Wildfires and Climate Change Pt 1
I’m Bob Larson. Did global warming play a role in last month’s wildfires? It depends on who you ask. Governor Jay Inslee made no bones about it, saying “these are not just
wildfires, these are climate fires.”
But, I asked a scientist, University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences professor Cliff Mass who says it was a fairly benign wildfire season until an extraordinarily unusual weather event sparked some grass fires September 6th …
MASS … “So, it started pushing towards the west, so we had high pressure inland. We also had unusual low pressure offshore and that produced these extremely unusual easterly winds, and that’s what did it. That’s what revved the fires up on the 7th and the 8th.”
Mass says it all happened very quickly …
MASS … “Some of the fires were already there. There had been some lightening fires in mid-August that weren’t going anywhere, okay. And, those blew up as the winds hit them. There were some electrical fires, some powerlines caused some fires as well, and then there were some arson, unfortunately.”
Oregon, Mass says took the brunt of it …
MASS ... “And so, we had all these fires on the western slopes of the Oregon Cascades. There was one that was on the Washington side, but it was mainly the western side of the Oregon Cascades and the fires blew up, and the rest is history.”
Tune in tomorrow for more on Climate Change and wildfires.
To find Cliff’s blog on this and more, go to …
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/09/did-global-warming-play-significant.html?fbclid=IwAR078vCUPXaD7CYVeBr7hX9HYV-a-LdlZXUnjdqaIbljMRZ1ivIn2bkzeW0
