North Bay, Santa Cruz Wildfires a Reminder that We’re Living in New Climate with New Dangers

As I walked among the embers of what was the Coffey Park neighborhood, my eyes burned from the smoke as I watched weeping residents gaze at where their homes once stood. I was shocked not only by the devastation, but by the fact that a wildfire could reach so far into a city.

Wildfires are supposed to stay in wildlands, not move into subdivisions with busy intersections, schools and restaurants. Of course, fires don’t follow any such rules. But if a working-class neighborhood in Santa Rosa could fall victim to a wildfire raging down the hills like a flash flood, what neighborhood can truly claim to be safe?

Indeed, Coffey Park was outside of the city’s “very severe” hazard zone. As the Los Angeles Times reported, that meant these homes were exempt from regulations to make them more fire-resistant. It’s not clear how such precautions would have protected the neighborhood from the early-morning firestorm on Oct. 9. More than 1,200 homes were incinerated in a matter of minutes.

This wasn’t city or state negligence, but rather a chilling testament that we live in a different era of fire danger. The climate has changed and so have the risks. This is the terrifying new normal.

PG&E power lines, whipping and sparking due to heavy winds, most likely triggered this month’s catastrophic wine country fires, but evidence shows that climate change built the weapon and aimed it right at the North Bay. And as last week’s wildfires in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties show, we remain under the gun.

From the most destructive hurricane season on record to the devastating fires still burning across the Bay Area , the reality is devastatingly clear: the climate has changed and the conditions for fires will only intensify. It was just two years ago that that the Valley fire exploded in the parched hills of Lake, Napa and northern Sonoma counties, burning 76,000 acres and 1,350 homes and killing three. The North Bay’s 15 concurrent fires scorched more than 220,000 acres, burned an estimated 5,700 structures and caused at least 40 deaths, making them the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history.

“That’s the way it is with a warming climate, dry weather and reduced moisture,” Gov. Jerry Brown said  in a press conference. “These kinds of catastrophes have happened, and they are going to continue to happen.”

Wildfires in California have always been a fact of life. Fire plays an important ecological role in the chaparral and conifer forest ecosystems. Problems arise when people choose to live in those fire-prone environments. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and local fire departments mandate property owners carve out a ring of defensible space to help defend against wildfires. But there’s little chance of fending off wind-whipped fires of such intensity and speed.

“We know that Northern California’s climate has changed,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, “and we’re in a climate that’s different than when a lot of what we have on the landscape was designed and built.”

Climate plays an important role in wildfire risk, but it’s not the only influence, says Diffenbaugh. Human elements such as ignition, forest management and where and how we build also play a role. But climate change is the biggest human element of all.

“Climate sets the stage, and we have strong evidence that the global warming that’s already happened has increased wildfire risk in the western United States through the effects of temperature drying the landscape,” Diffenbaugh says. “For this particular event, we can really see the impacts of heat. We had record hot conditions during the drought. We had record high temperatures that coincided with record low precipitation that created the most severe drought on record that killed tens of millions of trees. Those record drought conditions were followed by extremely wet conditions this winter, that were again followed by record hot conditions.”

Rising temperatures also lead to less snowfall in the Sierra and earlier melting of that snow, meaning there is less runoff available during the hot, dry days of fall.

In California, Diffenbaugh notes, low precipitation levels are twice as likely to produce drought if they coincide with warm conditions. “Overall, we’ve seen a doubling in frequency of drought in California in recent decades.”

The east-to-west Diablo winds that fanned the flames, reaching hurricane strength at higher elevations, may also be pegged to climate change, Diffenbaugh says.

Richard Heinberg, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on climate change and sustainability issues, lives in Santa Rosa and was evacuated the first night of the fire. His house was spared. While the links between climate change and wildfires can be indirect, he says, research shows that increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to rapid but less viable plant growth: i.e. more fuel for fire.

“It’s almost like we’re growing junk food with more CO2 in the atmosphere,” Heinberg says. On a larger scale, data shows that California is moving into a hotter and drier climate. “The 20th century was a wet spell for California,” Heinberg adds.

City officials say Santa Rosa will rebuild and will be “better than before.” But better in
what way? Better prepared for future wildfires? Better built to reduce the CO2 emissions that contributed to the perilous state we’re in? Or will better just mean bigger?

While Gov. Brown admirably sounds the climate change alarm, it’s not keeping pace with the explosive conditions on the ground.

In an essay called the “The Devil in Wine Country,” set to be published in the London Review of Books, Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imaginations of Disaster, admits he’s “an elderly prophet of doom” who laments “the hopelessness of rational planning in a society based on real estate capitalism.

“We’ll continue to send sprawl into our fire-dependent ecosystems with the expectation that firefighters will risk their lives to defend each new McMansion,” he writes, “and an insurance system that spreads costs across all homeowners will promptly replace whatever is lost.”

Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Coursey says he’s thought about how the city might rebuild to be more resilient, but with the fire still blazing and people’s lives at risk, now is not the time for that. “I’m not there yet,” he says.

Ann Hancock, executive director of Santa Rosa’s Center for Climate Protection, says that when the time is right, she hopes the conversation centers on reducing the impacts of climate change.

“It’s not too early to start thinking about that, so long as the people who are suffering are taken care of,” she says.

As a trained public health professional, Hancock is a strong advocate for prevention “where we have the best opportunity for impact with the lowest cost.”

Local measures such as better forest management and more defensible space are important, but her organization focuses on bringing down the greenhouse gas emissions that got us into this crisis.

“It’s is a wholesale systemic change,” she says, “and that’s overwhelming for most people to think about—and yet we have to.”

When the North Bay rebuilds, Heinberg calls for building great resiliency into local infrastructure that can better withstand future disasters: redundant electric and water systems, and larger inventories of food and supplies. With climate change exacerbating the risks, he says, the region should deepen its investment in mass transit, zero-energy buildings and clean energy.

“Ultimately, though, what all this suggests is we need to build differently, change our patterns of living and build a lot more resilience into our whole society, because we unquestionably have more disasters on the way of different kinds, not just wildfires,” Heinberg says. “We in California have the opportunity to see the handwriting on the wall and make some changes.”

This article first appeared in the North Bay Bohemian, a sister newspaper to San Jose Inside’s parent company, Metro Silicon Valley, based in Santa Rosa. Metro has created a fund to help victims of the wine country wildfires.

14 Comments

  1. > The climate has changed and so have the risks. This is the terrifying new normal.

    And how do we know that brush fires in California are “the terrifying new normal”?

    Because Stett Holbrook says so, so it must be true.

    I think SJI is doing a disservice to Stett by minimizing his identity and credentials. If we knew more about Stett, SJI readers could do a better job of assigning discredit to those institutions that shaped his view of reality and made him the ignorant and presumtuous person that he is.

  2. California’s contribution of greenhouse gases and to the problem of climate change are a function of our population. If our State was really serious about reducing our negative impact then we would stop focusing efforts on providing more affordable housing. Keep California unaffordable. Environmentally it’s the right thing to do.
    That said, it’s looking likely that some of these recent fires will be traced back to downed power lines. PG&E spends an enormous amount of time and money trimming and removing trees that threaten distribution and transmission lines. But their efforts are often impeded by property owners reluctant to grant access to tree crews. So PG&E’s line clearing program is made more complicated and winds up less effective. It seems to me that if property owners, rather than PG&E, were made to bear the financial burden of keeping their trees clear of power lines, then there would be a lot of incentive to not plant or keep trees that are too close to wires and this major problem would be dramatically reduced.

  3. It must be climate change that has attracted so many Mexican marijuana farmers to our forests, like those who started last year’s devastating Big Sur fire (news cameras actually caught them exiting the forest and identified them as campers… extremely camera-shy campers).

    As for the recent fires, Fall is harvest time for NorCal outdoor pot farmers, so there is real reason to at least consider their involvement, accidentally or intentionally (to sabotage others).

  4. From the article:

    “We know that Northern California’s climate has changed,” says Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist™.

    I am not one a them guys. But even I know that climates change. All climates change, all the time. No exceptions.

    But an interesting fact they don’t tell you is that those current changes are well within past parameters. There is nothing unusual or unprecedented happening now. Everything being observed now has happened before—and to a much greater degree. When is the last time you’ve heard that?

    For example, just prior to our current Holocene climate, global temperatures fluctuated by TENS of whole degrees, both up and down—and those changes happened within just a couple of decades! (And, I might add, they happened before human CO2 emissions were a factor.)

    Here’s how those pre-Holocene changes compare with what we’re observing now:

    Over the past century, global temperatures have fluctuated by only about 0.8ºC. That’s compared with ±10 degrees, within only a couple of decades.

    So what is Diffenbaugh talking about, when he says:

    “…climate change is the biggest human element of all.”

    He sounds just like Chicken Little, doesn’t he? And for a climate scientist™, Diffenbaugh can’t seem to get his facts straight. He says:

    “We had record hot conditions during the drought. We had record high temperatures.”

    Umm-m… No: http://tiny.cc/wx4eoy The 1930’s were quite a bit warmer than the recent ‘record’ temps.

    And of course, this well known climate scientist™ is also quoted:

    “That’s the way it is with a warming climate…” Gov. Jerry Brown said in a press conference. (A word of advice: it’s always best to not step between this Presidential wannabe candidate and a microphone…)

    This whole article is a series of disjointed factoids, Chicken Little-style global warming panic, and pseudo experts like this one:

    Richard Heinberg, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on climate change and sustainability issues, Do yoy think he might be a tad biased? …says that ‘While the links between climate change and wildfires can be indirect, research shows that increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to rapid but less viable plant growth: i.e. more fuel for fire.

    Wednesday, Thursday, Friday?? Is he saying that CO2, which NASA states is responsible for GREENING the planet, is a bad thing?

    And agricultural productivity—which tracks rising CO2 in lock-step—is now called “less viable plant growth”?

    Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot?!? This jamoke is getting so mixed up with his ad-hoc explanations that his name oughta be ‘Tanglefoot’.

    To recap: There is zero evidence showing that more CO2 is the cause of any global harm. Therefore, the rise in CO2 has been ‘harmless’. QED

    And compared with recent geologic temperature fluctuations, we’re now enjoying a “Goldilocks” temperature regime: For the past century+ the planet has been… Not too hot, not too cold, but ju-u-u-u-ust RIGHT!

    I mean, really, they’re running around in circles and clucking over an 0.8ºC wiggle in global temperatures? Over an entire century?? What more do they want… ?

    …oh, I get it. Yeah. They want more M-O-N-E-Y. Our money. And they want lots more of it.

    They want it bad enough to lie through their teeth about what’s happening.

    But it’s the government; what do you expect? Probity?

  5. Excellent exposition, Mr. Smokey.

    I was trained as a scientist, and the “global warming” mumbo jumbo just makes me crazy.

    It’s an insult to science to to even call it “junk science”. It’s just simply junk. Or more accurately, “junk politics”.

    Out of consideration for SJI, I will restrain myself from delivering the massive debunking that the topic so richly deserves. Mainly, those most in need of ingesting the debunking are also the most ill equipped to handle it. They have no real grounding in science, no understanding of the scientific method, and rely almost entirely on political shamans to inform their beliefs or opinions about global warming.

    “We all going to die from rising sea levels because science C-student Al Gore says so!

    (Hands over ears) I CAN’T HEAR YOU! I CAN’T HEAR YOU I CAN’T HEAR YOU”

    Fact: Sea level has RISEN almost 120 meters (400 feet) since the end of the last ice age.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#/media/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png

    “The debate is over”

    “Dialogue is violence”.

    http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/10/19/left-wing-protesters-invade-college-republicans-meeting-reportedly-declare-dialogue-is-violence/

    • I’d love to compare the opinion on this matter of people with any sort of degree in scientific fields vs. those without. It’d be enlightening to say the least, and probably not going your way!

        • So you’re an idiot savant ! I knew you must have a hidden talent,but I never would have guessed it was typing with your hands over your ears. It’s not much of a talent though as you can only type in CAPS. Is this how you keep the voices in your head from escaping or do they just flee through your pie hole instead ? Please seek help !

  6. Ahh, how refreshing to hear from the usual band of trolls. And so fascinating that you are all so scientifically qualified to naysay the climate change theory. Smokey cleverly uses pre-holocene data (careful not to get near the post-holocene, Smokey! It might make you look foolish!) And Outsidethebubble was “trained as a scientist”! Which is so obvious by his complete like of bias, namecalling, anti-Gore paranoia, or empty rhetoric.

    Or maybe not.

    Mr. Potatoz, as a PhD who used to work in atmospheric science, I can tell you this: all evidence corroborates the theory of global warming. The overwhelming majority of researchers in any germane field buy into the theory. Many will go far enough to say it is now fact and no longer just a theory. And apparently the only place anthropogenic climate change is not even a viable theory is among such biased and wildly partisan places like Breitbart/Fox/TheBlaze.

    • > all evidence corroborates the theory of global warming. The overwhelming majority of researchers in any germane field buy into the theory.

      Dear Mr. 1971:

      Let me guess: 1971 was the year your junior college social work teacher got his associate degree in ethnic studies.

    • Mr.1971, a newbie? I seem to remember California catching fire on a regular basis long before 1971. Sliding down muddy hillsides and shaking people out of bed long before you arrived here Mr. 1971.
      It was known as the land of “Fruits and Nuts” way back then!

  7. One thing is certain. There have been and are damaging fires and we in this state do little preventative about it. Fire breaks, more resources (fighters and planes etc.) are called for without validation of claims as to why and how.

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