The Fires This Time

A Climate View from California

By Rebecca Gordon July 11, 2021

In San Francisco, we’re finally starting to put away our masks. With 74%
of the city’s residents over 12 fully vaccinated, for the first time in more
than a year we’re enjoying walking, shopping, and eating out, our faces
naked. So I was startled when my partner reminded me that we need to
buy masks again very soon — N95 masks, that is. The California wildfire
season has already begun, earlier than ever, and we’ll need to protect our
lungs during the months to come from the fine particulates carried in the
wildfire smoke that’s been engulfing this city in recent years.

I was in Reno last September, so I missed the morning when San

Franciscans awoke to apocalyptic orange skies, the air freighted with
smoke from burning forests elsewhere in the state. The air then was bad
enough even in the high mountain valley of Reno. At that point, we’d
already experienced “very unhealthy” purple-zone air quality for days.
Still, it was nothing like the photos that could have been from Mars then
emerging from the Bay Area. I have a bad feeling that I may get my
chance to experience the same phenomenon in 2021 — and, as the fires
across California have started so much earlier, probably sooner than
September.

The situation is pretty dire: this state — along with our neighbors to the
north and southeast — is now living through an epic drought. After a dry
winter and spring, the fuel-moisture content in our forests (the amount of
water in vegetation, living and dead) is way below average. This April, the
month when it is usually at its highest, San Jose State University
scientists recorded levels a staggering 40% below average in the Santa
Cruz Mountains, well below the lowest level ever before observed. In
other words, we have never been this dry.

Under the Heat Dome

When it’s hot in most of California, its often cold and foggy in San
Francisco. Today is no exception. Despite the raging news about heat
records, it’s not likely to reach 65 degrees here. So it’s a little surreal to
consider what friends and family are going through in the Pacific
Northwest under the once-in-thousands-of-years heat dome that’s
settled over the region. A heat dome is an area of high pressure
surrounded by upper-atmosphere winds that essentially pin it in place. If
you remember your high-school physics, you’ll recall that when a gas (for
example, the air over the Pacific Northwest) is contained, the ratio
between pressure and temperature remains constant. If the temperature
goes up, the pressure goes up.

The converse is also true; as the pressure rises, so does the temperature.
And that’s what’s been happening over Oregon, Washington, and British
Columbia in normally chilly Canada. Mix in the fact that climate change
has driven average temperatures in those areas up by three to four
degrees since the industrial revolution, and you have a recipe for the
disaster that struck the region recently.

And it has indeed been a disaster. The temperature in the tiny town of
Lytton, British Columbia, for instance, hit 121 degrees on June 29th,
breaking the Canadian heat record for the third time in as many days.
(The previous record had stood since 1937.) That was Tuesday. On
Wednesday night, the whole town was engulfed in the flames of multiple
fires. The fires, in turn, generated huge pyrocumulus clouds that
penetrated as high as the stratosphere (a rare event in itself), producing
lightning strikes that ignited new fires in a vicious cycle that, in the end,
simply destroyed the kilometer-long town.

Heat records have been broken all over the Pacific Northwest. Portland
 topped records for three days running,
culminating with a 116-degree day on June
28th; Seattle hit a high of 108, which the
Washington Post reported “was 34 degrees
above the normal high of 74 and higher than
the all-time heat record in Washington, D.C.,
among many other cities much farther to its
south.”

With the heat comes a rise in “sudden and

unexpected” deaths. Hundreds have died in
Oregon and Washington and, according to
the British Columbia coroner, at least 300 in
Buy the Book her state — almost double the average
number for that time period.

Class, Race, and Hot Air

It’s hardly a new observation that the people who have benefited least
from the causes of climate change — the residents of less industrialized
countries and poor people of all nations — are already suffering most
from its results. Island nations like the Republic of Palau in the western
Pacific are a prime example. Palau faces a number of climate-change
challenges, according to the United Nations Development Program,
including rising sea levels that threaten to inundate some of its lowest-
lying islands, which are just 10 meters above sea level. In addition,
encroaching seawater is salinating some of its agricultural land, creating
seaside strips that can now grow only salt-tolerant root crops.
Meanwhile, despite substantial annual rainfall, saltwater inundation
threatens the drinking water supply. And worse yet, Palau is vulnerable to
ocean storms that, on our heating planet, are growing ever more frequent
and severe.

There are also subtle ways the rising temperatures that go with climate
change have differential effects, even on people living in the same city.
Take air conditioning. One of the reasons people in the Pacific Northwest
suffered so horrendously under the heat dome is that few homes in that
region are air conditioned. Until recently, people there had been able to
weather the minimal number of very hot days each year without installing
expensive cooling machinery.

Obviously, people with more discretionary income will have an easier time
investing in air conditioning now that temperatures are rising. What’s less
obvious, perhaps, is that its widespread use makes a city hotter — a
burden that falls disproportionately on people who can’t afford to install it
in the first place. Air conditioning works on a simple principle; it shifts
heat from air inside an enclosed space to the outside world, which, in
turn, makes that outside air hotter.

A 2014 study of this effect in Phoenix, Arizona, showed that air

conditioning raised ambient temperatures by one to two degrees at night
— an important finding, because one of the most dangerous aspects of
the present heat waves is their lack of night-time cooling. As a result,
each day’s heat builds on a higher base, while presenting a greater
direct-health threat, since the bodies of those not in air conditioning
can’t recover from the exhaustion of the day’s heat at night. In effect, air
conditioning not only heats the atmosphere further but shifts the burden
of unhealthy heat from those who can afford it to those who can’t.

Just as the coronavirus has disproportionately ravaged black and brown

communities (as well as poor nations around the world), climate-change-
driven heat waves, according to a recent University of North Carolina
study reported by the BBC, mean that “black people living in most U.S.
cities are subject to double the level of heat stress as their white
counterparts.” This is the result not just of poverty, but of residential
segregation, which leaves urban BIPOC (black, indigenous, and other
people of color) communities in a city’s worst “heat islands” — the areas
containing the most concrete, the most asphalt, and the least vegetation
— and which therefore attract and retain the most heat.

“Using satellite temperature data combined with demographic

information from the U.S. Census,” the researchers “found that the
average person of color lives in an area with far higher summer daytime
temperatures than non-Hispanic white people.” They also discovered
that, in all but six of the 175 urban areas they studied in the continental
U.S., “people of color endure much greater heat impacts in summer.”
Furthermore, “for black people this was particularly stark. The
researchers say they are exposed to an extra 3.12C [5.6F] of heating, on
average, in urban neighborhoods, compared to an extra 1.47C [2.6F] for
white people.”

That’s a big difference.

Food, Drink, and Fires — the View from California

Now, let me return to my own home state, California, where conditions

remain all too dry and, apart from the coast right now, all too hot.
Northern California gets most of its drinking water from the snowpack
that builds each year in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In spring, those
snows gradually melt, filling the rivers that fill our reservoirs. In May 2021,
however, the Sierra snowpack was a devastating six percent of normal!

Stop a moment and take that in, while you try to imagine the future of
much of the state — and the crucial crops it grows.

For my own hometown, San Francisco, things aren’t quite that dire. Water
levels in Hetch Hetchy, our main reservoir, located in Yosemite National
Park, are down from previous years, but not disastrously so. With
voluntary water-use reduction, we’re likely to have enough to drink this
year at least. Things are a lot less promising, however, in rural California
where towns tend to rely on groundwater for domestic use.
Shrinking water supplies don’t just affect individual consumers here in
this state, they affect everyone in the United States who eats, because
13.5% of all our agricultural products, including meat and dairy, as well as
fruits and vegetables, come from California. Growing food requires
prodigious amounts of water. In fact, farmland irrigation accounts for
roughly 80% of all water used by businesses and homes in the state.

So how are California’s agricultural water supplies doing this year? The
answer, sadly, is not very well. State regulators have already cut
distribution to about a quarter of California’s irrigated acreage (about two
million acres) by a drastic 95%. That’s right. A full quarter of the state’s
farmlands have access to just 5% of what they would ordinarily receive
from rivers and aqueducts. As a result, some farmers are turning to
groundwater, a more easily exhausted source, which also replenishes
itself far more slowly than rivers and streams. Some are even choosing to
sell their water to other farmers, rather than use it to grow crops at all,
because that makes more economic sense for them. As smaller farms are
likely to be the first to fold, the water crisis will only enhance the
dominance of major corporations in food production.

Meanwhile, we’ll probably be breaking out our N95 masks soon. Wildfire
season has already begun — earlier than ever. On July 1st, the then-still-
uncontained Salt fire briefly closed a section of Interstate 5 near Redding
in northern California. (I-5 is the main north-south interstate along the
West coast.) And that’s only one of the more than 4,500 fire incidents
already recorded in the state this year.

Last year, almost 10,000 fires burned more than four million acres here,
and everything points to a similar or worse season in 2021. Unlike Donald
Trump, who famously blamed California’s fires on a failure to properly
rake our forests, President Biden is taking the threat seriously. On June
30th, he convened western state leaders to discuss the problem,
acknowledging that “we have to act and act fast. We’re late in the game
here.” The president promised a number of measures: guaranteeing
sufficient, and sufficiently trained, firefighters; raising their minimum pay
to $15 per hour; and making grants to California counties under the
Federal Emergency Management Agency’s BRIC (Building Resilient
Infrastructure and Communities) program.

Such measures will help a little in the short term, but none of it will make
a damn bit of difference in the longer run if the Biden administration and a
politically divisive Congress don’t begin to truly treat climate change as
the immediate and desperately long-term emergency it is.

Justice and Generations

In his famous A Theory of Justice, the great liberal philosopher of the

twentieth century John Rawls proposed a procedural method for
designing reasonable and fair principles and policies in a given society.
His idea: that the people determining such basic policies should act as if
they had stepped behind a “veil of ignorance” and had lost specific
knowledge of their own place in society. They’d be ignorant of their own
class status, ethnicity, or even how lucky they’d been when nature was
handing out gifts like intelligence, health, and physical strength.

Once behind such a veil of personal ignorance, Rawls argued, people

might make rules that would be as fair as possible, because they
wouldn’t know whether they themselves were rich or poor, black or
white, old or young — or even which generation they belonged to. This
last category was almost an afterthought, included, he wrote, “in part
because questions of social justice arise between generations as well as
within them.”

His point about justice between generations not only still seems valid to
me, but in light of present-day circumstances radically understated. I
don’t think Rawls ever envisioned a trans-generational injustice as great
as the climate-change one we’re allowing to happen, not to say actively
inducing, at this very moment.

Human beings have a hard time recognizing looming but invisible

dangers. In 1990, I spent a few months in South Africa providing some
technical assistance to an anti-apartheid newspaper. When local health
workers found out that I had worked (as a bookkeeper) for an agency in
the U.S. trying to prevent the transmission of AIDS, they desperately
wanted to talk to me. How, they hoped to learn, could they get people
living in their townships to act now to prevent a highly transmissible
illness that would only produce symptoms years after infection? How, in
the face of the all-too-present emergencies of everyday apartheid life,
could they get people to focus on a vague but potentially horrendous
danger barreling down from the future? I had few good answers and,
almost 30 years later, South Africa has the largest HIV-positive
population in the world.

Of course, there are human beings who’ve known about the climate crisis
for decades — and not just the scientists who wrote about it as early as
the 1950s or the ones who gave an American president an all-too-
accurate report on it in 1965. The fossil-fuel companies have, of course,
known all along — and have focused their scientific efforts not on finding
alternative energy sources, but on creating doubt about the reality of
human-caused climate change (just as, once upon a time, tobacco
companies sowed doubt about the relationship between smoking and
cancer). As early as 1979, the Guardian reports, an internal Exxon study
concluded that the use of fossil fuels would certainly “cause dramatic
environmental effects” in the decades ahead. “The potential problem is
great and urgent,” the study concluded.

A problem that was “great and urgent” in 1979 is now a full-blown

existential crisis for human survival.

Some friends and I were recently talking about how ominous the future
must look to the younger people we know. “They are really the first
generation to confront an end to humanity in their own, or perhaps their
children’s lifetimes,” I said.

“But we had The Bomb,” a friend reminded me. “We grew up in the
shadow of nuclear war.” And she was right of course. We children of the
1950s and 1960s grew up knowing that someone could “press the
button” at any time, but there was a difference. Horrifying as is the
present retooling of our nuclear arsenal (going on right now, under
President Biden), nuclear war nonetheless remains a question of “if.”
Climate change is a matter of “when” and that when, as anyone living in
the Northwest of the United States and Canada should know after these
last weeks, is all too obviously now.

It’s impossible to overstate the urgency of the moment. And yet, as a

species, we’re acting like the children of indulgent parents who provide
multiple “last chances” to behave. Now, nature has run out of patience
and we’re running out of chances. So much must be done globally,
especially to control the giant fossil-fuel companies. We can only hope
that real action will emerge from November’s international climate
conference. And here in the U.S., unless congressional Democrats
succeed in ramming through major action to stop climate change before
the 2022 midterms, we’ll have lost one more last, best chance for
survival.

Copyright 2021 Rebecca Gordon

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