By John Lawrence
More than eight major fires and several smaller brush fires were burning from May 14 to May 17 in San Diego County during an unseasonal heat wave fueled by high Santa Ana winds.
Temperature records were set – highs of 97 in San Diego and 104 in both Escondido and El Cajon on May 15. More than a dozen southern California cities broke or tied high temperatures Wednesday, May 14.
The high temperature reached 99 in downtown Los Angeles, breaking the old record of 96 set 124 years ago. Airports in Long Beach and Camarillo topped 100 degrees – the warmest since 1981. Wind gusts in hilly areas of San Diego County reached over 100 miles per hour.
On May 17, the Santa Ana winds ceased and temperatures lowered from 98°F into the mid-90s, giving hope to firefighters. On May 18, weather conditions had returned to seasonal normal, with temperatures in the lower 80s and higher humidity. Most of the fires were fully contained at that point, including the Poinsettia Fire, Highway Fire, River Fire, Freeway Fire, Bernardo Fire, and the Tomahawk Fire. The Cocos Fire was extinguished on May 22, leaving only two Camp Pendleton wildfires (the San Mateo and Pulgas fires) still active.
By May 18, the fires had burned more than 27,000 acres (42 sq mi) of land. The three wildfires at Camp Pendleton are estimated to have burned 21,900 acres, which is nearly 18% of the base. More than 55 properties and buildings were damaged or destroyed including 11 houses, an 18-unit apartment complex and two businesses.
A badly burned body was found in a transient camp, and one firefighter suffered heat exhaustion. Estimates are that the fire cost close to $60 million, including $29.8 million in destruction or damage to private property, and $27.9 million in the costs of firefighting, support, and environmental damage.
As soon as the Santa Ana winds diminished, the fires were hastily put out. However, there was a sense of dread that drought-sapped vegetation, high temperatures and low humidity portend a long fire season ahead. Santa Anas and wildfire season don’t generally start until the fall. Now fire season seems to be all year long. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has responded to more than 1,500 fires so far this year, compared with about 800 during an average year.
“Normally, I don’t even put wildfire gear in my vehicle until the end of April. This year I never took it out,” Kirk Kushen, battalion chief of the Kern County Fire Department, said at a base camp in Escondido. “We never really completed the 2013 fire season. It’s been a continuation.”
The first blaze was caused by a spark from construction equipment, according to state officials, but it could take months to get to the bottom of what started the most damaging fires. Alberto Serrato, 57, pleaded not guilty to an arson charge in connection with one of the smaller fires, but authorities say they don’t believe he started it, just added brush to it.
“The last three years have been the driest in California’s recorded history,” Gov. Jerry Brown said, citing climate change as “a factor” in the spate of blazes. 100% of California is experiencing exceptional, extreme or severe drought conditions.
The Santa Ana winds, which are typical for October and November, do not usually occur this time of year, but Cal Fire Assistant Region Chief Thom Porter notes, “we’ve had this kind of wind … every month this year.” “As a native San Diegan, I have never seen the Santa Ana winds … in the month of May,” San Diego County Supervisor Dianne Jacob said.
Fire season in Southern California typically starts late in the summer and extends into fall. But nowadays, as Jacob points out, “We have year-round fire risk.”
Flooding in the Balkans
At exactly the same time span of the San Diego fires, there was massive flooding in the Balkans.
On May 17 BBCNews reported:
“More than two dozen people are feared dead in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia after the worst floods in more than a century. Tens of thousands have fled their homes as several months of rain fell in a few days and rivers burst their banks. Landslides have buried houses. In one Bosnian town alone, Doboj, the mayor said more than 20 bodies had been taken to the mortuary.
“Observed from the air, almost a third of Bosnia, mostly its north-east corner, resembled a huge muddy lake, with houses, roads and rail lines submerged. According to a spokesman for Bosnia’s Security Ministry, about a million people – more than a quarter of the country’s population – live in the affected area.”
The area got four months worth of rain in a single day. Power and roads were cut off. There were over 2000 landslides in Bosnia alone. Eastern Croatia and southern Romania also experienced flooding, while Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Slovakia were also affected by the storm.
3.1 million people were affected with 81,879 evacuations. Rain was the heaviest in 120 years of recorded weather measurements. By 20 May, at least 62 people had died as a result of the flooding.
Preliminary assessments of the damage range up to several billions of dollars. Officials in Bosnia stated that the damage could exceed that of the Bosnian War. The events initiated a large international aid campaign, with numerous countries, organizations and individuals donating humanitarian, material and monetary support for the affected areas.
The IPCC notes that extreme rainfall events are expected to become more frequent. As Earth’s atmosphere warms with increasing amounts of greenhouse gases, the amount of water vapor within it increases, weighting the dice toward more substantial downpours even in areas that are expected to become drier in the long term. Every region of the U.S. has seen an increase in heavy downpours with the most recent occurrence coming last month in Florida, when a storm system dumped 10 to 15 inches of rain in the Pensacola area in just 24 hours.
Massive Mudslide in Colorado
via Wikipedia
On Sunday May 25 there was a mudslide on the Grand Mesa which caused an earthquake that registered 2.8 on the Richter scale, the U.S. Geological Survey office in Golden reported.
The slide happened near the town of Collbran and is about 3 miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide. It covers more than 700 acres. It was preceeded by torrential rain. Three men are missing.
“It’s an understatement to say that it is massive,” Sheriff Stan Hilkey told CNN. “The power behind it was remarkable.”
A mudslide, also called a debris flow, is a type of fast-moving landslide that follows a channel, such as a river. Mudslides occur after water rapidly saturates the ground on a slope, such as during a heavy rainfall.
Every year mudslides kill more people than typhoons, hurricanes and cyclones combined.
Right Wingers Take Note
The insurance industry is becoming a true believer in climate change as opposed to the right wing climate change deniers.
Insurance companies are becoming increasingly concerned, and more vocal, about the rising costs of climate change. With large fossil fuel companies reluctant to take greenhouse gas mitigation efforts in the face of potential profit losses, the behemoth insurance industry could provide a counterbalance to the energy industry when it comes to incentivizing near-term emissions cuts, or at least adaptation to the effects of climate change.
“Most insurers, including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some right-wing circles that climate change isn’t happening, and are quite comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of global warming,” reported the New York Times.
John Lawrence
Latest posts by John Lawrence (see all)
- Economist Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Laureate, Dead at 95 - March 22, 2017
- Container Ships Burn Dirtiest Fuel: the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Could Change That - March 15, 2017
- Cities and States Prefer Public Banks To Wall Street - March 7, 2017
Thanks for this reminder, John Lawrence, that we need to take care of our world.
So this is what passes for journalism, completely unscientific associations between events like human instigated wildfires and climate change, followed by steering it toward political attacks on the opposition. Need it be mentioned that if the construction workers had not been operating faulty equipment there wouldn’t have been a fire? And since when is Gov. Jerry Brown qualified to make scientific conclusions?
Politicizing this matter does absolutely nothing toward legitimizing it, nor does suggesting to people that their own industrialized lifestyles are to blame for destructive conflagrations.
It only proves that “saving the earth” takes a back seat to partisan politics.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140516-san-diego-fires-climate-change-california/
“It’s not clear if this week’s fires are tied to climate change.”
“What we’re seeing right now is just a real anomaly,” said Norman Miller, an expert in regional climate and hydrology at the University of California, Berkeley. “Whether it’s part of natural variability or climate change, we need to have a longer record of occurrences so we can construct a trend and make sense out of it.”
A lot of people are connecting extreme weather with climate change and by the way only one of 8 major San Diego firs was caused by a construction worker. The rest evidently started from natural causes.
From Thinkprogress:
“Tom Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center, explained in a 2011 email:
What we can say with confidence is that heavy and extreme precipitation events often associated with thunderstorms and convection are increasing and have been linked to human-induced changes in atmospheric composition.”
How do you expect people to do anything about global warming if the matter is not politicized?
And this is from the same National Geographic article you link to:
“Nationwide, western wildfires are expected to grow more severe as climate change continues, according to the recently released National Climate Assessment, a federal report that represents the most comprehensive review of climate impacts in the U.S. in over a decade.”
Mr. John:
Also, that fire started by construction equipment might not have spread if not for the fact that we were in a Santa Ana condition. And this is the FIRST time EVER (since I’ve been in San Diego, 1982) that Santa Ana has happened in the Spring. That spells climate change to me.
None of these incedents means anything BY IT SELF. But the point of this weather watch series is that the individual items keep piling up. It’s called preponderance of evidence, John.
Thank you, Michael-Leonard. That’s exactly the point. Somewhere in the world on almost a weekly basis people are experiencing extreme weather.
That’s a completely unscientific analysis. I’ll repeat:
““Whether it’s part of natural variability or climate change, we need to have a longer record of occurrences so we can construct a trend and make sense out of it.”
Just because you don’t remember a Santa Ana in spring time since 1982 doesn’t mean anything. We’re not looking at 30 year trends.
” Somewhere in the world on almost a weekly basis people are experiencing extreme weather.”
Please don’t patronize people with arguments that are so off base. I mean, really, we can disagree on points of this issue but as a columnist here your contributions to the discussion should be more enlightened. There have ALWAYS been extreme weather events around the world. The biggest wildfire in San Diego was in the early ’70’s, not now. The worst tornadoes in the US happened 90 years ago, the worst hurricane season in the Atlantic? 1886, seven storms struck the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_hurricane_season
2013? “No major hurricanes. Tied (with 1982) for fewest hurricanes since 1944”
But I’m sure you’d only mention Atlantic hurricanes if there was a big storm you could tie to climate change, not after a season lacking any.
Let’s also not forget that modern technology deems that everything that happens now is more accurately recorded. If a hurricane spawned over the ocean 200 years ago and didn’t hit land nobody would know or record it- anyone unfortunate enough to be in a vessel to witness it would be extremely lucky to live to tell about it. Now satellites mean we can document those and add them to the totals. Same with wildfires. Inland California was only populated by Europeans (who, unlike the Native Americans, kept records) in the latter half of the 19th century- moreover, the population was so sparse that human ignited wildfires would be incredibly rare.
Do we have a lot of fires now? So what. There are many more times the number of homes and humans living in the dry rural areas than there was decades ago.
Like the 3% of “scientists” who are still climate-change deniers, you too cherry-pick your examples. See the MANY reports of warmest-ever and driest-ever months/years coming from … well, just about everywhere.
The two main questions are:
Is global climate changing?
Are humans in danger from the change?
The answers to both are a resounding YES and to deny either is foolish and self-destructive. You may say the data isn’t in yet or isn’t conclusive. I say wake up, John; this has to do only with human survival. Read “Six Degrees”.
“Like the 3% of “scientists” who are still climate-change deniers,”
How cheap are your debate tactics you need to associate me with a position not my own?
” See the MANY reports of warmest-ever and driest-ever months/years coming from ”
That’s funny because this article is partly about above normal rainfall events. So which is it?
Too wet? Climate change. Too dry? Climate change. “Oh but we can expect BOTH! In fact any weather event that seems out of the ordinary will be directly caused by climate change!”
“Is global climate changing?”
It’s quite probable however humans being the primary cause is not entirely conclusive, according to experts at the Max Planck Solar Research Institute. It’s well documented that the period from the late ’50’s through the 90’s was one of unprecedented high solar activity, and while it’s assumed that since immediate cooling did not follow this period man must surely be to blame, the residual effects are not understood because it is unprecedented. If solar variation melted the poles the methane release alone would continue the warming for many years.
“Are humans in danger from the change?”
Humans are in danger from too much sugar and fats too. You might note that in polls where scientists say they support the consensus on climate change the majority also say it’s not a priority or something to worry about.
Why? Because of the third question:
“If humans are the primary cause is this something we can mitigate through well intentioned policies across national borders or will they be ineffective- or even make the problem worse? ”
So far, judging from the results of GLOBAL greenhouse gas emissions since the implementation of Kyoto, the latter has been the case.
So excuse me if I’m not amused at people using fear mongering to advance their partisan political agendas when it only results in more human industrial activity in the third world, degradation of living standards in industrialized nations, and increased global GGE.
On a smaller scope what I’m trying to say to the author of this piece is that anyone who is vaguely familiar with this issue knows that climate change research does not constantly focus on singular events like a hot summer or a monsoon, it looks at trends and statistics over hundreds of years, and using fear and blame over these things does nothing to convince anyone but the ignorant. You don’t seem to realize that this only casts aspersion on the science, not lend legitimacy to it. In fact this is what has continued to drive my skepticism, the politicization, the “say anything that sounds good even if it’s complete BS” going on.
You did it yourself with your last reply, about no Santa Anas since 1982. It’s an erroneous, irrelevant talking point and if you’ll try to slide that by- whether intentional or out of ignorance- why is it assumed I should accept the next point offered at face value?
“I say wake up, John; this has to do only with human survival.”
How so? Putting people out of work when their jobs disappear and move to non annex one (under Kyoto, or future regulation) nations? Or having to walk a couple yards a year up the beach from a rising ocean?
Climate change will not kill me, nor my children nor theirs. Their homes will be a block further inland. Their homes will be more fire resistant. More hurricane proof. They will have leaders elected to office by their qualifications, not because a certain political party got their guy in office by using cheap tactics in overly politicizing an issue and blaming it all on the other party.
Humans adapt. If mitigation is unpractical or impossible that’s what we’ll do. And on that…
Funny thing according to you people the debate is over, the science is settled… I tend to disagree on the cause of it all, but let’s say for a minute you are right and the scientists who concluded it was mostly solar variation didn’t get shouted down by environmental ideologues and it’s all humans.
Why are you still occupying all your time and efforts with fear mongering and partisan politics? Why aren’t you instead hammering out the details of the great solution? “Alternative Energy! (the elusive magic beans)” “Carbon Equity!” “Climate Justice!”
It’s because your movement is like a dog who always chases cars. Saving the planet, like the dog catching the car, was never the goal. It’s about forwarding your ideologies, which happen to include the most damningly contradictory ones imaginable:
Mitigating a problem allegedly caused by human industrial activity…
And industrializing billions of third world people with the UN’s anti poverty goals, and a general ideology that global socialism is good. That people in Africa, India, China, should be assisted in getting the same creature comforts we enjoy here. Electricity, running water, hospitals, employment in factories, etc. The UN, the good folks behind the IPCC, have been at that for six decades. Now they’re going to fix climate change?
I’m not the one who needs to wake up. Repeat after me: Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen, and so has the rate of their rise, since the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. That is a fact.
Mr. John, you get too hot to be taken seriously.
Look at this address you’re making to John Lawrence: “…your movement is like a dog who always chases cars. Saving the planet, like the dog catching the car, was never the goal. It’s about forwarding your ideologies…”
Anyone who want to save the planet is an ideologue? You liken your opponent to a hapless dog chasing a car because?
What do you believe in? If you can’t say it you’re just an angry, suspicious failure so far as I can see. And don’t bother to call me blind. Think of something else.
” I can see. And don’t bother to call me blind. Think of something else.”
How about “off topic” since I doubt anyone came here to talk about me? As for the blind comment I was returning the same term.
“Anyone who want to save the planet is an ideologue?”
How about “literacy challenged” since I explained how it’s apparent forwarding political ideologies- the two primary ones so conflicting they preclude any chance of saving the planet- are what’s going on, since we can’t evolve our preaching from scaring people and attacking the opposition into practical solutions? The dog analogy was just that, dogs chase cars and wouldn’t know what to do with one if they caught one- just as AGW alarmists won’t know what to do with their time once the debate really is over, because it seems scaring people and judgemental posturing against the opposition was what put the wind in their sails.
(this calls to mind the one thing so many, including obviously you, Bob, can’t grasp about politics- it’s not about embarrassing, or belittling, or chasing away or shutting up your opponents- or even burying them in the cold hard ground. It’s about convincing them your side is the one to be on and joining you in solidarity, because last time I checked the winner is the one with the most votes. Believe it or not that’s what I’m trying to get across to John here, though we may disagree on a lot of points I’m merely saying he’d do a better job selling the product by avoiding fallacies and dubious tactics. There is also such a thing as strengthening your own position by confronting the opposition and seeing what they have to say.)
“What do you believe in?”
Bob, in most forums “pointless questioning” is a form of trolling, I think I’ve already posted more than enough about my beliefs. If you want a condensed version of my personal position on Climate Change just ask, though I believe it’s posted above.
“you’re just an angry, suspicious failure so far as I can see.”
Says the guy who, after I have posted well over a hundred lines of on topic material to choose from, walks in and composes a completely ad hominem attack. Sorry, Bob, I’m less than impressed.
Mr. John, you’ve persuaded me. I want to be on your side, though I can’t understand much of what you say. What can I do to understand your program?
Just stop and seriously ponder, can the same agency whose mission has long inherently, indirectly been industrializing the third world masses, also be engaged in mitigating an issue caused by human industrialization?
Does the conflict cause concern?
John, your argument that we have to wait and observe the weather for 30 years before drawing any conclusions about climate change is at this point old hat. The leading scientists are starting to draw the conclusion NOW that extreme weather events are related to climate change, and that, if we don’t start doing more about it NOW, the earth will become uninhabitable by 2100. In fact it still may become inhabitable regardless of what we do now, but, at least we need to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere in order to have a chance of surviving as a species.
“The leading scientists are starting to draw the conclusion NOW that extreme weather events are related to climate change, ”
Show me a scientist who drew that conclusion from only observing a thirty year trend and you’d have a point. Meanwhile I found one who said, for the third time:
““Whether it’s part of natural variability or climate change, we need to have a longer record of occurrences so we can construct a trend and make sense out of it.”
——————-
“if we don’t start doing more about it NOW, the earth will become uninhabitable by 2100”
And you repeat the whimsical claims of Dahr Jamail why? Is that the “say anything that sounds good even if it’s a patronizingly stupid opinion from an op-ed website” thing?
What would you do, another round of Kyoto? More regulations causing capital and industry to migrate to billions of third world people?
To show my complete objectivity I will offer you an article which proves us both right:
(but probably you more than I)
Conclusion:
Record high temperatures can easily be correlated to climate change.
Hurricanes, can not.
Extreme rainfall events, and wildfires, probably not (but are not directly discussed, the factors he weighs for temperatures do not apply to either and too many other variables- what he calls noise- are injected)
Note however there is no argument for observing 30 year trends, in fact the accuracy of temperature trends is affirmed by lengthy observation periods.