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A new report from a state agency in California warns that climate change is speeding up in the state. The report found that annual average air temperatures in California have increased by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 and that warming has occurred at a faster rate since the 1980s. It also found that 8 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred between 2012 and 2022, and temperatures at night have increased almost three times more than temperatures during the day.
Since the last report was issued in 2018, weather extremes have intensified and become more erratic, state officials said, and human health indicators such as heat-related illness, valley fever, and wildfire smoke have gotten worse.
“What we find in this report is a continuation and acceleration of the trends we’ve been tracking in earlier editions,” Amy Gilson, a deputy director with the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, said. “It’s not just heat, not just water, but that they cascade and compound through the ecosystem, causing the impacts that we’re seeing.”
Among those impacts is the destruction of almost a third of the southern Sierra Nevada's forests. The area extending from Lake Tahoe to the Sequoia National Forest has experienced persistent drought and increased temperatures over the past decade, which has left pines more vulnerable to wildfires and bark beetle infestations, according to a new study of Forest Service data. Around 30 percent of conifer forests in the southern Sierra Nevada succumbed to these threats between 2011 to 2020. Over the same period, 85 percent of the region’s dense mature forests either died or were substantially thinned, according to the study.
Getting the facts straight on forest management
Speaking of trees... This week on the Center for Western Priorities' podcast, The Landscape, Aaron and Kate talk to forest scientists Megan Cattau and Nayani Ilangakoon to find out what's going on in the world of wildfire risk reduction and forest recovery. Specifically, they ask about the U.S. Forest Service’s plan to plant a billion trees over the next decade, as well as how climate change is affecting forest recovery after wildfires.
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It’s a very exciting time. When I look across the service, we currently have over 80 different agreements where we’re doing some type of co-management, co-stewardship, or partnership with tribes. This gets them back on the landscape where they have that reciprocating relationship between the flora and the fauna that they’ve managed as horticulturalists since time immemorial.”
