More wind energy, electric cars, and maybe shutting down oil and gas wells.
That is how to cut down on the destructive and deadly forest fires that have raged through subdivisions in California, scorched forest lands in Colorado and left behind only ash on the Texas plains.
At least, that’s what NPR suggests in a report.
The Austin, Texas, NPR station KUT warns that a bad year for wildfires in Texas may get worse.
“Climate researchers say the uptick in fires bares (sic) the fingerprints of climate change,” said the report.
“One of the big contributors to that has been these last two weeks of temperatures over 100 degrees,” Geeta Persad, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told NPR. “It has allowed the fuel in that area to dry out really quickly.”
She said the heat wave is at least partly the result of climate change, the new name given global warming after the warming stopped.
“I feel very confident in saying Texas is in the bull’s-eye of climate change,” Donald Falk, a forest ecologist at the University of Arizona, told NPR.
Falk said there is “only one big way to prevent forest fires.”
“The lesson from our research is very, very clear,” he said. “You cannot fix the fire problem without getting real and confronting climate change. Period. End of story.”
The Washington Free Beacon, however, pointed out that after a huge Texas fire in 2011, NPR reported Texans believed the real solution was controlled burning of dry grass and brush.
“Burn it on your own terms, they say,” NPR reported. “Burn it under expert guidance before it builds into fuel for a wildfire of epic proportions like it did in 2011 in Bastrop County.”
Vox reported Wednesday the Carr Fire plaguing Redding, California, now has burned across more than 112,000 acres.
More than 960 homes have been destroyed, at least eight people have died and another dozen are reported missing.
Reports said the fire is so hot and large it created its own weather, with fire tornadoes. It already has cost $24 million to fight.
Officials said the region already was in a drought and experiencing a heat wave.
The blaze was sparked by human activity, the “failure of a vehicle.”
Vox reported it was “in the background” that the climate also is “changing.”
“Average temperatures are rising, and the state of California is increasingly ping-ponging between periods of severe rainfall and extreme drought. The conditions in recent years have led to a massive tree die-off, and scientists expect more woodlands to dry out across the West, contributing to larger, more destructive fires,” the report said.
Fires also have scorched large sections of Colorado as well as the drought-stricken areas of Texas.
