WHY ARE THE WILDFIRES SO EARLY THIS YEAR?

There are currently 18 major wildfires raging over a 900-mile swath through California and Southwest Oregon.  From the Garner Complex fire near Cave Junction, OR, to the Cranston fire near Hemet, CA in the San Jacinto highlands, crews are fighting these wildfires with everything they’ve got.  There are Smokejumpers from across the country parachuting into these infernos and C-130 Hercules aircraft, heavy with red fire retardant, diving into dangerous smoke-filled canyons and dropping their load, trying to beat back fires that have already consumed over 250,000 acres.

But the Western United States usually doesn’t see this kind of wildfire activity until well into the fall.  Why is it so early this year?  That explanation starts with why we have these annual wildfires in the first place.

The transverse mountain ranges of the Western United States are mostly east-west ridges that slice up and define the Western coastal areas of North America.  These ranges were fire-prone long before there was a country known as the United States.  They keep cool, moist coastal air in and arid desert air out for most of the year, until the dry, high-pressure air masses of the Great Basin build up to the point where extremely dry downslope winds swoop down towards the Pacific Ocean.

These winds dry out the dense vegetation that has been feeding off the moist ocean air all year long and make it perfect kindling for wildfires when hot dry winds, known as Santa Anas in California and the Brookings Effect in Oregon and Washington state blow through the region, usually in the late fall.

BUT KINDLING NEEDS A SPARK

State and Federal arson inspectors are constantly looking for the sparks that trigger these awful wildfires.  We need to know why they start, so that laws can be passed to mitigate these disasters by regulating human behavior.  Unfortunately, the cause of most wildfires is nature-made, resulting from lightning from thunderstorms due to the unstable air masses that collide with each other during the change of seasons.  There isn’t much any legislation can do to prevent weather patterns, but, perhaps, something can be done to regulate human activity that’s responsible for these changes in our weather patterns?

THE EARTH IS GETTING WARMER

For the last 100 years or so, scientists have been carefully measuring global temperatures.  This was, at first, considered a necessary public expense because increases in the efficiency of human agricultural production were crucial for our ever-expanding populations.  Then weather became an important component for the safety of our space programs.  Launching satellites and manned-missions had to be done under ideal conditions, and since NASA was already managing our nation’s weather satellites, there was a natural transition into entrusting that organization with controlling our weather pattern research dollars.

Soon the insurance companies saw that scientifically researched weather prediction could greatly add to their net profits, so the NASA climate group became their go-to authority on all things climate.  Since the first NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) annual global temperature analysis was published in 1981, insurance underwriters, and the futures speculators who fund them, have used this climate report as the gold standard for determining risk management for practically every type of disaster insurance underwriting in existence.  If the GISS analysis shows a high risk factor for some free market component due to climate change, that endeavor is probably not going to get insured.

SO IS THERE A CONSENSUS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?

Not quite a total consensus, but over 97% of climate scientists, who actually do annual research and publish scientific papers on this matter, agree that over the past century climate-warming trends are extremely likely due to human activities.  Also, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position on human caused global warming.  Most of the articles that you can read on the internet that are skeptical of this position are written by public relations professionals who have been hired by fossil fuels industry organizations, like Exxon-Mobil and the Koch Brothers, to drop press releases in business magazines.  Hardly any of them are scientists, and the scientists that the corporations do hire to argue against the human caused global warming position are those who haven’t published any scientific papers in years.  But these corporate experts have a science degree, often in an unrelated field, and are willing to write just about anything, if the price is right.

The bottom line here is that catastrophic weather events are becoming much more frequent and severe – like this year’s way-too-early wildfire season.  That’s going to raise insurance premiums on everything, which may be good for the .01% in the short run, but certainly not long term.