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A new study finds that as the impacts of human-caused climate change intensifies, 90% of extreme fire events will be followed by at least three extraordinary downpours in the same location within five years.
This horrific one-two punch of natural disasters will hit the American West the hardest and most frequently. Heavy rainfall on recently burned areas could increase as much as eight-fold in the Pacific Northwest, double in California, and jump about 50% in Colorado by the year 2100 in a worst-case climate change scenario of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
The study authors say it's because even though the Western U.S. is getting drier overall and wildfire seasons are longer, incidents of concentrated bursts of heavy rainfall are becoming more frequent and occurring earlier, increasing the risk of both scenarios.
“One disaster is bad. Two disasters in rapid succession is even worse because you’re already reeling from the first one,” said study co-author Samantha Stevenson, a climate scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara. “But in the particular case of wildfire plus extreme rain, the wildfire is setting you up for worse consequences because you’re losing your vegetation, you’re changing soil properties and making that landscape more conducive to destructive flooding.”
The study results hit close to home for co-author Daniel Swain, a western weather expert based at UCLA who lives in Colorado. Last week, he had to evacuate his Boulder home because of a fire, which also happened to be the start of flash flood season. Swain said, “It’s entirely foreseeable that some of these places will literally still have fires burning when the first extreme rainfall event extinguishes them.”
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We need to be educating our base about these dystopian ideas and the scapegoating that's being put upon Black, Indigenous and people of color and working-class communities, such that they're able to identify these messages that may sound like they're environmental, but we need to be able to discern that they're actually very racist."
