Quote of the Day: Ronald Neilson on the Southern California Fires
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 10.29.07
Photo credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
This is exactly what we’ve been projecting to happen, both in short-term fire forecasts for this year and the longer term patterns that can be linked to global climate change. ...
You can’t look at one event such as this and say with certainty that it was caused by a changing climate. But things just like this are consistent with what the latest modeling shows, and may be another piece of evidence that climate change is a reality, one with serious effects.
As the planet warms, more water is getting evaporated from the oceans and all that water has to come down somewhere as precipitation. That can lead, at times, to heavier vegetation loads popping up and creation of a tremendous fuel load. But the warmth and other climatic forces are also going to create periodic droughts. If you get an ignition source during these periods, the fires can just become explosive. In the future, catastrophic fires such as those going on now in California may simply be a normal part of the landscape."
—Ronald Neilson, a professor at Oregon State University, bioclimatologist with the USDA Forest Service, and contributor to publications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in an OSU press release
[Via ::The Blue Marble Blog]
See also: ::L.A. Demands Fire-Fighting Goats
It should be obvious that global warming is going to have some kind of impact on natural phenomena throughout the world. Global warming is happening. It is happening everywhere. It is influencing all weather events everywhere. Yes, it can be said that global warming does not necessarily cause any single particular event. But it would be silly to say that global warming isn't having some kind of impact on each and every weather or natural phenomena event. And it should be obvious that in many instances that impact will be extremely negative. And as far as I am concerned, it only makes sense to assume that this is one of those cases. But you know how it goes, those with an economic interest involved will continue to try to downplay the climate crisis at every step of the way. This is as much a certainty as global warming. And as with global warming, we will simply have to find an effective way to deal with it.