Climate change amplifies natural disasters like wildfires in places like California, the author of ‘Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World’ John Vaillant says.
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00:00Yeah, but we've been told on this channel, speaking to other experts like you, that wildfires
00:06are a natural and vital part of the environment's life cycle and therefore it's not purely the
00:13result of human activity. Doesn't it mean that these fires were inevitable and would
00:19have happened regardless of what human beings did?
00:23So Tom, this is a really important question you're asking. And what climate change does
00:29is it amplifies natural systems, natural behavior. We all know that Southern California
00:37is wildfire prone. It's a natural part of the environment here. There are seasonal,
00:43seasonal winds, seasonal fires. That's all fine and normal. What is not fine is the fact
00:49that Los Angeles had the hottest summer in its history this past summer and followed
00:57by eight months of drought. So now what you have is a kind of supercharged fire scenario.
01:03And that's what climate change does is, you know, in the case of Hurricane Helen, which
01:07trashed the Southeastern United States, hurricanes are normal. They've always been there, but
01:13they have not dropped a meter of rain in the mountains of North Carolina ever in history.
01:20And that's what we're seeing are these historic extremes that are driven by our dependence
01:26on fossil fuels.