Climate

Eva Xiao, Financial Times -  Over the past month, firefighters in Georgia and Florida have battled hundreds of fires that have spread across both states, which are not typically considered hotspots.  The severe and protracted drought, which scientists say will probably worsen as global temperatures rise, is driving the exceptionally high fire activity this year.

So far, about 1.9mn acres (700,000 hectares) nationwide have been razed by early May, according to the latest data from the National Interagency Fire Center. That is nearly 80 per cent more than the 10-year average and the most acres burned year to date since 2017, involving more than 25,000 fires. More US wildfire activity is occurring in places far from what is normally thought of as fire country, such as Maine and Massachusetts in the north-east, as global warming intensifies.

“We’re going to have to be able to tackle multiple threats at once,” said Kim Cobb, professor at Brown University, listing coastal flooding, hurricanes and other climate disasters that locales will face. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting . . . because it’s going to be happening all at once

NY Times -   In much of the Southwest, the ponderosa pine is the one and only truly big tree, thriving in dry heat and poor soils...

But after about 26 years of exceptionally high heat and drought, hundreds of million of these trees in lands stretching from New Mexico and Colorado to the southern Sierra Nevada of California have died. And in many places, something even more startling is happening: The trees aren’t coming back.

Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.

One of the biggest consequences is the loss of shade. Without the forest canopy overhead, snow can evaporate quickly instead of trickling into rivers, streams and aquifers. In the mountainous parts of the West, where roughly 70 percent of freshwater runoff originates as snowpack, that’s a huge deal, a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop beginning to form.

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Lands that are no longer covered by snow also absorb more heat from the sun, drying them out and leaving them more vulnerable to large wildfires. Those fires in turn put more carbon into the atmosphere, warming the climate even more. In 50 or so years, by some estimates, snow could virtually disappear from the West, making life there exceedingly difficult.