A study released last summer that identifies global climate change as the main driver of increasing fire weather helps explain Northern California's Dixie wildfire, an award-winning environmental reporter said this week.
John Upton, a Newark, New Jersey-based partnership journalism editor at Climate Central, referred in a Twitter post to coverage of the now second-largest California wildfire on record.
Climate Central Partnership Journalism Editor John Upton
| linkedin.com/in/journalistupton/
"Climate change is bringing more frequent fire weather to America's West," Upton said in a Twitter post. "This has helped stoke the growth of Northern California's biggest wildfires and it triggers debilitating anxiety among some survivors."
Upton's coverage of bioenergy earned him an Online News Association award, and he was a 2016 winner of the John B. Oakes Award for distinguished environmental journalism.
Upton's Twitter post linked to a Guardian news story published the same day that referred to fire weather across California's Sierra Nevada foothills and elsewhere on the U.S. West Coast as "increasingly becoming a distressing reality of life." In the past 50 years, increases in global temperatures has dramatically increased annual fire-weather days, the Guardian reported, referring to a Climate Central analysis issued in August, based on federal weather station data.
Climate Central's analysis found that annual fire-weather days increased from seven days in the early 1970s to 22 in 2020 and to 25 this year.
Fire weather days have been noted for years as part of the wildfires experienced in the Western U.S. These are natural events that drive ecosystem cycles, NOAA's Drought.gov says on its website.
The problem is that the frequency and intensity of wildfires have been increasing rapidly and steadily in recent decades and, though it is conceivable that the observed increase is natural, there is a substantial body of evidence that strongly suggests it isn't, according to NOAA.
Drought.gov reports that the 1.7 million acres burned in 11 states between 1984-2000 pales in comparison to the 8.8 million burned in 2020 alone.
