How Hurricane Hilary caused the Los Angeles Fires: A case study of climate impacts on fire-weather conditions in the Pacific and Southern Hemisphere
Disasters have no borders, and the summer of disasters in the US shows it. Hilary, the tropical storm that roared over Los Angeles this week, was not the type of storm that California is known for. The pollution nightmare that followed the smoke from fires hundreds of miles away was not expected by the East Coast. Hawaii’s native greenery isn’t supposed to burn, and yet fires engulfed Maui.
Climate change can be seen not only in the US but in all over the world. It’s piling disaster upon disaster on communities figuring out how to adapt to these new realities. They face a new crisis sometimes but are still recovering from a previous one.
According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are now the primary cause of more extreme weather around the world. Land and sea temperatures are rising because of greenhouse gases. Hurricanes help warm waters make bigger storms. It propelled Hurricane Hilary into a storm of a Category 4 over the Pacific and gave it enough juice to stay strong over Baja California and Southern California.
The study looked at human-caused climate impacts on fire weather, the conditions that make a spark likely to catch and turn into a blaze. More intense fire weather leads to much more dangerous burns, says Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. Hotter air temperatures suck moisture from trees and duff along the forest floor, priming them to burn with taller, hotter flames. High winds can also cause fires to spread so quickly they are difficult, or impossible, for firefighting teams to control.
The deadliest wildfires in Hawaii’s history leveled Lahaina this month. The change from a Hawaiian Kingdom capital to a tourism destination made it harder for Native Hawaiians to afford to live there. In the aftermath, residents face another potential land grab from realtors and developers who might try to capitalize on the disaster. So fire isn’t the only reason families might lose their homes.
Disasters often cause communities that have been marginalized to be the hardest hit. “Communities that are feeling the impact disproportionately are the lower-income populations, are the ones who are systematically deprioritized and traditionally underserved,” Kruczkiewicz says. “That’s always the case with disasters, particularly when we see these compounding.”
It pours when it rains, and before you recover, you are hit again. The director of theMSE in Systems Engineering at the John Hopkins School of Engineering says that the effect of a string of events is worse because they are living in a multi-hazard possibility.
The wildfire season in Canada has burned for 59,000 square miles since 1959, forcing nearly 1 out of every 200 Canadians to evacuate their homes and burying choking smoke
A record-breaking 59,000 square miles have burned across Canada this year, forcing nearly 1 out of every 200 Canadians to evacuate their homes and smothering vast parts of North America in choking smoke.
Weather that increases fire risk is “getting more severe as climate change gets worse,” says Clair Barnes, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and the study’s lead author. They will continue doing so until we stop using fossil fuels.
Sandy Erni, a fire and disaster risk expert with Canada’s Forest Service, said the fires have burned not just forest but through communities as fire cover grows and people’s footprints expand.
The area burned this summer is roughly the size of Florida. That’s more than twice as much as the next-most destructive season, 1989. The country’s annual burned area has doubled since 1959.
In many of the fire zones, Indigenous communities have been hit the hardest. At one point in July, 75% of those under evacuation orders were Indigenous, says Dorothy Heinrich, a disaster risk expert at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center in the Netherlands, who was involved in the study.
The eastern part of the country is less prepared for a big fire than the west according to previous research.
“The eastern forests are much more sensitive to moisture changes,” says Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, a climate expert at McGill University. The region’s dense forests are expected to burn to the ground in a season of extreme heat and lack of rain.
Normally, Canada’s wildfire season would begin winding down soon, as autumn sets in. Weather forecasts predict more hot, dry weather for several weeks, potentially extending the fire season well beyond its historic bounds.