The World is on Flames: Impact of Climate Change Through Incessant Wildfires

LOS ANGELES, CA – Summer in California is almost synonymous with wildfire season. The Bobcat Fire, one of the largest in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 115,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest since Sept. 6 possibly due to vegetation coming into contact with a Southern California Edison overhead conductor.

According to the California Department of Fire Protection, the Bobcat Fire is one of the 27 major wildfires burning in California, where 26 people have died and 6,400 structures have been destroyed.

Photo Credit: The Los Angeles Times

Monrovia Resident Karen Gutowski said that even though her neighborhood had fires in the area before, the Bobcat Fire was the first that burned close enough to her home to make her pack her car and be ready to evacuate at any moment.

“[The air quality] has been very bad. [It] was very thick, we didn’t go out,” Gutowski said. “The quality was that bad.”

Los Angeles County also reached its highest temperature on record. The temperature was 124 degrees when Gutowski noticed the Bobcat Fire was a threat. She was out in the garden spraying her plants when she looked up and saw a small fire out in the distance, about ten minutes after it started, she said.

“It wasn’t even on any fire reporting at that point, but I knew that we were in for trouble,” Gutowski said. “We could see a hundred-foot flames. It was very frightening for us. We were terrified that we were going to lose everything.”

According to CNN, nearly 19,000 firefighters are battling the blazes. The Los Angeles County Fire spokesman Sky Cornell said much of the northern spread of the Bobcat Fire was into high desert flatlands, a much easier terrain to battle wildfire than the steep hills and deep canyons of the Angeles National Forest, where the blaze has already burned.

According to the Cal Fire, over 9,200 fire incidents struck California, burning a record four million acres this year.

But California is not the only state associated with fires during summer. The year 2020 has seen record-breaking wildfires all over the world.

Overseas in Brazil, the biggest country of South America where 60% of the Amazon Rainforest is located, the state of Amazônia, Rondônia and Mato Grosso are targeted by incessant wildfires all-year long, but most noticeable during its most dry season from August to November.

Wildfires burned more than 13,000 square kilometers of the Amazon Rainforest in 2020, which is more than eight times the size of London, the BBC News reports.

This fire season was also the worst in Australia’s history. According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, 15,000 fires burned in every Australian state, killing and displacing nearly three billion native animals.

In California, the natural area and facility of the Devil's Punchbowl park has been burned by the fire, a news release from the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation said on NBC News. "The area is still considered a hotspot and not safe," the release said. "The facility will be closed until further notice."

Although the animals from the Devil's Punchbowl park were evacuated, not all animals have this luck. Fires destroyed a sanctuary of rarest birds of blue macaws in Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland in Brazil. Because of the fires, which mainly are illegally set by cattle-ranchers to create pasture land, macaws are now threatened with extinction. According to the New York Times, Pantanal is also burning at a record rate, with close to 8,000 square miles burned so far.

Wildfires not only drastically impact biodiversity and threaten endangered species to extinction, but also increase greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, causing the climate to change.

Dr. Tom Hogen-Esch, Chair and Professor of the Political Science Department at California State University, Northridge, said it is in the national interest of the United States to rejoin the Paris Climate agreement under the Biden administration in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Stacey Frederick, California Fire Science Consortium’s Coordinator, says the climate crisis poses a risk to humans and ecosystems since more natural disasters are prone to happen.

"There are some patterns within climate change that can both affect the vegetation ahead of a fire, so it could cause more tree mortality or different plants to die," Frederick said. "And then once the fire is happening, it can also affect the current weather conditions, so having hotter, drier, windier temperatures."

As Frederick states, California is one of the most biologically diverse states in the United States. Because of that, so are the fires, since California has a flammable ecosystem. The weather patterns of climate change make fires worse by spreading faster.

"There's a lot of scientists who have taken the climate change prediction models and tracked what these patterns might be that would be related to fire, and there's a lot of potential for different areas all across the nation and all across the world to get worse because of climate change.”

Still, Frederick says there are still solutions through other actions besides mitigating climate change with carbon. Some of the actions are "restoring fires [and] having control of the prescribed fire during the right temperatures and the right time of year can actually make a forest more resilient, both to climate change and to future fires."

As Cal Fire warns that California's wildfire season continues even when summer turns to fall, people might have to learn how to live with natural disasters – including wildfires – as the government deals with the climate crisis.

“[We have to] focus on our structures and our homes, and make it so as if a fire does come through – probably not if, more when a fire comes through – our homes are easier to defend,” Frederick said.

Though Dr. Hogen-Esch said neither former President Trump and President-elect Joe Biden say anything that would have much of an impact in climate change, the Biden administration will have more enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

Meanwhile, CSUN’s Geology Professor, Dr. Jennifer Cotton, said realistically, Biden understands the United States doesn’t have the infrastructure to ban fossil fuels in America, which is one of the main contributors to emitting greenhouse gases and affecting the climate.

“You can’t just tomorrow shut down all oil drilling and all fracking, because 50% of California’s electricity is generated from natural gas,” Cotton said. “If we didn’t use natural gas starting tomorrow, we wouldn’t have enough electricity to meet the demands of the state.”

Cotton said scientists know climate change is caused by humans. As human actions are causing the climate to change much faster than natural forces, urgent changes are necessary to avoid more deadly natural disasters to happen.

“We don’t have a lot of time to start making these infrastructure changes to switch to renewable resources.”