‘This shouldn’t come as a surprise:’ How climate change is fueling California’s record heat, wildfires and smog

The buildings of downtown Los Angeles are partially obscured in the late afternoon on Nov. 5, 2019 as seen from Pasadena. The air quality for metropolitan Los Angeles was predicted to be “unhealthy for sensitive groups” that day by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The Trump administration has begun officially withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. A new report by more than 11,000 scientists worldwide states that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency.” (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

by: Los Angeles Times

Posted: Sep 13, 2020 / 04:47 PM PDT

Updated: Sep 13, 2020 / 04:47 PM PDT

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In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet’s inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase in the risk of forest fires and “substantially degraded air quality” in large metropolitan areas as a result of climate change.

In just the past month, nearly two decades after the third United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was issued, heat records were busted across California, more than 3 million acres of land burned, and in major metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, air pollution has skyrocketed.

“This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “Maybe we underestimated the magnitude and speed” at which these events would occur, he said, but “we’ve seen this long freight train barreling down on us for decades, and now the locomotive is on top of us, with no caboose in sight.”

In a matter of weeks, California has experienced six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern history and toppled all-time temperature records from the desert to the coast. Millions are suffering from some of the worst air quality in years due to heat-triggered smog and fire smoke. A sooty plume has blanketed most of the West Coast, blotting out the sun and threatening people’s lungs during a deadly pandemic.

Read the full story at LATimes.com.