Focus on Arts and Ecology

California is on fire. Almost 2.5 million acres of land have burned there so far this year — nearly 20 times what had burned at this time last year — and the wildfire season is far from over.

That means many scientists in the state aren’t just studying their field; many of them are living it.

When I got in touch with Nina S. Oakley on Tuesday for an article about the connections between climate change and California’s wildfires, she was in her car, driving toward the ocean.

Dr. Oakley, a research scientist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was driving with her husband, Benjamin Hatchett, a climatologist, away from their home in Santa Rosa, Calif., where choking smoke from wildfires and power failures had made it impossible to work.

For these climate scientists, and, increasingly, for all of us, their discipline is anything but academic. The links between climate change and some extreme weather phenomena can be hard to distinguish from natural weather variability without extensive attribution analysis, but the links between wildfires and a warming planet, especially in California are “straightforward,” said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Warmer temperatures dry the fuels, and all you need from there is a spark.”

The effects of global warming on wildfires are varied. Want to learn more about how people live in fire-prone areas and protect themselves? How about the increasing problems for people who need to insure their homes areas where fires are likely, or the growing support among Americans for tough limits on building in fire and flood zones? In California’s fields where farm laborers are suffering under the burdens of punishing heat and rising levels of wildfire smoke, as well as the coronavirus pandemic. And as the wildfire season continues, California is dealing with depleted ranks of inmate firefighters.

This year’s fire season in California is far from over, and you could say the same for the state’s fire crisis. Dr. Williams published a paper last year that pointed to the drying effects of human-induced warming in much of the West. It concluded that the effects on wildfire activity “over the next few decades will likely be larger than the observed influence thus far.”

That, counterintuitively, gave me chills.