Are the Southern California wildfires linked to global warming?
Scientists can’t link a single wildfire (or any natural disaster) to global warming. “I’m not sure we can finger global climate change as the underlying cause of the current fires that we’re seeing in the Los Angeles area and elsewhere in California,” said climate researcher Dan Cayan of Scripps institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego and the U.S. Geological Survey. Dominick Spracklen at the University of Leeds agrees: “It’s impossible to blame the fires that are happening at the moment on climate change.” That being said, many scientists speculate that in a warming world the likelihood of wildfires is higher. Part of the issue is heat-induced drought. Over the next 90 years, scientists say the southwestern United States and parts of northern Mexico will experience nearly perpetual drought. Spracklen’s research, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, suggests that the area of forest burnt by wildfires in the United States will increase by more than 50 per
