than 180,000 in 2017, the approach of the Bear Fire meant that 20,000 were ordered, immediately, to flee."

"In photographs, the nearby Bidwell Bar Bridge, normally green, and the sky and the flames and the bridge itself, were all blurry variations of the same shade of burning rust. You could mistake it for the Golden Gate Bridge."

It may feel, from a distance or perhaps even up close, merely that California is burning again. But this season is already much, much worse than any in recorded history, and there are months yet to go.

"In SF, at noon, you couldn’t see. 'No measurable sunlight' was penetrating the smoke—the fire equivalent of an eclipse. Rooftop solar stopped working. It was 30-degrees colder than predicted. A toddler walked out her front door with a flashlight, searching for the sidewalk."

"On social media, in a mood of tragic acquiescence, people were posting real-time photographs of Bay Area burnt-orange alongside stills of Blade Runner 2049 and debating how much science-fiction dystopia had already gotten right."

"Among activists, the mood was exhaustion and urgency—fury that so little had been made of climate change in coverage of this summer’s historic heat wave, and conviction that these fires made the case for action, again, as if the world needed another reason to move quickly."

"The call to climate action was echoed by Establishment figures from Barack Obama to Gavin Newsom to Kamala Harris and Andrew Cuomo." Many had worked to expand or support fossil fuel production. All were members of a party that recently refused to end fossil fuel subsidies.

"Of course, we must move much more quickly. But in planning a path forward, through fire, California cannot wait, or hope, for climate action—for a Green New Deal, electrified everything, and global decarbonization. For one thing, it would take too long."

"The climate impacts of even extremely aggressive global decarbonization, scientists believe, won’t be even observable for decades. Until then, no matter what we do, warming will worsen, and the fires of the American west, presumably, will too."

"If the fires of 2020 horrify you, as they should, consider that, no matter what we do, by 2050, when the benefits of fast climate action will only begin to arrive, the area burned annually in the west is expected to have at least doubled, and perhaps quadrupled."

"That isn’t to say nothing can be done. It can. But what must happen is not merely decarbonization and climate action. That is necessary but at this point insufficient. California—indeed the whole American west—must also adapt to the horrible new world in which we already live."

"In the mouths of climate skeptics, or Trump, blaming forest management can sound like an evasion, which it is—over recent decades, warming has extended wildfire season by two months, quintupled the amount of flammable forest, and driven a doubling, at least, of acreage burned."

"According to one estimate, across the western U.S. as a whole, burn area has grown 900 percent since just 1984."

"And it’s no accident, or coincidence, that three of the four biggest fires in California history, are burning in the immediate aftermath of a historic heat wave, in which what may be the highest temperature ever recorded on planet Earth was registered in Death Valley: 129.9F."

"The last time the planet was as hot as it is today was more than 100,000 years before the birth of agriculture."

"But one reason 'forest management' sounds like an evasion is because it also sounds doable — small, manageable, marginal, a matter of 'clearing brush,' perhaps removing eucalyptus from your backyard."

"In fact, the need for what’s called 'controlled burning,' to thin the state’s supply of 'fuel' without risking damage to life or property, is so large it would dwarf anything humans have ever seen before."

In this way, California is a representative case: "adaptation" to climate change is often discussed as though it is an alternative to decarbonization, with the assumption that it will be easier. It may — indeed, likely will — prove much harder and bigger a project.

"In January, a team of scientists offered an authoritative estimate for how much of the state would have to be burned under human supervision to stabilize its fire ecology: 20 million acres. That is one-fifth of the state — an area about the size of Maine."

"It is only in one state, California, which typically accounts just a fraction of American wildfire damage."

"'California is built to burn,' the fire historian Stephen Pyne once told me. 'It is built to burn explosively.' And indeed, many thousands of years ago, millions of acres would burn there each year."

"But while there is wisdom in the indigenous approach to controlled burning that somewhat governed the region for centuries, the population of the state before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas was well under a million, and perhaps under 200,000. Today, it is 40 million."

"In this way, even beyond the immediate threat of their flames and the eerie contagion of their smoke, the new California fires offer a threefold prophecy about our climate future."

"First, however much we do to stabilize the world’s climate, it will not stop the burning any time soon." Indeed, inevitably, that burning will worsen dramatically before decarbonization stabilizes the planet's climate.

"Second, it isn’t that the land itself, or the ecology of the region, can’t survive climate change, but that the conditions of habitability on which we have erected whole sprawling, demanding, often unjust civilizations are being shaken with comparatively little warming."

"And third, we not only have the hard work of rapid decarbonization ahead of us, but also the work of adapting to the new world made inevitable by warming, particularly for the marginalized communities who always stand most clearly in the path of impacts like wildfire." (x/x)