California: We are Facing Mother Nature's Consequences

Although it may seem like the effects of Climate Change won’t be obvious until years later, California has been suffering from them for the last few years. With the constant fire season getting more intense and longer, the hotter and longer summers and inconsistent weather are all byproducts of Climate Change.

With the recent Fawn Fire in Northern California, the annual fire season has officially begun. The fire, which began on September 22nd, burned over 8,500 acres and took over a week to fully contain. Because of winds during that day, orange skies could be seen all the way from Southern California. And although the first fire was not started because of natural events, the fact of the matter is that high winds, and hotter climate caused the fire to spread faster.

Because of the rise in temperature, decrease in humidity, and stronger winds, the number of forest fires in California, regardless of origin, have increased in number, size, and duration. A study done by a research team published in Environmental Research Letters, tracked the number of forest fires in California since 1980 and compared them with the increased change in temperature due to climate change.

The paper goes in detail about the methods that they used, where the data came from, and their overall conclusion about the correlation between the rise in temperature due to Climate Change and the surge in wildfires across California.

“We show that state-wide increases in autumn temperature (∼1 °C) and decreases in autumn precipitation (∼30%) over the past four decades have contributed to increases in aggregate fire weather indices (+20%).”

Over the course of the past four decades, the fires in California have more than doubled since the 1980s. And it doesn’t take a scientist to see that when the temperatures and humidity went down, the forest fires increased.

Every year, California breaks a new record for a longer, fiercer fire season with 2020 having almost 10,000 wildfires burning over 4 million acres of land. In fact, five of the six largest forest fires in California history burned in 2020 alone.

The fact of the matter is that climate change has caused a surge in the number of fires that has become more and more apparent in recent years. California Forest fires have affected most residents, having caused millions to evacuate their homes every year, and others having lost theirs.

And California is not the only state that is being affected by the changing climate. From the subtle increase in temperature every year to being snowed in for days, Texas’ climate is slowly starting to show more apparent changes as well.

Climate change has reached the stage where the impacts are just small rises in temperature. It’s affecting real people who live in one of the best countries in the world. And if nothing major happens, the consequences will only get worse.