A single, devastating California fire season wiped out years of efforts to cut emissions of global warming gases. The climate crisis is now accelerating, says The Economist.
When the California fire season finally ends, it will have killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed more than 4 million homes and displaced tens of millions more, all in the space of just over two months. With such a long lead time, scientists say it will take at least the end of the century for the state’s emissions to start to fall.
A single, devastating California fire season destroyed years of efforts to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for warming the planet, and experts believe the damage was so severe that the window of opportunity to curb emissions in the future is now narrow indeed.
The worst single fire has killed more than 80 people in the small town of Rancho Cucamonga in Southern California, according to media reports, and is thought to have reduced the city’s population by almost one-third, from about 18,000 a year ago to around 12,000.
When fires become part of life, as they are now, it is hard to see what will be spared.
A single Californian fire season has reduced the state’s greenhouse gases by more than a third, according to a new study led by a University of Washington professor and based on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Some experts have suggested that the fire season was probably the result of climate-change-driven drought years.
But The Economist, which has examined the effects of weather and climate change on California’s economy, says the climate crisis was also to blame.
“This was the result of years of burning, which was caused by global warming. But it was also caused by the lack of action by politicians who failed to protect people and the environment, and by inadequate local planning of what should be built and managed.”
A new study suggests temperatures across the world have already risen and will continue to rise in the coming decades. This would not be a surprise to climate scientists because it follows from the work and the projections made by their models. The reason they
