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Notes -
Maybe arsons in less-flammable times don't result in newsworthy conflagrations. Nobody cares about the fires that remain small and burn themselves out quickly. During fire-prone times, any arson is liable to become a big deal.
I agree, but this negates what is often used as a point to discredit the claim that climate change plays some role in recent extreme wildfires.
I often point to figure D from the paper I linked, showing that there’s an incredibly tight relationship between annual area burned and atmospheric aridity (measured as vapor pressure deficit).
And in fact, we know very well that increasing continental vapor pressure deficit extremes is a key aspect of climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51305-w
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD025855
I’ve seen a lot of the back and forth rhetoric about the conditions in California right now. One side, it’s climate change! The other, it’s homeless camps who are lighting fires!
All I know is that Southern California is currently experiencing their second lowest winter (wet season) rainfall totals in 150 years of record keeping and then the Santa Ana winds arrived.
https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/01/california-rain-drought-north-south/
That drought may or may not be related to climate change, but these type of scenarios almost always have an angle where the climate is playing a primary role, for one reason or another.
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