Most States have four seasons, Spring, Fall, Summer, Winter.
In California, we have five seasons. The fifth season is called the fire season.
Most people don’t even realize it when they say it, but once the rain stops, and the grass starts turning green people start talking about California’s fifth season, fire season.
More acres have already burnt this year, and more money has been spent than California projected. California has been in a drought for years, and water is a precious resource. Some people have said that California should let fires that are not putting homes and lives in danger burn so that so much water isn’t used. But the health benefits, the ability to breathe clean air is a resource as well, and the number of days that Californians are having to shut their windows to keep the smoke out is increasing.
Scientists have said that global warming could be a reason for an increase in both the frequency and severity of wildfires.
California has a fire season
The Sierra Nevada reported that “Earlier this year the journal Environmental Science & Technology published a study indicating that California will experience more large fires, and that with that increase in wildfire activity comes a significant increase in fire-generated greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Modeling done for the study suggests that because California forests will experience larger fires, wildfire emissions will increase by 24 percent over 1961-1990 values in the next 30 years and that in the next 70 years they will increase by more than 50 percent. That means that efforts being made in California to reduce vehicle emissions, curb industrial emissions, and invest in clean energy could go up in smoke – literally.”
The study found that the emissions could be worse than the emissions in 1970 when Los Angeles could barely see in front of their face, “The study found that by the year 2085, emissions from wildfires are projected to be equal to the annual emissions of about one-fifth of all of the cars currently registered in California. This is a trend that has already started. Early estimates indicate that the 2013 Rim Fire alone released roughly the same amount of greenhouse gasses as were released during the entire year in 1970. Even if we were to be successful in reducing the number of cars, or increasing the number of clean-burning vehicles on our roads, one fire season can dump us right back to where we started.”
California Air Resources Board (CARB) is setting requirements for car companies that gasoline-only cars should be off the road by 2050 in an attempt for cleaner breathing air. If California doesn’t get some water to quell the dryness of the land and to put these fires out faster, it will have to do more than just require cars to clean up their emissions.
Watch the video and notice the smoke and how dry the land is Landing at Sacramento airport during the fire season.
