WASHINGTON — Expect more preventative power blackouts in California as the climate gets hotter and drier and the wildfire season gets nastier and longer, scientists say.
The Golden State is fire-prone with lots of dry plants and woodlands — but add high winds that can knock down power lines or cause them to spark, then watch out, wildfire experts say.
The darker outlook hits close to home for Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who like so many others had his electricity cut off Thursday by Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
“At this point we don’t have a better option for reducing risk than shutting electricity off,” Field said. “It’s better than having a whole community burn down.”
Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta in Canada, said “the new reality” is that there will be more fires with drier and hotter weather from man-made global warming. So he said power shutdowns like those by California utilities are more likely to happen to try to avoid catastrophic fires with losses of lives and property like those that plunged PG&E into bankruptcy.
“Power shutdowns, that’s pretty dramatic. It’s very effective. It’s overkill,” Flannigan said. “It’s a trend.”
Flannigan said there is some build-up of certain trees and plants as fuel, but that’s usually not a big problem. “It’s just fire weather is getting more severe,” he said. “Fuels are drier, which means more fuel to burn. The more fuel to burn means more intense” fires.
The area burned in California wildfires has increased fivefold from 1972 to 2018 and that’s been “driven by drying of fuels promoted by human-induced warming,” according to a June study in the scientific journal Earth’s Future.
Summer “warm season” days in California have increased in temperature by 2.5 degrees in the past century, the study said.
“Mostly we see a strong summertime effect,” study co-author Jennifer Balch, a scientist at the University of Colorado, said in an email. “But warmer temperatures in the fall also dry out fuels and make big, wind-driven wildfires more likely.”
