#daniel swain

[tomorrowusa]

2024 was officially the hottest on record – DW – 01/10/2025

2024 was the first full calendar year to see global temperatures exceed the warming limit laid out under the international Paris Agreement o

We knew this was coming but now it's official.

According to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2024 was the hottest year on record.

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has confirmed in its latest Global Climate Highlights report that 2024 was the hottest on record. The study reveals a rise of 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times — defined as the level between 1850 and 1900. Previously, 2023 was the warmest year. At the international climate conference in Paris in 2015, 196 world leaders agreed to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, and to pursue efforts to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees (2.7 Fahrenheit). Samantha Burgess, C3S deputy director told DW that the world is now "teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5-degree level." [ ... ] Scientists working as part of World Weather Attribution, an organization that studies the links between extreme weather and climate change, found that 26 of the events they looked at last year had been made worse or more likely to happen due to rising temperatures. Human burning of fossil fuels for activities such as heating, industry, and transportation is the main driver of global warming, but natural phenomena, like El Niño have also played a part in pushing up temperatures over the past two years, said scientists at C3S. [ ... ] Typically occurring every two to seven years,El Niño is associated with the warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, leading to overall average sea surface temperatures that are 0.51 degrees Celsius higher than the 1991 – 2020 average.  Sea surface temperatures are of particular concern to scientists because oceans store around 90% of the heat connected to global warming.

From climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain at the California Institute for Water Resources.

Sadly, things won't be improving over the next four years.

[thepotentialof2007]

Climate Change is narrowing and shifting prescribed fire windows in the Western United States

"findings strongly suggest that expanded windows of opportunity to use prescribed fire effectively and safely may well emerge at a time of year when such burns have, for the most part, been far less common across the West. One challenge? Winter is when nearly all seasonal wildland fire employees have already been let go for the year, so staffing is an even greater problem at this time of year than during the autumn and spring shoulder seasons. But ultimately, the study authors are relatively optimistic regarding this development—even as most places in the West see decreases in the environmental favorability for prescribed fire during most of the year, modest changes to existing land and fire management priorities (including the retention of more year-round employees) could make it possible to take advantage of these new potential winter burning windows."

. . . .

" Cultural burning is a related practice involving the use of fire by Indigenous peoples that includes some goals overlapping those of prescribed fire (management of natural landscapes in a way that ultimately reduces vegetation density and subsequent fuel loading), but that also holds much broader cultural importance and is practiced using a more holistic knowledge of place to guide the timing and implementation of burning activities. The study discussed in this blog post is focused on prescribed fire as practiced by government agencies and other organizations that follow their standards (e.g., The Nature Conservancy), but the issues explored have relevance to cultural burning as well given the importance of ambient weather and vegetation conditions in both settings."

_

from UCLA Climate Scientist Daniel Swain's commentary on the 2023 study he led

doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00993-1

[youthchronical]

California cleans up after record rainfall from Hilary - Times of India

LOS ANGELES: Southern California was cleaning up Monday after record rainfall triggered landslides and flooding, shuttering schools, roads and businesses in an “unprecedented” tropical storm. Up to 11 inches (28 centimeters) of rain were recorded in some areas as the tail end of what was once Hurricane Hilary belted through the region. In Oak Glen, a small mountainside community between Los…

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[katslefty]

The Return of the Urban Firestorm

Climate scientist Daniel Swain explains that what happened Thursday in Colorado wasn’t a wildfire, but something potentially much scarier.

“By the standards of the megafires and gigafires of the last few years, the Marshall Fire was quite small — 6,000 acres, all told, once it was finally, poetically, brought to an end by snowfall on New Year’s Eve. But following the driest and second-warmest fall in 150 years, the devastation was harrowing out of proportion to its scale, since unlike most wildfire it was not in wildland or forest but was — as the climate scientist Daniel Swain, who lives in Boulder, put it — an ‘urban firestorm.'”

[protoslacker]

The Return of the Urban Firestorm

 Climate scientist Daniel Swain explains that what happened Thursday in Colorado wasn’t a wildfire, but something potentially much scarier.

This conversation between Wallace Wells and Daniel Swain is intense because Swain lives in the area. He’s also very insightful and the piece , while long, is fast-paced reading.

[greenjudy]

Did Climate Change Make That Freak Weather Even Worse?

When a shocking storm or heat wave happens, attribution scientists are on the case, helping to show the public the real-life effects of global warming.

“[I]n 2004, a group of scientists led by Peter Stott at the United Kingdom’s national weather service decided to quantify the extent to which climate change had contributed to the 2003 heat wave. “It is an ill-posed question whether the 2003 heat wave was caused, in a simple deterministic sense, by a modification of the external influences on climate,” the group wrote in their subsequent paper, “because almost any such weather event might have occurred by chance in an unmodified climate.” Instead, they asked a different question: How much more likely had greenhouse gas emissions made the deadly heat wave?”

[brandondonnelly]

Thoughts on California’s wildfires

What is happening in California right now is both sad and scary. I woke up to these photos in the New York Times. So I spent the morning reading up on wildfires and what causes them. 

I am sure many of you are thinking: Is climate change doing this?

It’s important to note that California is designed to burn. The characteristics that make the state a highly desirable place to live -- mild winters and hot and dry summers -- also make it a highly flammable place.

Below is a map from Popular Science showing how much of California has burned over the last 5 years. Most of California’s hottest fires (13 of the top 20) have occurred since 2000.

But these naturally occurring fires are actually important for the regeneration of its forests. So one argument is that the current policy of “total fire suppression” is actually partially responsible for this increase in severe wildfires.

Low-intensity forests aren’t burning like they used to and it is creating more densely packed forests for even larger wildfires. In other words, through our actions we could be exchanging smaller and more frequent fires for bigger and more severe ones.

The other concern is development. 

California had a population of about 24 million people in 1980. Today it is closer to 40 million. And much of that growth has occurred outside of existing urban areas (too hard to build). This has meant more people living in suburban and rural areas -- adjacent to wildlands.

Ed Glaeser has repeatedly argued that the best way to respect nature is to actually stay as far away from it as possible. Humans are a destructive species. Living in a dense city is good for the planet.

Now let’s address the climate change issue.

Daniel Swain, who is a climate scientist and author of the Weather West blog, published this popular thread on Twitter about a day ago. At the time of writing this post, it had been retweeted and liked over 10,000 times.

From his perspective as a climate scientist, this is not all about climate change. That’s the wrong question to ask. It’s more complicated and nuanced than that. But climate does indeed act as a “threat multiplier” to the other factors we’ve already discussed.

Fire season typically begins and ends with rain. When the fall rainy season starts, the fire season ends. One of the biggest risk factors is a dry fall, particularly after a hot and dry summer (or after multiple hot and dry summers, as has been the case in California). 

Because according to Swain, fall means the start of “offshore wind” season, which can help to stoke these wildfires. 

Unfortunately, one of the projected outcomes of climate change for California is more precipitation concentrated in the “winter” months, at the expense of precipitation in the shoulder seasons (spring and fall). So that means a longer fire season.

Swain believes that if Northern California had received close to its typical amount of rain this fall, it is almost certain that this tragedy would have been avoided. 

That, however, makes me wonder about the relative importance of all the factors we have discussed today.

For Daniel Swain’s full thread, click here.

[scitechman]

UCLA Experts Explain Why California Is Burning in December

The Thomas Fire. The Creek Fire. The Rye Fire, Skirball Fire, Lilac Fire and Liberty Fire. Even in Southern California, six wildfires in four days is a lot to see tear through housing developments and close one of the nation’s busiest freeways.

“Southern California does see December wildfires, but not nearly a quarter million acres like we’re seeing in Ventura and Santa Barbara, and not half a…

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