Summer 2022: Oak Fire in California exploded due to climate change
But as the climate emergency brings rising temperatures, California has become increasingly vulnerable to extreme wildfires. In 2020 and 2021, the state saw two of the most devastating fire seasons on record, with more than 6.8m acres burned and 36 deaths.
And it will only get worse:
How bad will California’s fire season get this year?
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has forecast that California will be hit hard by fire conditions in the coming months.
California fire officials reported last month that vegetation was already as dry early in the summer as it would typically be in October, a foreboding sign.
“It is dire across the board,” Dr Craig Clements, the director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University, told the Guardian last month. “We have a lot of accumulation of dead fuels and because of drought it is just going to get worse and worse. We can only expect as we get later in the summer, that the fires will get bigger.”
What actually happened in 2022?
California saw a much more quiet fire season in 2022 compared to the previous year. The year-to-date data from Cal Fire shows 362,478 acres burned this year. That’s a much lower number than the 2,569,459 acres that burned in 2021.
The article’s quoted expert blames forest management for recent large fires.
And – The Oak Fire was arson: Alleged arsonist busted in Yosemite Nat’l Park blaze initially attributed to climate change (nypost.com)
The climate speculation was incorrect but is what will remain in people’s memory. People will remember what they hear first, even if they learn later that this was incorrect.
More on prediction versus reality -> here.
Also – the long term trend – the NIFC erased all data prior to 1983 (I kept a copy on file in a spreadsheet so I still have it) and reset their chart start to 1983 which just happened to be the lowest number of acres burned in 100+ years. The NIFC now says we have no records of fires prior to 1983 saying they changed how they counted acres burned.
Drought Predicted to Continue in 2022/2023 Winter
Through the fall of 2022, experts predicted continued drought in California for the 2022/2023 winter. Instead, they had 200% of normal precipitation.
Similar erroneous forecasts were made for my state for 2022 fires and 2022/2023 drought/precipitation. All of them were wrong.
Update: Even though expert predictions for the near future are wrong about 90+% of the time, we now see predictions of future apocalypse based on spring’s Canadian wildfires and drought (and/or flood) in Europe. Will anyone look back next year and check on the prior year’s predictions? No. Just a couple of years ago fires in Australia and Brazil lead to predictions of more to come – which didn’t come. But again, no one follows up to point out that predictions of eminent doom nearly always are wrong. But people will remember the scary predictions and that will influence their thoughts for years to come, even when subsequent events demonstrate past apocalyptic predictions were wrong. Once the pattern of fear is set in motion, it can rarely be stopped.
