As deadly wildfires continue to rage in California—destroying hundreds of homes, threatening thousands more, and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate—experts believe the blazes are part of “the new reality” that climate scientists have warned about for decades.
“This past month shows climate change for real and in real time,” The Fresno Bee declared in an editorial published Monday.
The ferocious California fires, the Guardian reports, have “spawned bizarre pyrotechnics, from firenados to towering pyrocumulus clouds that evoke a nuclear detonation. These events are not aberrations, say experts. They are California’s future.”
“Scientists have been warning that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat. It is sobering to witness how swiftly that prediction has come true.”
—The Fresno Bee
“More acres are burning,” Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told the newspaper. “That is almost certainly due to climate change.”
Anthony LeRoy Westerling, a professor at the University of California, Merced, added that “climate change is continuing to unfold,” and “the impacts from it will probably accelerate.”
California is far from alone in its current struggle to rein in a hot, fiery crisis; in recent weeks, experts have sounded alarms about heat waves and wildfires across the globe, linking the extreme weather to the warming climate.
“Scientists have been warning that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat,” noted The Fresno Bee. “It is sobering to witness how swiftly that prediction has come true, from the lethal heat wave gripping Japan to the record temperatures in Europe to the flames exploding near the Arctic Circle.”
As Common Dreams reported Friday, amid record-breaking temperatures worldwide, an analysis by international scientists found that the “unprecedented” heat wave which has swept across Europe and fueled dozens of fires in Sweden was made more than twice as likely by climate change.
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