After visiting California’s Yosemite Rim Fire, National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis said climate change is leaving the West more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires that are huge, “incredibly difficult to control and very expensive.” “This is a gnarly fire,” he said. “It’s got high attention, huge fuels, big flame lengths and lots of really, really dry, climate-driven conditions.”
Climate change isn’t the only culprit creating the conditions for more severe and dangerous fires, but it doesn’t take a climate scientist or even a great detective to see the fingerprints of human-caused climate change on most wildfire crime scenes. Despite this, Media Matters analysis shows that the news media has largely failed to do the service of putting wildfires into the climate context for their audiences. This summer (as of July), only 6 percent of news stories about wildfires even mentioned climate change.
As fire geographer Michael Medler testified in a congressional hearing, “On the fire lines it is clear, global warming is changing fire behavior, creating longer fire seasons and causing more frequent, large-scale, high-severity wildfires.” (That was back in 2007.) The science here is clear. Low snow pack and early snow-melt along with hotter temperatures and drought are making forests dry and highly flammable. Fire season now lasts two months longer and destroys twice as much land as it did 40 years ago.
So, how should we reinforce the connections between climate change and the scary trend toward more frequent, wilder, hotter, bigger and less unpredictable wildfires? There are plenty of excellent resources to go deep on the science. (Some of the best are here, here, here, here, and here). But people need to hear the basics.
Here are some simple, powerful sound bites to frame every possible conversation (and news story) about wildfires:
