Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumKey Driver To This Season's Record-Shattering West Coast Fires: Long-Term Warming - 3F In CA
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It is the same story in the Northwest. More than 1 million acres have burned in Oregon, where tens of thousands of residents are under an evacuation order and officials have warned of a mass fatality incident. And across the West, those not living in the path of fires have had to contend with a cloud of toxic fog that stretches from the Inland Empire to Idaho.
California and the West have always burned. Their plants and ecosystems are evolved to endure and thrive in seasonal fires. But this regional chaos is something different, Swain said, caused by a perfect firestorm of elements. A windstorm whipped California and Oregon earlier this month, turning valleys into blowtorches. Many western forests are crowded with fuel after a century in which authorities fought every fire, no matter how remote. And a rare lightning storm last month provided an enthusiastic source of ignition for fires. All of those factors may explain aspects of why there are so many fires right now.
But they do not capture the unusual ferocity of this fire season. What were seeing right now is that every fire is becoming a super-intense fire, Swain said. Even if you assume we need more fire on the landscape, we probably dont need more of this kind of fire. To explain the severity, you have to go back to the conditions that preceded August. This has been one of the hottest and driest years on record in this part of the country, he said. And surprise, surprise, now there are hot fires. The primary driver of the fires this year, he said, is Californias rising air temperature. Over the past century, climate change has warmed California by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit. This warming has now started to affect the behavior of water stored in vegetation across the state. In hotter, drier air, liquid water is more willing to become a gas.
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The vapor-pressure deficit indexes two other measurements: the air temperature and the relative humidity. Both measurements affect the airs sponginess. Hotter air is more likely to bump water into a gas state, while drier air can hold more water vapor overall. The vapor-pressure deficit measures the overlap. Its the difference between the amount of water vapor thats in the air and the amount of water vapor that the air can possibly hold, Williams said. When the vapor-pressure deficit is high, it means the atmosphere has become an immense, six-mile-high sponge. The arid air will induce water to evaporate from wherever its hidingthe soil, the wooden boards of houses, the limbs and leaves of trees and underbrush.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/09/most-important-number-for-the-wests-wildfires-california/616359/
IcyPeas
(21,737 posts)The president met with Gavin Newsom and experts Monday in California. He said again we have to clean the forest floors... dead leaves and branches are what's causing these fires. He was corrected but he is incapable of taking in new information and said the science isnt always right. Again on Tuesday he repeated the same old wrong info about forest management. So the meeting Monday went in one ear and out the other. He believes he knows more than the scientists and nothing will change his mind. I would like to see him read that article you quoted from. He has no curiosity to learn new things. Just like his followers... They will never change their minds either. Closed minds.
Here he was today repeating the same old shit:
Link to tweet
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