A massive wildfire in northern California is a symptom of the American West's suffering from climate whiplash — oscillating between periods of extremely wet and dry conditions exacerbated by a warming atmosphere.
Why it matters: This whiplash, coupled with decades of land management practices that have strictly limited fire from the landscape, is increasingly creating conditions in some places for destructive and devastating fires.
The Park Fire in California now ranks as the state's fourth-largest blaze on record, surpassing the SCU Lightning Complex from 2020.
Why it matters: The record shows how a mixture of long-term climate change, short-term weather conditions and land management can combine to produce a rapidly spreading and massive blaze.
Why it matters: The research makes clear how every tenth of a degree of warming matters, and decisions made to cut emissions now could reverberate for centuries.
