Center for Climate Science

“We’ve been lengthening fire season by shortening the precipitation season, and we’re warming throughout,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to National Geographic. “That’s essentially what’s enabled these recent fires to be so destructive, at times of the year when you wouldn’t really expect them.”

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the figure is strikingly high and likely a record for carbon emissions from wildfires in California history.

“The Montecito event was not a particularly strong storm, it just happened to be localized, one (burst of rain) in a bad spot,” Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, warned. “Those situations are hard to predict. Giant storms are not going to catch us by surprise, but these individual heavy cells can catch us by...

The 2018 emissions figure for California wildfires is “strikingly high, significant in the context of overall statewide emissions, and likely a record value for single-year direct carbon emissions from wildfires in California history,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Last year was California’s most destructive fire season — until this year. The Golden State is in the midst of what Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, calls “a multi-year fire siege.” While it’s hard to point to climate change as the distinct cause of any individual...

US officials have yet to draw conclusions on the cause of the inferno. There is no doubt that the dry Mediterranean climate of California is susceptible to wildfires, but the natural factor is not the major cause. First, because of global warming vegetation tends to dry out more. Statistics show that the autumn of California...

While 3 degrees of warming in the past 40 years might not seem like a lot, it makes a big difference in the moisture levels of plants, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. Moisture levels in vegetation across California remain today at some of the lowest levels ever recorded, even as autumn wind...

That vegetation-drying effect compounds with every degree of warming, explains Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, meaning that plants lose their water more efficiently today than they did before climate change ratcheted up California’s temperatures.

In a Q&A, California climate scientist Daniel Swain breaks down the influences on the state’s devastating blazes and what the future could bring.

The UCLA IoES Center for Climate Science’s Neil Berg speaks to Mashable about the connection between climate change and the current, particularly destructive wildfire season in California.

About the fire, you know, in some ways, this is a typical late fall, early winter fire event, with very, very high Santa Ana wind speeds, ignition at a time of year when our fuels are absolutely bone dry. And so, these sorts of fires are anticipatable. They would be anticipatable without climate change. What...

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said that “if Northern California had received anywhere near the typical amount of autumn precipitation this year (4-5 inches of rain near the Camp Fire point of origin), the explosive fire behavior and the stunning tragedy in Paradise would almost certainly not have occurred.” It was also very hot: “The entire...