Victoria Gonzalez/Vaquero Radio
As wildfires in California erupted, concerns have been raised about how the United States has approached climate change and how that has affected the severity of the fires.
The Palisades and Eaton fires rank in the top three as the most destructive California wildfires, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, covering more than 37,000 acres combined since Jan. 7.
The newest threat, the Hughes fire, began Wednesday, burning about 10,000 acres; however, neither of the three fires have been fully contained.
The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment reported an increase in temperature by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895.
Lecturer for the UTRGV School of Earth, Environmental and Marine Sciences Gene Paull explained the climate has become unstable, so this caused the rapid vegetation growth.
“Los Angeles had temperatures up to 121 degrees the past few years, 119 and 121,” Paull said. “You got to remember, this is a marine climate. So yes, you had 10 years of drought. This past winter has been dry. They basically haven’t had any rain since last May, a little rain in October, so all that growth, which you had in 2023 and 2024, has now dried out.”
While the cause of the firestorms remain under investigation, the observable changes in weather, such as heat waves and the lack of precipitation, have led scientists to believe this created fire conditions to burn hotter and more intensely.
Associate Professor for the UTRGV School of Earth, Environmental and Marine Sciences Christopher Gabler said when temperatures are warmer, the region will evaporate moisture, causing things to become drier.
“And so, when the things that are flammable are more dry, they become more easy to burn,” Gabler said. “And so, all the things that you find in a forest, dead wood, dead grass, even some live trees and other live plants, if they’re dry enough, they’ll burn. And so, just by virtue of having warmer temperatures, there’s more fuel and the fuel is more combustible. And so, when a fire does start, things burn hotter and faster, and it makes it harder to control.”
He added a big part of climate change is climate volatility and more energy in the atmosphere.
“So, the same thing that creates more powerful hurricanes, for example, that hit us here on the Gulf Coast is also contributing to greater, stronger wind patterns that are having those big winds pushing the fire faster and further and actually fueling it as well,” Gabler said. “In order for a fire to burn, you need fuel and you need oxygen. And so, higher winds also makes those fires burn hotter and travel faster, makes them harder to contain, and that’s another big factor for the risk itself and why more areas are burning.”
Vegetation management is used to remove unwanted plants to decrease the likelihood of a hazard, but Gabler said the method is costly.
He added humans naturally do not want things to burn, so this has caused fire suppression, and places that would normally burn every decade have not burned for up to 70 years or less.
“And that’s risky because that means fuels accumulate,” Gabler said. “More trees that would just burn normally, even if there is a fuel load, are there. And so, the fact that we’ve suppressed fire for a long time makes our risk of a big fire now, and that fire being hotter and more hard to control when it does come.”
Professor for the UTRGV School of Earth, Environmental and Marine Sciences Alejandro Fierro-Cabo said warmer temperatures tend to have a higher capacity of the atmosphere to take in moisture, meaning plant vegetation dries faster and is drier than before.
“When there is warmer temperatures, things dry faster,” Cabo said. “I think that many people would agree that this will not improve, right, in the short term, at least. It may even get worse.”
Paull said California residents like to live near foothills and canyons, places where vegetation is, making large populations vulnerable to the fires.
“The solution would be not to build near the brush fires,” he said. “It’s a natural process, the burning of the underbrush, and then the larger trees regenerate, putting ash into the soil.”
As the climate has changed, animal range shift occurs, which is when a species moves to a new area or leaves one due to unfavorable environment conditions. Gabler explained this is an indirect effect of climate change, and said insects that are pests on wood have spread and become more active in forests.
“Indirectly, by the insects being more active and new insects coming into the area, there’s more dead tree material on the ground, which also contributes fuel that lets those fires burn hotter and faster,” he said.
Gabler said the wildfires are in an ecological hotspot and have caused a major loss in biodiversity as forests are being destroyed. Species who were rare may now be endangered or if they were not rare before may be threatened. These species who were already stressed by human development and climate change are now facing another stressor caused by wildfires.
He added biodiversity is the engine for an ecosystem to function, but with reduced biodiversity going forward, systems will be less resilient and not as functional.
“The things they do for humans and other aspects of nature are driven by all the different, diverse things that, by virtue of doing their jobs in nature, they’re fulfilling their ecological niche, [driving] these ecosystems to function,” Gabler said. “You don’t get as much carbon sequestration, you don’t get as much nutrient cycling, you don’t get as much water purification or air purification as you would if you had higher diversity.”
Because humans are part of nature, Gabler said people have to work with nature and recognize its natural limits.
“We can only bend our ecosystems so much before they break or they snap back and we feel that repercussion,” he said. “So, for example, you know, we freed ourselves of fire by suppressing fire for many years, but one result of that, one consequence was that it meant that the fires that happened then come back more strongly and are less able to be controlled.”
Cabo said people often forget that climate change deals with human alterations of the global carbon cycle. He explained humans are changing the carbon in the atmosphere to the form of greenhouse gases, which are more prominent in the Earth now than before the Industrial Revolution.
“And the reason for that is that we are taking out of the ground, deep in the ground, there is fossil fuels, which look like gas or look like oil, but when they are down in the ground, they are inert,” Cabo said. “They are not reacting, they are not in the atmosphere. They are not producing warming or nothing like that. They are deep down in the ground, no problem. They have been there for millions of years, no problem, not interfering with the climate, with nothing.”
He said the problem arises when humans pump out fuels and burn them, which converts the carbon into greenhouse gases, adding those gases to the atmosphere that was not originally there before, affecting photosynthesis, respiration and the climate.
Gabler said the release of greenhouse gas emissions has contributed to climate change patterns and is a direct result of human activity that has contributed to the extreme wildfires. Although the proposals of cutting down on emissions have been tossed around, the likelihood of seeing change in a short amount of time is unrealistic due to the fact that the climate limits have been pushed so much. He said it may take several years to see any change.
“But the point is, is that we’ve already had such an effect that’s sort of slow to develop, that even if we did cut our carbon emissions, the effects of climate change that are leading to these wildfires and making these wildfires worse would not go away for at least a decade, and probably more than that,” Gabler said.
Paull said avoiding the discussion of climate change does not help. Unless there is a concerted worldwide effort, the effects of climate change will keep persisting.
“Again, I want to emphasize [that] winter cold fronts don’t mean anything in terms of climate change,” he said. “It is the length of the warm season that’s increased and the intensity, and that’s going to continue.”
The World Resources Institute shows that the U.S. is second to China in greenhouse gas emitters. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, a treaty that was adopted by almost all nations in 2015 to combat the negative effects of climate change.
The agreement aims to “reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to hold global temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,” as per the United Nations.
Even if this executive order does provide some economic benefit, Gabler said it would be short lived because the longterm cost of climate change is greater.
“The notion that you can’t have a healthy economy and economic growth with any kind of environmental regulation or limitations is not true,” he said. “There are entire industries that benefit with more protection of our natural resources, and it does give us a security that we don’t otherwise have. We can be successful and protect our future generations from climate change and help mitigate climate change.”
To make a donation to the California wildfire victims, visit the Disaster Relief Donation Page.
This is Victoria Gonzalez for Vaquero Radio.
