Year 2, Month 7, Day 25: Smoke Signals

The July 9 edition of the Summit County Voice (CO), features a good report on how scientists are studying the relationship between climate change and the wildfires that have been wreaking havoc in the American West:

Fires are one of nature’s primary carbon-cycling mechanisms, said Dr. Melita Keywood, a researcher with Australia’s national research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

A press release from CSIRO highlighted some of the questions Keywood raised in a recent presentation at a gathering of geophysicists.

“Understanding changes in the occurrence and magnitude of fires will be an important challenge for which there needs to be a clear focus on the tools and methodologies available to scientists to predict fire occurrence in a changing climate,” Keywood said.

She said the link between long-term climate change and short-term variability in fire activity is complex, with multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks.

Smoking is bad for your health. Sent July 9:

The key phrase in your report on wildfires and climate change can be found in the fifth paragraph: “the link between long-term climate change and short-term variability in fire activity is complex, with multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks.” Both parts of this sentence deserve careful attention. Climate denialists universally fail to understand that complicated phenomena are connected in complicated ways; their simplistic “analysis” reaches its most sophisticated level with “global warming can’t be real, because it’s cold outside.” And those same denialists have never been able to grasp the idea of “feedbacks,” loops of causation in which the symptoms of a problem exacerbate the problem itself (what happens when you and your partner mix up the dual controls on an electric blanket?). When a scientist uses a phrase like “multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks,” she’s giving us a very strongly worded warning: this problem has the potential to get much worse in ways we cannot yet imagine. Welcome to the future!

Warren Senders