![]() Select Footage Courtesy NASA: Ī brief heat spell will dry out the smallish stuff or the already dead stuff-and maybe even some of the bigger tinder. What are wildfires and how do they start? Learn how we can prevent destructive wildfires, and how we can manage wildfires to improve the health of forests. If that deficit is cranked up for a long time, soils and vegetation will parch. Scientists can measure this "vapor pressure deficit"-the difference between how much water the air holds and how much it could hold. The hotter and drier the air, the more it sucks up, and the amount of water it can hold increases exponentially as the temperature rises small increases in the air's heat can mean big increases in the intensity with which it pulls out water. Hot air, if it’s not at 100 percent humidity, is like a thirsty sponge: It soaks up water from whatever it touches-plants (living or dead) and soil, lakes and rivers. ![]() That might not seem like very much warming, but just a little can go a long way. Warming has accelerated since the 1980s to just under 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.3 degrees F) per decade, and it's likely to accelerate further in the future. Since then, global average temperatures have ticked up roughly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) California’s change is closer to 3 degrees Fahrenheit. The planet has heated up nearly continuously since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, when humans started burning massive quantities of fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide that traps excess heat in the atmosphere. The clearest connection is with warming air temperatures. “Climate change is not the only thing going on, but it is a big and important part of the story.” (Human-caused ignitions are clearly a major part of the risk: A study published in September, on which Balch was a co-author, found that humans were responsible for 97 percent of the ignitions that caused fires that then threatened homes in the wildland-urban interface, between 19).Ĭlimate change has affected the first two components ( and in some cases, the third) in clear, measurable ways that have become increasingly obvious over the past few decades. “People are changing all three of those,” says Jennifer Balch, a fire ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It takes three components: the right weather and climate conditions, plenty of burnable fuel, and a spark. But for fires near that so-called wildland-urban interface, as well as more remote, forest-centered burns, climate change has significantly heightened the baseline risks. Other factors also hike fire risk, like forest management decisions that have allowed for the buildup of vast amounts of vegetation that can quickly turn into fuel, as well as more problematic issues like the slow creep of houses and other infrastructure into risky areas. But people being on base matters," he says, and global warming is putting people on base. The home run is the proximal cause of the event. “If there’s a three-run home run in baseball, it’s the home run that definitely caused the runners to round the bases and score. ![]() Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, makes a baseball analogy to describe increase in risk.
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