Climate change makes things worse, much worse. That's the cause and effect. More and worse hurricanes. More and way worse wildfires. More 'snowpocalypses' and longer, hotter droughts. Then, you can attribute greenhouse gases as causing these worse disasters.
totally yes. I've been calling out fellow journalists and advocates for years now to use more precise language and to understand how climate change really works. Thank you!!!
As far as estimating how much climate change affected this event, there is an entire new field of research, extreme event attribution, that allows us to figure this out. See, e.g., this paper by @weatherwest.bsky.social https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220302475
There should be no question that climate change made the LA fires worse. This is simply a consequence of increased rainfall variability combined with warmer temperatures increasing fuel aridity.
More than 20 YEARS of West Coast, Global Warming, Drought, actually all the way up to BC: British Columbia, say, yes you can say the Primary Cause is Global Warming.
And Global Warmings PRIMARY Cause is Burning Gas, Jet Fuel, Natural Gas by 8 Billion Humans on Earth.
Global warming does directly cause melting ice and sea level rise, and the warming oceans. The rest are events that occur anyway, only greatly supercharged by greenhouse gases caused by, yes, burning petrochemicals. To say otherwise gives climate deniers plausible deniability.
Thank you, Dr. Dressler. Boilerplate shouldn't be given any space in these stories anymore. It's lazy journalism. (I wonder if it was salted into the story by a desk editor.)
For the record, I didn't say that. I did tell her that I feel that quantifying the effect of climate change on this particular fire will be very difficult. And I referred her to Megan Kirchmeier-Young's groundbreak study on the 2016 BC fire https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018EF001050
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The interesting question is to what extent climate change made this event worse.
I talked about this a while back on The Climate Brink:
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/tcb-quick-hit-is-climate-change-causing
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220302475
See this paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1607171113
Who cares who or what lit the match, the Bonfire was All Set To BLOW.
And Global Warmings PRIMARY Cause is Burning Gas, Jet Fuel, Natural Gas by 8 Billion Humans on Earth.
https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/lifestyle/columns/2017/05/20/caprock-chronicles-causes-long-drought-remain-speculative/14825436007/