Please don't use California as an example here. It's supposed to be on fire. Several species of trees and plants here cannot germinate without fire. The loooong known problem [1] is mismanagement, building houses where places burn, and blaming the wrong people, which leads to overgrowth from lack of fire. Fires aren't, by any measure, optional. If you impede them, they will come back harsher the next time around, which has very recently been addressed with laws to help increase the frequency of fires [2][3].
I don't see how it's possible to even measure global warming impact with the mismanagement that has accumulated.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-l...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s...
Canada, on the other hand, is a powder keg waiting to blow. The ecosystem is too wet to have any fire adaptations and as the peatlands dry, they expose meters thick layers of undecomposed plant matter that are dense enough to be used as a cheap and dirty fuel in some parts of world. It’s one of the largest carbon stores on the planet and we’ll soon have months long fires a the peat burns.
The fire season is longer, the droughts are worse, the fires are more intense, fires are happening outside of their historic range, and trees are not surviving the fire assuming they weren't dead already due to drought.
Timely article, "Anthropogenic climate change impacts exacerbate summer forest fires in California" (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213815120)
With the nearly 30 years of mismanagement, I'm having trouble understanding how that conclusion can be so easily made. From your link:
> While an increase in temperatures and dryness has been identified to be one of the major drivers of increased summer forest burned area (BA), the extent to which such changes are due to natural variability or anthropogenic climate change remains unresolved
"Our results indicate that nearly all the observed increase in BA is due to anthropogenic climate change as historical model simulations accounting for anthropogenic forcing yield 172% (range 84 to 310%) more area burned than simulations with natural forcing only. We detect the signal of combined historical forcing on the observed BA emerging in 2001 with no detectable influence of the natural forcing alone. In addition, even when considering fuel limitations from fire-fuel feedbacks, a 3 to 52% increase in BA relative to the last decades is expected in the next decades (2031 to 2050), highlighting the need for proactive adaptations." "BA" is "burned area"
This is from the conclusion:
"These findings strongly indicate that the observed increase in BA was primarily due to increased fuel aridity and not due to simultaneous variations in nonclimate factors such as human effects on ignitions, fire suppression, or by altering land cover (similarly to the conclusions by refs. 1 and 42). Our results suggest that changes in human environmental factors, including changes in biomass and fire management practices during the period of record, did not significantly affect the stability of the climate-fire relationship at the scales analyzed here."
I'm not saying fire suppression policies had no impact. I'm saying that the only cause of the fires. Furthermore, I am saying they aren't even the primary cause and it's not close.
What I am trying to say is you cannot use specific weather events to talk about climate. And of course once you go into statistics, you will lose 55.3% of your persuasiveness.
The strongest and most accurate evidence for global climate change are GLOBAL indicators, such as sea level rise, global average temperatures, etc...
Every weather event you list, can probably be countered with a mild weather event somewhere else. It's mock science, and it's the most obvious sign of hyperbole.
Last year's floods in Pakistan that displaced millions (barely reported on in the west) were such a local event.
Saying "oh, this is fine, because somewhere else the weather was mild" is disturbing.
The whole reason why climate change is so problematic is that the change in the global indicators will cause many many "individual weather perturbations", as you call them, which will displaced millions and disrupt supply chains.
The fact that there is some mild weather event somewhere else doesn't offset these negative effects in any way!
It is not mock science!
This articles data.
Incredible floods in Pakistan.
Heat domes over the PNW.
Fires in Australia, Canada, California.
And now a warming event in the North Atlantic unlike any other.
All of that and this is likely to be one of the coolest summers for the remainder of our lives. Its only getting warmer from here (barring geoengineering).
What about this is not alarming? As disheartening as it is, this is what is needed for action at this point.