The disadvantage of getting most of one’s news during the day from NPR is that we don’t always get the real facts.  No, I’m not claiming NPR is fake news.  But, as happens when I listen (or even watch) Israeli news- with its rapid fire (and you thought New Yorkers talked quickly) presentation- including names and places that are unfamiliar, I sometimes get the wrong impression.

Like when I first heard about the big fires in Redding that required city residents to evacuate.  I was perplexed how a ‘car’ fire could grow so rapidly that the city of Redding (not a small place) was endangered.  Until I read the Washington Post and the New York Times the next day to find out it was the ‘Carr’ fire!

And, when I was traveling in the wine country, the vistas were beautiful the first days.  Until the smoke from the Mendocino fires in the distance began resembling fog rolling in on the valley.

It doesn’t help that the Sacramento Valley is experiencing the hottest July on record.  (While the metropolitan DC area experienced the most rainfall on record.  Too bad we couldn’t ship that rain to California, where it was desperately needed and avoid the rampant flooding of Alexandria and its environs.)

These hellish temperatures end up drying all the timber and grasses- so the fires, once going, burn even more intensely.  Yes, building homes closer and closer to forests doesn’t help, neither do careless citizens with their lit cigarettes, but the rising temperatures (temperatures on the West Coast have risen about 2 F (1 C) over the past 40 years) and drought-like conditions simply amplify the smallest ignition point.

When vegetation is wet, an ignition source is more likely to smolder – and extinguish itself.  But, dry vegetation on a scorching day is more likely to explode when ignited.  Fires don’t need much energy to spread quickly, which then liberates more energy, and that feeds further fire expansion.   (These explosions are what led to the rampant spreading of the Carr fire.)

And, new data is indicating that temperature has far more influence than the precipitation as a risk factor in forest fires, as well as climate change (due to human factors)- as reported by Drs.  John T. Abatzoglou (Idaho) and A. Park Williams (Columbia) in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).  (The ACC notation in the graph above denotes human-caused climate change.)

This study concluded that human-caused climate change is the cause of more than half the increase in dry vegetation stocks, the condition that causes the increased fire intensities.  Top that off with the failure of nighttime temperatures to drop as they did in the past (also due to climate change) means that the chance for a fire to attenuate at night is virtually non-existent.   These are some of the reasons why the wildfire season is some 78 days longer than it was some 20 or 30 years ago.

The Carr fire was not abetted by winds, as is normally true for so many other forest fires.  It was simply due to the state of dry vegetation.  So, that fire- which had hot air streams reaching 39000 feet (about the height of a cross-country airplane flight) at speeds of 130 mph- created what could conceivably be considered a tornado.

The fire vortices (and the rain vortices that accompanied derechos occurring in the East Coast) make putting the fire out more difficult- because predicting which direction the fire will jump or where the embers will travel is more guess than science.  And, the vortex that accompanied the Carr fire had staying power – it lasted almost 90 minutes when it began around 7 PM on 26 July- as it flattened large trees and stripped roof tiles that weren’t consumed in the fire.

This phenomenon is how the Carr Fire jumped the Sacramento River.  Moreover, fires are behaving differently than they have in the past.  Fires used to be fought from downhill, since heat rises and fires naturally expand uphill, creating uphill winds.   Now, fires are just as likely to spread downhill (perhaps as a result of the “tornado” effect as described above).

None of this bodes well for our future.

(Oh, yeah.  The title.  Unless we address climate change,  we won’t be able to control those forest fires.)