A14 The BulleTin • Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Biden to talk wildfires with leaders of Western states
BY CHRIS MEGERIAN AND
ANNA M. PHILLIPS
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — President
Joe Biden will meet Wednesday
with Cabinet officials and leaders
from Western states, including
California Gov. Gavin Newsom,
as he faces what could be another
devastating year of wildfires with
drought conditions worsening
and searing temperatures spread-
ing.
The situation has alarmed ex-
perts and public officials, who
warn that this year’s fire season
could outpace last year’s, which
was the worst on record. Blazes
have already ignited around Cal-
ifornia, where dry vegetation
has left large swaths of the state
primed to explode into flames,
even as the federal government
struggles to hire firefighters.
“We’re in as high risk of a start-
ing condition as we could ever
expect,” said Noah Diffenbaugh,
a Stanford University professor
who studies climate change and
wildfires.
The California National
Guard deployed a month earlier
than last year, sending helicop-
ters to drop water on the Lava
fire near Mount Shasta. It’s the
largest active fire in the state,
burning more than 13,000 acres
since sparking Thursday, and
Newsom announced Tuesday
that the federal government was
going to help cover some of the
costs.
Western states are eager for
Washington to step up its com-
mitment after President Donald
Trump repeatedly blamed them
for failing to prevent and stop
wildfires — particularly Califor-
nia, which he said failed to “clean
your forests” of combustible veg-
etation.
Heat dome
Continued from A1
Wind directions have played
a crucial role in the coverage
and magnitude of the exces-
sive heat. The high-pressure
system has been centered near
the international border, with
clockwise flow around it bring-
ing easterly winds for much of
the Columbia River Basin and,
broadly, Idaho, Washington
and Oregon.
Between Saturday and Mon-
day, the easterly winds helped
push the coastal marine layer,
or zone of ocean-chilled air,
back over the water, permitting
the heat to extend into the In-
terstate 5 corridor from Seattle
south to Medford, and even to
the coast in some areas.
But as the low-pressure area
weakened and shifted to the
north late Monday, it allowed
onshore flow of winds off the
ocean to return to coastal ar-
eas, which brought significant
cooling.
Ted S. Warren/AP
A person walks past a Molly Moon’s Ice Cream store Monday in Seattle’s
Capitol Hill neighborhood. The store was closed due to excessive heat
as Seattle and other cities in the Pacific Northwest endured the hottest
day of an unprecedented and dangerous heat wave, with tempera-
tures obliterating records that had been set just the day before.
Portland had its biggest
overnight drop in temperature
on record between Monday
evening and Tuesday morning,
as the mercury plummeted 52
degrees, from 116 to 64.
“It was very, very nice, a
much-needed break,” Muessle
said.
But this onshore wind won’t
offer relief for interior locations
that are predicted to bake un-
der the heat dome for the next
several days.
The threat comes amid staff-
ing shortages at the U.S. Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land
Management, problems exacer-
bated by low pay, competition
from state and local fire depart-
ments and exhaustion from last
year’s fire season.
More than a month after sea-
sonal hiring would typically have
ended, the federal government
is still trying to fill vacant posi-
tions on Hotshot crews, the most
elite and experienced firefighting
teams. Although these crews are
venerated for leading the attack
against the most difficult fires,
Climate change
A heat wave of this magni-
tude required weather systems
and winds to align, but it could
not have been this extreme
without human-caused cli-
mate change.
The role of climate change
has been to substantially in-
crease the likelihood of record-
breaking temperatures.
Simple logic dictates a cli-
mate experiencing a back-
ground warming of several
degrees will be more prone to
hotter heat events. It’s like a
slam dunk in basketball — if
the floor rises, it becomes eas-
ier to score.
“Summers in the Pacific
Northwest are about 3 de-
grees warmer today than 50
or 100 years ago,” said Zeke
Hausfather, a climate scientist
at the Breakthrough Institute.
“All things equal, we would
think a heat wave today would
be about 3 degrees warmer.”
Such warming, Hausfa-
ther said, means exceptionally
some have had so many veteran
firefighters quit that they’ve been
downgraded to a lower-ranking
status.
Nationally, fire management
teams are having to compete
with each other for crews and
equipment much earlier in the
season than in years past. On
June 22, the National Inter-
agency Fire Center, which co-
ordinates fire response from
Boise, Idaho, raised the national
preparedness to level 4 on a 1
to 5 scale, saying it was the sec-
ond earliest it had reached that
point.
strong heat waves, such as this,
become more frequent.
“Heat waves that used to oc-
cur as 1-in-1,000-year events
are becoming 1-in-100-year
events and 1-in-100-year
events are becoming 1-in-20,”
he said.
In addition, drought, which
has connections to climate
change, is playing a role as
both a cause and effect of the
ongoing heat. Fifty-five per-
cent of the West is experienc-
ing an extreme or exceptional
drought — the two most se-
vere categories — including
about a quarter of Washington
and nearly a third of Oregon.
Dry air heats up considerably
faster than humid air. That
means the same input of heat
can foster a higher tempera-
ture.
Research shows climate
change has worsened the
“megadrought” over much of
the West, because warming
temperatures dry out the land
surface more quickly.
“We’re in as
high risk of
a starting
condition as
we could ever
expect.”
— Noah
Diffenbaugh, a
Stanford University
professor who
studies climate
change and
wildfire
Looking ahead, observed
temperatures associated with
the heat wave are actually help-
ing to dry out the area even
further, while the impetus for
the heat — high pressure —
diverts precipitation and storm
systems to the north. That will
make high temperatures even
tougher to shake.
Finally, it’s possible that cli-
mate warming has changed
the jet stream to increase the
strength of hot weather pat-
terns such as what we’ve seen
in the Pacific Northwest this
week.
Michael Mann, a climate
scientist at Pennsylvania State
University, with colleagues,
published a study in 2018 that
connects summer weather ex-
tremes with a fundamental
change in how the jet stream is
behaving during the summer.
Hausfather said “robust de-
bate” continues in the scien-
tific community about the role
of climate change on jet stream
patterns.