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September 12, 2020 02:34 pm

With Wildfires, California Experiences a 'Cascading' of Climate Disasters

"Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. "Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)The crisis in the nation's most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other. "You're toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven't imagined," said Roy Wright, who directed resilience programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2018 and grew up in Vacaville, California, near one of this year's largest fires. "It's apocalyptic." The same could be said for the entire West Coast this week, to Washington and Oregon, where towns were decimated by infernos as firefighters were stretched to their limits. California's simultaneous crises illustrate how the ripple effect works. A scorching summer led to dry conditions never before experienced. That aridity helped make the season's wildfires the biggest ever recorded. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern California history have occurred this year. If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a decade ago, today it is all too real for Californians... "If you are in denial about climate change, come to California," Gov. Gavin Newsom said last month. Officials have worried about cascading disasters. They just did not think they would start so soon... Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said many people did not understand the dynamics of a warming world. "People are always asking, 'Is this the new normal?'" he said. "I always say no. It's going to get worse."

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