Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today

Re:Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western ... by cratermoon on Friday August 06, 2021 @01:49PM (#28090606)

> extreme events become more extreme

This is the beef* I had with Cliff Mass when he said the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest had nothing to do with climate change, it wasn't an extreme event, it was just natural variation. The temperatures may not have been more extreme than known outliers, but what he didn't say is much more important: How often would natural variations lead us to expect events like it and how long would they last?

You can't just say "oh, this is just a typical thing that happens once in a hundred years" when it's happening every year.

* I have lots of other beefs with Cliff, but they aren't relevant to this discussion.

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Re:Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western ... by btilly on Friday August 06, 2021 @09:51PM (#28094955)

According to a preliminary analysis you can find reported on at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/prelimin..., current models say that the event was a 1/1000 year heatwave with global warming, and a 1/150,000 year event without.

Those numbers are extreme enough to make me question whether the model's tails are heavy enough, but yeah. It basically wouldn't have been possible without global warming.

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