For the fourth consecutive year California is ablaze with catastrophic firestorms. We had a record setting heat wave the last few days and a new set of firestorms are on us again. The Clausius-Clapeyron relationship explains these catastrophic firestorms.
“You may have heard of the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship.” he said to a reporter, hopefully.
The reporter had not.
“It’s an exponential function that describes moisture as a function of temperature.”
For every one-degree increase (Celsius) in temperature, he explained, the amount of water vapor that could be in the air increases by 7% — “like compounding interest.”
What does that have to do with wildfire risk?
As the amount of water vapor that could be in the air goes up, the amount that is actually in the air can’t keep up. That gap creates a vacuum that sucks moisture out of trees and plants. It makes them drier, more parched, more flammable.
It resulted, during those infamous August lightning storms, in an exceptionally high ignition rate: between 4% and 6% of each strike resulting in a fire, Swain estimated, due to the dryness of the vegetation.
The fires spawned by that lightning moved with a speed that surprised Swain. “We’ve seen some of these crazy fires in the past, moving very fast, taking out neighborhoods and killing people,” he said. “But almost all of those have been wind-driven events” — conflagrations abetted by offshore winds coming from the east and north.
The blazes that blackened over a million acres in Northern California over the past three weeks did so without help from the kinds of offshore winds that accelerated the Tubbs and Kincade fires.
The winds whipping these latest blazes were generated, in large part, by the fires themselves. “That’s part of the story,” Swain said, “when you have drier fuel that burns hotter, more intensely.“
The fires themselves are creating their own wind. Terrifying.
I know I have some conservative friends who want to say it is mismanagement of forests is the cause of these firestorms, and the failure to clear out debris on the forest floors certainly doesn't help. And we have a nitwit president that says it's California's fault for not "raking the forests". But the explosion of these formerly unprecedented firestorm seasons is new, and is because of climate change. I myself, back in my conservative days, thought that the climate change people were just trying to find a way to attack productive industry. I finally had to relent and admit that climate change is real, way too real. By all means, do better forest management , but the issue is climate change. It's really obvious.
Climate change is creating extreme weather conditions around the world, and we are approaching a time when some parts of the world may become uninhabitable.
I am not about to abandon my beloved California but I know many who are giving it serious consideration.
It is not even that we have a new normal. A new normal hasn't been reached. We have ever growing effects of climate change, and we don't know where it is going to end up.
