The wave of fires puts climate change in the US campaign

When Chris Bruno started working as a firefighter in Fresno, California, 20 years ago, his instructors told him about the brutal fires that raged across the south and north of the state from lightning strikes and gusts of wind around October.

They were examples of things that happened elsewhere, not in Fresno.

"The concern here was grassland fires, not forests."

But the fire that has consumed the mountains to the northeast of the Californian city for a week is "that fire."

It is burning areas that have never burned.

“This is a fire that firefighters in this area have been talking about for years.

And now it has happened ”, said Captain Bruno on Friday at the command center of the so-called Creek Fire, which has already burned 80,000 hectares of forest and remains uncontrolled.

This is just one of a hundred fires ravaging the West Coast, from Seattle to Los Angeles.

But he's not the only one who has stunned local firefighters.

Not only are there many fires, but many of them are phenomena never seen before, by size, by speed, by the type of terrain, by the number of simultaneous outbreaks.

In just one week the record for hectares burned in Oregon and California at the same time has been broken, and in both, the difference with the previous mark is enormous.

Satellite images show the 2,000 kilometers of coastline covered in smoke.

In the case of Oregon, in addition, the fires may have produced the greatest tragedy in lives in the history of the state, authorities fear.

Rescue teams have only just begun to search the remains of five entire villages (more than 600 houses) that were razed by one of these flash fires.

In California, 19 deaths had been confirmed as of Saturday and at least twenty people are missing in a fire that in just a few hours devastated the same forest in which 85 people died in 2018.

"The thickness of the undergrowth, the low humidity, the high temperature, the dry and diseased trees, all these elements have come together to make this fire a unique event in my generation," Captain Bruno, 46, told EL PAÍS .

"Every year we debate whether these are the worst fires we have ever seen, and the following season they are overcome."

Bruno says he has seen the weather conditions in this part of California harden with his own eyes.

"It is inevitable that this will get worse."

Firefighters are seeing the consequences of a change in weather conditions on the ground that was until recently theoretical.

The catastrophe has filled the headlines in the United States and has forcefully returned to the national debate one of the great political issues that were to be part of this electoral campaign, but it was buried by the covid-19 pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.

Climate change and its consequences is very difficult to define as a political argument, because people do not see it in their daily lives.

Until this week.

This isn't an intellectual debate.

This isn't about ideology.

The proof is right in front of our eyes.

The impacts of climate change simply cannot be denied. @ NBCNightlyNews pic.twitter.com/gohbZ67Fyb

- Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 12, 2020

"I have no patience with climate change deniers," California Governor Gavin Newsom said this week, visibly irritated when referring to the state's fire crisis.

On Friday he visited one of the burned areas north of Sacramento and said again: “The debate on climate change is over.

Just come to California.

See it with your own eyes.

It is not an intellectual debate.

It is not even a debate.

It's a goddamn weather emergency.

This is real".

In Oregon, twice as many hectares have been burned in the last week as the annual average for the last decade.

Governor Kate Brown said "this is not going to be an isolated event, unfortunately it is a warning from the future."

"We are seeing the impact of climate change," Brown said.

In Washington State, Governor Jay Inslee, who ran in the Democratic primaries with a program focused on fighting climate change, has started calling wildfires "climate fires."

"This is not an act of God, this is because we have changed the climate of Washington State dramatically," Inslee said.

Chief Bud Backer told me he has never seen a fire explode like this one in his 33 years of service.

Climate change is making these fires more frequent, more expensive and far more dangerous.

We're beginning to see the costs of climate inaction.

And they are far too high.

pic.twitter.com/g1lsV2Im9d

- Governor Jay Inslee (@GovInslee) September 10, 2020

These types of statements are beginning to jump into the national debate.

"Mother Nature is angry and is telling us with fires and hurricanes," said Nancy Pelosi, a Californian from San Francisco and leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives.

"The climate crisis is real."

The situation can thus become one more factor of mobilization before a president who embraces denialism on climate change, has removed the United States from the Paris Agreement to reduce polluting emissions and has fought in court to annul the limits of pollution of the automobile industry.

Trump's resume on this matter is irreversible at this point.

That of the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, is very insufficient for the left wing of his party, but at least he has promised strong actions in the fight against climate change.

"The science is clear and the deadly signs are unequivocal," Biden said in a statement Saturday that definitely makes the issue a campaign issue.

The White House announced Saturday that Trump will visit California on Monday to learn about the situation firsthand.

It will be the first time that it is exposed in this debate in this electoral period.

The causes of this week's fires have been some spontaneous, such as a dry thunderstorm that struck California lightning, and long-term, such as forest management that does not allow natural fires and that is being reversed.

A third factor that explains the loss of life is the effort to build wooden houses in the middle of the forests.

But at the bottom of all this is climate change, which makes all these factors together pose an extreme danger.

"Global warming has caused places like California to have severe drought problems that have removed moisture from soils and vegetation," explains Ricardo Álvarez, consultant on adaptation to climate change and researcher at Florida Atlantic University.

"To that we add higher temperatures and dry rays."

"Gradually there are more months of fires and they are more in number," says Álvarez, which in turn aggravates the problem of droughts and pollution.

Of the 20 largest fires in California history, 17 have occurred in this century, 10 in the last decade.

Of the ten biggest in history, four are from this year.

Records will continue to be broken.

"It will take hundreds of years" to reverse the trend, says Álvarez.

"This is all bullshit," said Jim Kimble, 79, a Vietnam veteran and Trump supporter, on Friday.

Kimble had to leave his home on Monday and has since lived in a caravan with his wife in the parking lot of a Fresno church.

He believes that it is all the fault of poor forest management and democratic environmental goodwill.

The area around Fresno is a Republican stronghold within the

Western

, which is not at stake in this election and will not change politically between now and November.

The Kimbles of the United States are not going to change their minds or with their houses burning.

But the images of the red and yellow skies, the evidence that the situation is going to get worse, and Trump's record on this matter suddenly open a new flank to ask moderate Americans, in key states, if they they may allow four more years of denial.