This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Just over a year ago, my old friend Jane Braxton Little experienced climate change up close and personal. Greenville, California, the Gold Rush-era town she'd lived in since the 1970s (when I used to visit her there) was burned down in the raging Dixie Fire. She wrote about it vividly at TomDispatch. For a time, she became, as she put it, a "climate refugee," just as so many of the survivors of Hurricane Ian did in Florida this fall.
Honestly, it isn't really up for debate anymore (unless you're in the Trumpublican Party), is it? This overheating planet of ours is growing ever more perilous right before our eyes, whether you're talking about increasingly severe megadroughts, floods, fires, storms, or melting glaciers and ice sheets. And it's only going to get worse as, despite everything we now know, humanity continues to put record amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As it happens, the latest war on this planet, the still expanding one in Ukraine, is only making matters worse, while pouring record profits into the coffers of the giant fossil-fuel companies whose CEOs are living as if there were no tomorrow.
Of course, there will indeed be a tomorrow and another after that, even if they prove ever more perilous. When it comes to fire, as Little explains today, in its own fashion, this planet is already ablaze. As a United Nations report put it, we're experiencing "a global wildfire crisis" turning landscapes into tinderboxes." Already reporting on climate change when the Dixie Fire hit her community, Little saw all this in a horrifying way. Now, take a step back with her and she'll fill you in on the inferno this planet threatens to become. Tom
Inferno
Climate Disaster Is Turning the Planet into a Tinderbox
Mike Savala's boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead.
"Third response today," said Savala, shaking his head.
This hillside in my own backyard in California's northern Sierra Nevada mountains hadn't seen lightning for months and yet it had still burst into flames. All summer long, it had baked in heat that extended into an unseasonably hot autumn. Now, in late October, it was charred by a fire of mysterious origin. A spark from a wandering hiker? An errant ember from a burn pile? Spontaneous combustion?
Savala, a fire-crew boss for the Greenville Rancheria of Maidu Indians, scanned the sky. Cloudless. There had only been three inches of precipitation since July 1st " 15% of normal. And no wonder, since California is in the throes of its fourth dry year. More than 95% of the state is now classified as under severe or extreme drought.
Although small and easily contained, this tiny fire in rural northeastern California was another wake-up call, up close and personal, about an ominous trend. A warming planet and changing land use are fueling a dramatic surge in forest fires worldwide. Terrifying projections forecast a 57% increase in extreme fires globally by century's end. The indisputable cause: climate change.
"The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes," a team of 50 researchers from six continents reported in "Spreading Like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires," published this year by the United Nations Environment Program. That document describes what can only be viewed as a future flaming version of planetary collapse that could push humanity perilously close to a precipice of no return.
Like dozens of previous reports from the U.N. and other international organizations, it describes a situation that, while dire, isn't yet hopeless. Despite those ever stronger, hotter, drier winds that will fan the flames, governments could slow climate change by improving their forest management techniques, planning and preparing far better, and communicating more effectively. To reduce the likelihood of future mega-fires means working with forests where fire is an element as essential to ecosystems as sunshine or rain. It also means working with forest communities, where local knowledge accumulated over generations is too often shunned. And of course, it means honestly confronting our reluctance to ween ourselves from the fossil fuels that power our factories, cars, and those absurdly unnecessary leaf blowers that are backing us toward the cliff.
A Fiery Feedback Loop
If my small backyard fire was a personal wake-up call, the 2021 Dixie fire was a four-alarm blaze. On its rampage from the Feather River Canyon through Lassen Volcanic National Park and beyond, it destroyed my adopted town of Greenville, 160 miles northeast of San Francisco. In fact, it torched close to a million acres. Nearly half of them burned so intensely that the once-majestic, now blackened pine and fir forests there may never again support the biologically diverse ecosystems that drew me here so long ago.
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