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How climate change is fueling record-breaking California wildfires, heat and smog

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How climate change is fueling record-breaking California wildfires, heat and smog

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LA Times Article

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In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet's inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase in the risk of forest fires and "substantially degraded air quality" in large metropolitan areas as a result of climate change.

In just the past month, nearly two decades after the third United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was issued, heat records were busted across California, more than 3 million acres of land burned, and in major metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, air pollution has skyrocketed.

"This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone," said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. "Maybe we underestimated the magnitude and speed" at which these events would occur, he said, but "we've seen this long freight train barreling down on us for decades, and now the locomotive is on top of us, with no caboose in sight."

In a matter of weeks, California has experienced six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern history and toppled all-time temperature records from the desert to the coast. Millions are suffering from some of the worst air quality in years due to heat-triggered smog and fire smoke. A sooty plume has blanketed most of the West Coast, blotting out the sun and threatening people's lungs during a deadly pandemic.

California is being pushed to extremes. And the record heat, fires and pollution all have one thing in common: They were made worse by climate change. Their convergence is perhaps the strongest signal yet that the calamity climate scientists have warned of for years isn't far off in the future; it is here today and can no longer be ignored.

"What we've been seeing in California are some of the clearest events where we can say this is climate change - that climate change has clearly made this worse," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland-based think tank. "People who have lived in California for 30, 40 years are saying this is unprecedented, it has never been this hot, it has never been this smoky in all the years I've lived here."

Unprecedented, yes. But not unexpected.

Since the 1980s, government and oil industry scientists have been anticipating the events that have transpired across the state this past month.

As one 1988 internal Shell Oil Co. document noted, "by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation."

"I'm only sorry that in 1989, I could not get an audience for what I wanted to communicate," said Jim Hansen, a retired NASA researcher and early climate change scientist, of testimony he made to Congress about the issue.

Record temperatures

Each of the extremes Californians are living through right now is fueled, at least in part, by the gradual warming of the planet, which is accelerating as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

California summers are 2.5 degrees warmer than they were in the 1970s and are on track to heat up an additional 4.5 degrees by the end of the century if the world's current emissions trajectory continues, said Hausfather.

While precise attribution studies on the extreme heat waves in California in recent weeks will take time to complete, he said, they are clear examples of how climate change compounds natural weather variability to increase the likelihood of what once would have been a rare event.

"In a world without climate change, it still would have been a hot August; we still would have had some fires. But it's clear that climate change has made things notably worse," he said. "An extreme heat event that would have been 100 degrees is now 102.5 or 103 degrees, and that is actually a pretty big difference in terms of the impacts on people."

During the mid-August heat wave, Death Valley soared to 130 degrees, one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth.

Another ferocious heat wave over the Labor Day weekend brought Death Valley-like heat to other areas. Los Angeles County had its hottest temperature on record when Woodland Hills hit 121 degrees Sept. 6. At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, it reached 120 degrees, the highest reading since record-keeping began in 1869, in an area that is less than 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

John Lindsey, a marine meteorologist with Pacific Gas and Electric, said the mercury rose to unprecedented levels in San Luis Obispo due to hot, downslope winds blowing from the northeast. They are known locally as Santa Lucia winds and can increase temperatures by 5.5 degrees for every 1,000 feet they descend.

"It was just rip-roaring hot," said Lindsey, who has forecast weather along the Central Coast since 1991. "You just don't expect Death Valley temperatures along coastal California."

Lindsey, who acknowledges that he was a bit of a climate skeptic in the past, said seeing the increase in seawater temperatures, in particular, over many years "was a real epiphany or wake-up call."

"By now, there's no doubt in most people's minds that the atmosphere is warming and the ocean is warming," he said. "With the way greenhouse gases are increasing, in my mind, there's no doubt that we're causing this. It's human activity that's causing this. So I'm concerned about the future. And that's somebody who's very skeptical."

Global warming has increased the odds of unprecedented heat extremes across more than 80% of the planet and "has doubled or even, in some areas, tripled the odds of record-setting hot events" in California and the Western U.S., said Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.

An unprecedented firestorm

When it comes to wildfires, "what we've had in California over the last three to four weeks is unprecedented in our historical experience," Diffenbaugh said.

"This is more extreme than any other year in living memory," he said, and is consistent with the impact of global warming.

Research by Diffenbaugh and colleagues that was published last month found that the number of days with extreme wildfire weather in California has more than doubled since the early 1980s, primarily due to warming temperatures drying out vegetation.

"It means that even with no change in the frequency of strong wind events, even with no change in the frequency of lightning, the risk of wildfire and risk of large, rapidly growing wildfires goes up as a result of the effect of that warming," he said.

And it's that atmospheric warming that has set the stage for the fires raging throughout the western U.S., said Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

"If we think of the atmosphere as a giant sponge that's always trying to extract water from the landscape, then temperature increases the sponginess," he said.

As soils become drier, heat waves become more intense. That's because the energy in the atmosphere is no longer being used in evaporation but is just building up heat. And as heat increases and soils - and, therefore, fuel for fires - dry out, the risk grows, laying the foundation for the type of wild and destructive fires we are now observing.

"That's why, I think, you keep reading quotes from these firefighters who say they are seeing fire behavior unlike anything they've seen before," he said. "As we go out in the future, in a world with this exponentially growing risk ... we're going to see fires far different than we've seen before."

He noted that fires are not unusual in California - they are an integral part of the state's history and landscape. Bad forest management, combined with human behavior - intentional and unintentional starting of fires - have contributed to the problem. But the effect of climate change is real and growing.

"We have seen the rapid warming of California summers really turbocharge the type of conditions that are suitable for rapid growth of wildfires," Hausfather said. "We see fires growing from essentially nothing to a quarter of a million acres in one day. And that's because the conditions are ripe, and temperature plays a large role."

John Abatzoglou, associate professor in the Department of Management of Complex Systems at UC Merced, agreed.

"What we are seeing play out does indeed have human fingerprints on it, including those from climate change," he said.

"We can see how warm and dry years catalyze these fires," he said, adding, however, that for fires to start, "they need to have ignitions. But the heat and dryness have absolutely set the table for widespread fire activity."
Dreadful air quality
It was no coincidence that ozone pollution levels in downtown Los Angeles spiked to their highest levels since the mid-1990s on a day in which temperatures reached an all-time high for the county, said Cesunica Ivey, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at UC Riverside who studies air quality.

The global rise in temperatures observed over decades is also occurring locally, she said, "and these frequently occurring heat waves, this upward trend in basin-wide average temperature, is contributing to ozone exacerbation."

Southern California regulators have seen decades of progress fighting smog stymied in recent years by hotter weather and stronger, more persistent inversion layers that trap pollution near the ground. Their efforts are being hindered by rising temperatures from climate change, according to air quality experts.

That's because hotter weather speeds up the photochemical reactions that turn pollutants from vehicle tailpipes and other sources into ozone, the invisible, lung-damaging gas in summer smog. Studies show that ozone levels are about two parts per billion higher than they would be without global warming.

What precisely is driving changes such as elevated smog levels can be hard to tease out in the middle of an extreme event because so much is happening at once, with multiple hazards piling on top of each other in a vicious feedback loop.

The recent heat spells, for instance, both fueled smog formation and led to power outages. Gov. Gavin Newsom suspended air quality rules on power plants and other polluters to ease strain on the grid, allowing more emissions to sully the air. The COVID-19 pandemic has added an additional layer of complexity at a time when Californians are trying to protect their homes, lungs and bodies from threats that seem to be coming from all sides.

"When you add COVID, extreme heat, wildfires and air pollution all together, they're all detrimental to public health, and it just makes things worse," said Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health who studies air pollution and its effects. "These stressors are happening at the same time. So the impact is cumulative and maybe even synergistic to each other."

That cascading effect, in which one extreme compounds another, is a feature of global warming that experts have long warned about.

Ivey, of UC Riverside, said she and other scientists aren't surprised to see so many extremes hitting simultaneously, "but to see it playing out is scary."

"It's one of those moments where ozone converged with record acres burned and a heat wave," she said. "If the writing isn't on the wall, then I don't know what to tell folks."

Global warming is also fueling increases in wildfire pollution, a mix of soot particles and gases that can fuel ozone formation and dramatically worsen smog. Those added emissions are only going to get worse as the severity and frequency of fires increases.

"People may not directly connect local air pollution to global climate change, but they are intertwined," said Zhu. "They are two sides of the same coin."

What this year's extreme heat, fire and air quality degradation is showing, said Columbia's Williams, is that we are, in a sense, blindly stepping off a cliff from a world in which we could somewhat predict what was going to happen, based on decades and centuries of data.

"We're finding that we've lost complete control," he said. "The baselines we've used for decades no longer apply. There really isn't a normal anymore."

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How climate change is fueling record-breaking California wildfires, heat and smog

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In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet's inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase in the risk of forest fires and "substantially degraded air quality" in large metropolitan areas as a result of climate change.

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New York Times Article

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Climate change can be overwhelming. Here’s how to think about your effects on the environment and the steps you can take to lessen that impact.

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Why climate change is a human rights issue

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Why climate change is a human rights issue

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For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on. Here's how

Learn about the ways climate change is deeply altering how we live, where we live and the foods we eat - ultimately threatening some of our most basic human rights.

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TED Talks on why climate change is a human rights issue

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You have JavaScript disabled For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on. Here's how Learn about the ways climate change is deeply altering how we live, where we live and the foods we eat - ultimately threatening some of our most basic human rights.

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Countdown is a global initiative, powered by TED and Future Stewards, to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis.

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Countdown is a global initiative, powered by TED and Future Stewards, to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 towards reaching net zero by 2050. It was launched October 10, 2020 with the Countdown Global Launch, a virtual event featuring five curated sessions of talks, interviews and performances. The initiative continued with the Countdown Summit in Edinburgh, Scotland, in October 2021, bringing together hundreds of leaders to share a blueprint for a beautiful net-zero future and activate millions in the lead-up to COP26. To learn more about the initiative and how you can take action on climate change, visit countdown.ted.com.
(Curation and production: Bruno Giussani, Lindsay Levin, Chris Anderson, Juliet Blake, Logan McClure Davda, Nicole Ng and the Countdown team)

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Countdown is a global initiative, powered by TED and Future Stewards, to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 towards reaching net zero by 2050.

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A Climate Change Solution that's Right Under Our Feet

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A Climate Change Solution that's Right Under Our Feet

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

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Asmeret Asefaw Berhe: A climate change solution that's right under our feet

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There's two times more carbon in the earth's soil than in all of its vegetation and the atmosphere -- combined. Biogeochemist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe dives into the science of soil and shares how we could use its awesome carbon-trapping power to offset climate change.

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What is your carbon footprint? Calculate it now. Offsetting the carbon emissions from your lifestyle is a critical step toward fighting climate change.

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Earth's Changing Climate Multi-Language Glossary

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Earth's Changing Climate Multi-Language Glossary

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All of your vocabulary words and definitions for this unit

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Google Extension Tool

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An easy to use speech synthesis and recognition tool for your browser!

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Read Aloud uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology to convert webpage text to audio.  It works on a variety of websites, including news sites, blogs, fan fiction, publications, textbooks, school and class websites, and online university course materials.

Read Aloud allows you to select from a variety of text-to-speech voices, including those provided natively by the browser, as well as by text-to-speech cloud service providers such as Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, IBM Watson, and Microsoft.  Some of the cloud-based voices may require additional in-app purchase to enable.

Read Aloud can read PDF, Google Docs, Google Play books, Amazon Kindle, and EPUB (via the excellent EPUBReader extension from epubread.com).

Read Aloud is intended for users who prefer to listen to content instead of reading, those with dyslexia or other learning disabilities, and children learning to read.

To use Read Aloud, navigate to the web page you want to read, then click the Read Aloud icon on the Chrome menu.  In addition, the shortcut keys ALT-P, ALT-O, ALT-Comma, and ALT-Period can be used to Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind, and Forward.  You may also select the text you want to read before activating the extension.  Right clicking on the selected text will provide you with yet another option to activate Read Aloud via the context menu.

To change the voice, reading speed, pitch, or enable text highlighting, go to the Options page either by right clicking on the Read Aloud icon and choose Options, or by clicking the Gear button on the extension popup (you'll need to stop playback to see the Gear button).

Read Aloud is an open-source project.  If you wish to contribute bug fixes or translations, please visit the GitHub page at https://github.com/ken107/read-aloud.

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Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader

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Read aloud the current web-page article with one click, using text to speech (TTS). Supports 40+ languages.

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Articles included: Warming and Habitat Loss, Warming and Sea Level Rise, or Warming and Extreme Weather.

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Learn about Coral Bleaching with this game!

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Click the + or - buttons to adjust the water temperature and pollution levels.

Click on the green "Start Storm" button to create a storm that will go by.

See what happens to the coral reef depending on the various conditions you choose!

Coral bleaching? What's that?!

A reef is a big group of rocks on the ocean floor, but did you know that a coral reef is actually alive and covered with very small animals called corals? These animals glue their tiny skeletons to rocks, so they end up staying in the same place their entire lives!

Coral reefs are very sensitive to light and temperature. If the water they live in gets too hot, they might not survive. They also don't like it when the ocean has too much pollution. Sometimes, storms can even upset coral depending on how often they happen and how severe they are. If coral reefs are under too much stress, like in these conditions, they can eject the algae living on them and turn completely white. This is known as coral bleaching. This does not necessarily mean the coral is dead - corals can survive bleaching! They do become more vulnerable to death however, especially if the stress continues for a long period of time.

NASA recently developed some very sensitive instruments to study coral reefs from an airplane flying above the ocean. The COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) uses an instrument called the Portable Remote Imaging Spectrometer (PRISM) to see the condition of reefs. Scientists will now be able to monitor these reefs and their health. They will be able to measure the amounts of coral, algae, and sand on the ocean floor!

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Learn what factors lead to coral bleaching.

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Test an idea (or hypothesis.)

Answer a question.

Show how nature works.

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Do a science fair project!

Test, answer, or show?

Your science fair project may do one of three things:

Topic ideas:

These are just the beginning of ideas. Ask a parent, teacher, or other adult to help you research the topic and find out how to do a science fair project about it.

Measure the cloud cover in the sky.

Test the effect of a mild acid on sea shells. (Test lemon juice or vinegar, for example.)

Demonstrate how Earth's water cycle creates fresh drinking water from sea water.

Investigate the greenhouse effect outdoors, over one week using two thermometers, two shallow open boxes lined with soil, with one covered tightly with clear plastic wrap, and a notebook for taking temperature readings through the day and night. Or use a different, but well-controlled method of comparison.

Make a do-it-yourself rain gauge. Measure the rainfall during one storm or over several days.

Make a cloud in a bottle.

Demonstrate why the equator is warmer than other parts of Earth (unequal heating of Earth's surface) using a flashlight, graph paper, a ruler, and masking tape.

Compare the freezing point of fresh water with the freezing point of seawater or salt water, with varying amounts of salt.

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Do a science fair project! Your science fair project may do one of three things: These are just the beginning of ideas. Ask a parent, teacher, or other adult to help you research the topic and find out how to do a science fair project about it.

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Rationale: Students complete the multiple choice summative assessment consisting of 8 multiple-choice questions in which they analyze and interpret data, evaluate evidence, and construct explanations. This assessment indicates where students fall along the levels of the progress build after instruction by measuring their mastery of the specific ideas, including unit specific science concepts and crosscutting concepts. This assessment also measures students’ understanding of important supporting content needed to meet the unit's standards: MS- ESS3-3, MS-ESS3-4, and MS- ESS3-5. Overall, this assessment's results indicate students’ progress over the course of the unit.
Supporting all learners: For my focus students including ELL and diverse learners, I have provided resources (also in the learning platform), for students to use to support them on this assessment. Students may use the multi-language glossary to view definitions of content specific vocabulary in their native language. In addition to this, they can use the speech to text and read to text chrome extension to have the questions and answer options read to them. I will also extend support by offering a teacher help breakout room while students are completing this assignment, and I will allow for extra time to the students who require it.