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Firefight in Sonoma County reaches second week as flames force thousands to evacuate.
An army of firefighters with a larger aerial arsenal at their disposal held made some gains Saturday on devastating wildfires ravaging Wine Country, but a rising death toll offered clear reminder of the peril that still grips the region.
Firefight in Sonoma County reaches second week as flames force thousands to evacuate
KEVIN MCCALLUM AND RANDI ROSSMANN
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | October 15, 2017, 12:53AM
| Updated 4 hours ago.
An army of firefighters with a larger aerial arsenal at their disposal held their ground and made some gains Saturday on devastating wildfires ravaging Wine Country, but evacuation orders that forced thousands from their homes before dawn and a rising death toll were clear reminders of the peril that still grips the region.
Northeast winds that arrived early Saturday whipped up a new fire in the hills outside eastern Santa Rosa, and spread an existing blaze outside Sonoma, prompting another round of nighttime evacuation orders.
Thousands of Santa Rosa residents were forced to leave — some for the second time since last Sunday — while others faced their first mandatory orders in Sonoma.
Aware winds were on their way, firefighters were posted in potential trouble spots ahead of time as law enforcement officers — their bullhorns and sirens blaring — drove city blocks in Santa Rosa ordering people out of their homes before 3 a.m. They knocked on doors and in some cases returned to homes two or three times, authorities said.
By that time, flames had crept beyond Pythian Road below Hood Mountain Regional Park, east of Highway 12. Authorities were concerned the fire would advance on Oakmont, the retirement community across the highway from the park, and into the city.
The mass evacuation carried out by officers went smoothly, authorities said, allowing firefighters to focus on their job. It was a marked contrast with the helter-skelter operation on the night of the initial firestorm, they said.
“It was flawless,†Santa Rosa Fire Chief Tony Gossner said of the morning evacuation of Highway 12 between Calistoga Road and Adobe Canyon Road in Kenwood. “That’s what we can do when we’re prepared.â€
No homes burned in the area on Saturday, but smoke and flames from the Oakmont fire framed a terrifying backdrop against the mountains, with vineyards and at least one landmark winery — Ledson — in the foreground.
Fire officials characterized Saturday’s overall efforts across the region as a success. Firefighters largely held their lines and increased containment of most blazes, including the Tubbs fire, which consumed more than 2,800 homes in Santa Rosa on Monday, and killed at least 22 people in Sonoma County.
The death toll across Northern California from wildfires that started last week increased to 40, including eight people in Mendocino County, six in Napa and four in Yuba County.
Fires in Sonoma County have burned 94,370 acres. Containment on the Tubbs fire grew to 50 percent on Saturday.
To the south in Sonoma Valley, the 46,106-acre Nuns fire jumped a containment line early Saturday morning on the northeast side of Sonoma.
“Crews experienced some very intense, some very difficult fire conditions. They did an outstanding job,†said Sonoma Valley Fire Chief Steve Akre, estimating they’d likely saved hundreds of homes in the fire’s path.
Gusty winds in hilly east Sonoma neighborhoods created what one soot-covered firefighter called “islands of fires,†threatening homes on Lovall Valley Road. At least three homes burned down on Castle Road less than 2 miles from the historic Sonoma Plaza.
Containment on the Nuns fire was 15 percent Saturday night.
There are now more than 3,400 people assigned to the firefight in Sonoma County. Across the wider region, including Mendocino, Lake, Napa and Yuba counties, where fires are also burning, 30 helicopters, 8 air tankers, and 3 massive 747s are making water and retardant drops, Cal Fire officials said.
“It’s definitely a huge help that we have such a huge force of aircraft available to us,†said Amy Head, Cal Fire spokeswoman.
The aircraft have been particularly helpful in more remote areas, including the 11,246-acre Pocket fire near Geyerserville.
Lines on the Pocket fire held Saturday, with officials reporting little growth. Containment was at 15 percent.
“We held everything we had on the west, north and south. It’s the east part that’s the biggest concern,†said Cal Fire Battalion Chief Marshal Turbeville. “There’s no good control on the east side.â€
That section is burning toward The Geysers and beyond into Lake County. Growth was slow and Cal Fire officials in Lake County were less concerned about the threat Saturday night.
In Santa Rosa, ridgetop flames early Saturday lit up the eastern horizon, frightening residents who fled west. Some hunkered down in the parking lot of the Safeway on Calistoga Road, watching the firefight. After daybreak they saw aircraft, including a hulking 747 supertanker, douse the Oakmont fire with retardant.
The forecast Saturday night called for winds up to 25 mph out of the north, better conditions than Friday, but not ideal for corralling the fires.
The Tubbs fire, which now stretches across three counties, vexed firefighters at its eastern flank on Mount St. Helena. About 30 crew members on Saturday night drove to the top of the 4,341-foot mountain and started a hike down the southwest side, working the fire’s edge as it pushed further into southern Lake County.
Lit by headlamps and carrying chainsaws, the firefighters cut away thick brush in the flames’ path to remove dry, thick fuel.
By dawn, the hope was for calm weather so planes and helicopters could move in and “beat up on it,†said Greg Bertelli, a Cal Fire division chief helping run the north end of the fire.
An advisory evacuation remained in place for fire-scarred Middletown on the other side of the hill. Advisory and mandatory evacuations orders also remained for areas in and around Calistoga.
Sonoma County’s Coroner’s Office Saturday reported two more bodies found in the wake of the fires, in Mark West Springs and Fountaingrove.
Family members were being notified and authorities expected to identify more of the deceased today.
Two bodies also were found Saturday in Napa County. Sally Lewis, 90, and her caretaker, Teresa Santos, 50, were found in the remains of a home in the 1900 block of Soda Canyon Road.
The rising death toll and unprecedented damage, particularly in Santa Rosa, left visiting dignitaries aghast.
“The devastation. The horror. The displacement. It’s truly something that none of us will ever forget,†Gov. Jerry Brown said at a community meeting at Santa Rosa High School.
U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris vowed to secure federal resources to support the area through what they predicted would be a long recovery.
“It’s going to be overwhelming. It’s already overwhelming,†Harris said.
They encouraged people to seek assistance, particularly at the newly established assistance center set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in downtown Santa Rosa. The service hub, open daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 427 Mendocino Ave., drew hundreds of fire evacuees on Saturday.
“I lost everything,†said Felis Domingues, a 70-year-old Fountaingrove resident who was at the front of the line. “All my personal documents are gone.â€
Staff Writer Nick Rahaim contributed reporting. You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Writer Randi Rossmann at 707-521-5412 or randi.rossmann@pressdemocrat.com.
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Don’t consign poor countries to wild storms and flooding.
Wealthy nations caused the problem but are not doing enough to solve it.
DON’T CONSIGN POOR COUNTRIES TO WILD STORMS AND FLOODING
BY HUGH SEALY ON 10/15/17 AT 6:50 AM
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OPINION
Hurricane Maria is still wreaking havoc in Puerto Rico, weeks after making landfall.
Officials announced last week that several people may have died from contaminated water supplies caused by the storm. And with one-third of the Puerto Ricans still without running water, more deaths may follow as people turn to streams.
Climate change has made hurricanes like Maria more intense and destructive -- and has exacerbated the public-health crises that hurricanes can unleash. These crises, fuelled by invisible killers, can be far deadlier than the physical destruction caused by extreme weather.
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More than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, according to a new World Health Organization report. That's over one-fourth of the globe's population.
Climate change is making this problem worse. That's because climate change influences the "frequency, intensity . . . and timing of weather and climate extremes," as a United Nations report makes clear. More than half of the major extreme weather events between 2011 and 2015 were linked to human-caused global warming.
These extreme conditions threaten water supplies. Intense precipitation causes flooding that overwhelms sewage systems and contaminates sources of drinking water with sediment, animal waste, and pesticides.
Consider what happened in the Solomon Islands, in the South Pacific, in 2014. Massive rainstorms caused flooding that contaminated water supplies throughout the archipelago. More than 2,100 people developed flu-like symptoms. Nearly 4,000 people suffered from diarrhoea, and ten children died.
People walk across a flooded street in Juana Matos, Puerto Rico, on September 21, 2017 as the country faced dangerous flooding and an island-wide power outage after Hurricane Maria.
HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/GETTY
Eileen Natuzzi, a public health researcher who studied the disaster, noted that the illnesses and deaths underscored the "significant health impacts from our changing climate."
Or consider hurricanes like Maria, which have become more frequent and severe because of rising ocean temperatures. Dominica's Prime Minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, made an impassioned plea at the recent UN General Assembly, calling the situation in his country, which was hit hard by Maria, "the frontline in the war against climate change." The Prime Minister lamented, "While the big countries talk the small island nations suffer."
Last October, Hurricane Matthew dumped huge amounts of water onto the Dominican Republic. After rivers overflowed, leptospira bacteria -- which can lead to kidney damage, meningitis, and liver failure -- permeated the water supply. Seventy-four people died.
Rich nations bear some of the blame for these climate-change-fuelled crises. The richest 10 percent of people are responsible for half of global fossil-fuel emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere and thereby warm the planet. The poorest half of the world's population accounts for a paltry 10 percent of emissions.
Yet richer, higher-emitting countries are also fortunate enough not to bear the full consequences of climate change. A warming climate will have less impact on their levels of economic growth and mortality. By that standard, 11 of the 17 countries with the lowest levels of emissions are "acutely vulnerable" to the negative effects of climate change, according to a recent Scientific Reports study.
In other words, wealthy nations caused the problem but are not doing enough to solve it. In March, for example, the White House announced it would scale back several emissions-cutting measures -- like limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants and a ban on new coal leases on federal land.
Meanwhile, in Europe -- where leaders have chastised the United States for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement -- only three of 27 countries are set to meet their carbon-cutting pledges.
One bright note is the announcement in June by France's Ecological Transition Minister Nicolas Hulot that France, one of the three EU members in compliance with the Paris Agreement, will stop issuing licenses for further oil and gas exploration.
The rest of the developed world must urgently follow France's lead. It is irresponsible and immoral to continue to emit such high levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Rich, developed countries need to acknowledge this -- and take urgent action to correct their emitting ways.
Otherwise, future Marias could lead to even greater losses of life.
Hugh Sealy is a professor in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at St. George's University in Grenada.
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How many more cities must burn before the climate-change deniers give up?
The human cost, including the mounting deaths, is immeasurable.
Opinion How many more cities must burn before the climate-change deniers give up?
To the editor: The photo of 7-year-old Chloe Hoskins walking through her devastated neighborhood in Santa Rosa evoked memories in me of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by Nick Ut in 1972 of the napalm-bombed Vietnamese 11-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running burned and naked to escape the horror to which she had been subjected. (“The staggering toll in Santa Rosa: At least 15 dead, 2,834 homes destroyed in firestorm,” Oct. 12)
Both tragedies resulted from senseless wars, one from a mistaken mission to interfere in a civil war, and the other caused in part by global warming deniers who conduct an aggressive war on the science of climate change and the role humans play in the overall environmental picture.
Thousands more had to die before Richard Nixon finally ended the carnage in Vietnam. How many more neighborhoods must be razed and lives lost before the Trump administration ends this senseless war on the environment and agrees to join the rest of the world in a cooperative effort to save our planet?
Bob Constantine, Placentia
..
To the editor: The mega-fires in the West are equally as shocking as the images of underwater cities were in Texas and Florida. The human cost, including the mounting deaths, is immeasurable.
The agony and grief of Californians losing their homes must not be repeated every fire season.
— Gerald Staack, Santa Clarita
Scientists are unequivocal that thanks to decades of Republican obstruction to cleaner energies, we are experiencing only the beginning of man-made climate change and its horrific effects. But the Trump administration, led by the absurd head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is uninterested in the facts and science and wants oil and coal burned with abandon.
Thankfully the courts and state attorneys general are holding the line, but what an obscene waste of the nation’s time and resources with the very planet at stake.
Wendy Blais, North Hills
..
To the editor: Fire-prone California needs new building codes that require the outside of all homes be fireproof. Re-roofing of older homes must be done with fire-resistant materials, and flammable, exposed exterior portions of the house must be coated with fire retardant.
The agony and grief of Californians losing their homes must not be repeated every fire season.
Gerald Staack, Santa Clarita
..
To the editor: Your editorial ties the increase in the intensity and frequency of hurricanes and fires to climate change caused by the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. I agree with you.
But where that agreement begins, further agreement on how to rectify this situation ends.
Many environmentalists and scientists believe that we need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels by perhaps 50% by a date uncertain. I believe that it's too late already to turn back, and we would need to reduce burning fossil fuels by 90% yesterday.
There is one possible solution, and that would be to stop having children and over a relatively short time reduce world population from 7 or 8 billion to a sustainable 1 billion. I know this is a pipe dream.
The good news is the world won’t be coming to an end tomorrow, and I won’t be here when it does.
Ron Garber, Duarte
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Worrying new research finds that the ocean is cutting through a key Antarctic ice shelf.
The Dotson ice shelf holds back two large glaciers and connects to the larger West Antarctic ice sheet.
A new scientific study published Tuesday has found that warm ocean water is carving an enormous channel into the underside of one of the key floating ice shelves of West Antarctica, the most vulnerable sector of the enormous ice continent.
The Dotson ice shelf, which holds back two separate large glaciers, is about 1,350 square miles in area and between 1,000 and 1,600 feet thick. But on its western side, it is now only about half that thickness, said Noel Gourmelen, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the lead author of the research, which was just published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The reason is the same one that is believed to be shrinking glaciers and pouring ice into the ocean across West Antarctica — warm ocean water located offshore is now reaching the ice from below.
In Dotson’s case, it appears the water is first flowing into the deep cavity beneath the shelf far below it, but then being turned by the Earth’s rotation and streaming upward toward the floating ice as it mixes with buoyant meltwater. The result is that the warm water continually melts one part of the shelf in particular, creating the channel.
“We think that this channel is actually being carved for the last 25 years,” said Gourmelen, whose research team detected the channel using satellite observations. “It’s been thinning and melting at the base for at least 25 years, and that’s where we are now.”
The work was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh along with colleagues at other institutions in France, Norway, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The newly discovered channel is three miles wide and 37 miles long, and the scalloped region at the base of the floating ice shelf is mirrored by a long depression on its surface.
Dotson ice shelf as a whole has been thinning at an average rate of more than eight feet per year since 1994, even as the speed of ice flowing outward through the shelf has increased by 180 percent. But the thinning in the channel has been far greater. The research calculates that 45 feet of ice thickness is being subtracted annually from the channel.
The new study calculates that as a result of this highly uneven melting, the Dotson ice shelf could be melted all the way through in 40 years, rather than 170 years, which would be the time it would take if the melt were occurring evenly. And it speculates that as the thinning continues, the shelf may not go quietly or steadily any longer — something dramatic could occur, such as a breakup.
“Any carpenter knows: you’re going to cut through a block of wood a lot faster with a saw than with a sander,” said Ted Scambos, an Antarctic expert with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who commented on the study by email (he was not involved in the research). “What they’ve shown is that warm ocean water reaching the Antarctic coastline beneath the ice does not just remove the ice uniformly, it cuts deep gouges in the ice from below. The channels are weak spots in the floating ice (ice shelves).”
Meltwater from this process streams outward into the Amundsen Sea in front of the Dotson ice shelf and the channel, which has large downstream consequences. The water carries nutrients, such as iron, that have also spurred sharp growth of marine microorganisms in the region — another sign of the major changes in the region.
“This study reveals the complexity with which the ocean interacts with Antarctic ice shelves, and will be of value in assessing the future of the ice-ocean-biology system of the Antarctic coastline, and its sensitivity to changes in climate,” said Dan Goldberg of the University of Edinburgh, another of the study’s authors.
Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the new research highlights the importance of a European Space Agency satellite called CryoSat-2, which she said is “currently the only satellite monitoring Antarctica’s ice shelf thickness.”
“It gives us data at incredibly dense coverage, which is allowing us to map small-scale features like basal channels,” Fricker said. “These are regions of higher basal melt, and could cause the ice shelf to weaken much sooner than the average melt rates imply. It is vital that we keep monitoring these ice shelves.”
There could be numerous other such channels across the Antarctic continent, Gourmelen said.
In the particular case of Dotson, the ultimate fear is that the undermining of the shelf will increase the flow of ice outward from the glaciers behind it, named Smith and Kohler, which contributes to sea level rise. If the ice shelf collapsed, that would speed up even further.
To see why that matters, consider this map of what the overall region looks like, where “DIS” refers to Dotson ice shelf:
In the long term, the greatest fear perhaps is that Smith glacier ultimately connects to Thwaites glacier, the largest in West Antarctica, as you can see above. Thwaites runs backward all the way into the heart of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains about 10 feet of potential sea level rise.
“The nature of the impact is not really known” if Dotson is lost, Gourmelen said. “But they are essentially part of the same large basin.”
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Trump lies as global warming’s victims die.
The Trump administration’s lies about climate change are having real impacts today. More devastatingly, the lies all but guarantee a future filled with more and more deadly disasters.
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
King Features
Legendary independent journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone often cautioned, “All governments lie.” But even Izzy would have been dizzy with the deluge of lies pouring out of the Trump administration, including President Donald Trump’s claim that human-induced climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to hurt the U.S. economy. Global warming has exacerbated recent catastrophic events from Houston to Miami to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and, now, to raging fires sweeping across California. The corporate TV weather reporting aids and abets Trump’s misinformation by consistently ignoring the role of climate change in this string of disasters.
This year’s hurricanes have struck with historic force. On our warming planet, with rapidly warming oceans, hurricanes occur with more frequency and more strength. The 10th hurricane this year, Ophelia, has just been named. There have not been 10 hurricanes in one season since 1893.
At least 82 people died when Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Gulf Coast, inundating Houston. The storm also led to millions of pounds of pollutants being released into the air and water by Houston’s sprawling petrochemical industries. Initial estimates for the rebuilding are currently about $190 billion.
Hurricane Irma killed at least 134 people, of whom 90 were in the United States, including 14 elderly residents who were trapped in a hot, flooded, blacked-out nursing home in Hollywood, Florida. AccuWeather’s founder and president, Dr. Joel N. Myers, said, “Also unprecedented is that this particular storm, Irma, has sustained intensity for the longest period of time of any hurricane or typhoon in any ocean of the world since the satellite era began.” His initial cost estimate for recovery from Irma, primarily in Florida, is $100 billion.
Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean has yet to be fully assessed. Puerto Rico had its entire power grid destroyed. After three weeks, at least 85 percent of the island remains without electricity. The Federal Emergency Management Agency reported that 63 percent of the island’s 3.4 million residents have access to clean water, although that claim has not been independently verified. The official death toll on Puerto Rico alone at the time of this writing is 48, with scores still missing, but these are surely underestimates, as remote regions of the island have had very little contact with the outside world, and a new wave of serious infections related to poor sanitation are now afflicting people on the island. Even less is known about the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.
In the aftermath of the storm, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz waded chest-deep in floodwater, bullhorn in hand, helping people trapped in their homes and organizing rescue operations. Her repeated urgent calls for more help to stem the humanitarian crisis on Puerto Rico were rebuffed by FEMA chief Brock Long, who called her public cries “political noise.” Trump himself accused the mayor of being “nasty,” then engaged in a shockingly insensitive stunt during his short visit to the island, throwing rolls of paper towels into a crowd of hurricane survivors.
Across the United States, in California, over 20 wildfires are sweeping across the state. In Sonoma and Napa, fires have wiped out entire neighborhoods, turning thousands of homes into piles of smoldering ash and forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands. At the time of this writing, 21 people are confirmed dead from the fires, but hundreds are reported missing.
Scientists have found a direct link between climate change and the fires in California. Park Williams, bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, “The amount of area that has burned due to human-caused climate change … is about half of the area of forest in the western U.S. that has burned over the last 35 years: the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.”
When asked about the failure of network TV meteorologists to make the connection between extreme weather and climate change, Williams said: “The terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ have been politicized. But in the circles that I work with, with real climatologists who are working on these issues every day, there is no hesitation to use those terms. As you put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the globe warms, whether it’s the Earth or another planet. It’s just the law of physics. And so, it is surprising to see trained meteorologists on TV steer away from those terms.”
It is not only surprising. This massive omission reinforces the efforts of climate change deniers to confuse the American public and stall climate action. You have to ask, if we had state media in this country, how would it be any different?
President Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. His Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, declaring, “The war on coal is over,” signed an order intending to rescind President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have curbed polluting power-plant emissions. The Trump administration’s lies about climate change are having real impacts today. More devastatingly, the lies all but guarantee a future filled with more and more deadly disasters.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” Denis Moynihan is an author and researcher.
PUBLISHED OCT. 13, 2017, MIDNIGHT
in: California, climate change, Donald Trump, global warming, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurrican Irma, Izzy Stone, wildfires
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How a seed bank, almost lost in Syria's war, could help feed a warming planet.
A plant conservationist from Syria and his colleagues are safeguarding seeds that might be crucial when more parts of the world become as hot and arid as the Middle East.
TERBOL, Lebanon — Ali Shehadeh, a seed hunter, opened the folders with the greatest of care. Inside each was a carefully dried and pressed seed pod: a sweet clover from Egypt, a wild wheat found only in northern Syria, an ancient variety of bread wheat. He had thousands of these folders stacked neatly in a windowless office, a precious herbarium, containing seeds foraged from across the hot, arid and increasingly inhospitable region known as the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of farming.
Mr. Shehadeh is a plant conservationist from Syria. He hunts for the genes contained in the seeds we plant today and what he calls their “wild relatives” from long ago. His goal is to safeguard those seeds that may be hardy enough to feed us in the future, when many more parts of the world could become as hot, arid and inhospitable as it is here. But searching for seeds that can endure the perils of a hotter planet has not been easy. It has thrown Mr. Shehadeh and his organization, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or Icarda, squarely at a messy intersection of food, weather and war.
Icarda, though it received no state funding, was once known as a darling of the Syrian government. Based in Aleppo, its research had helped to make Syria enviably self-sufficient in wheat production. But a drive to produce thirsty crops also drained Syria’s underground water over the years, and it was followed by a crippling drought that helped to fuel the protests that erupted into armed revolt against the government in 2011.
Icarda, in turn, became a casualty of the war. By 2014, the fighting drew closer to its headquarters in Aleppo and its sprawling field station in nearby Tal Hadya. Icarda’s trucks were stolen. Generators vanished. Most of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep, bred to produce more milk and require less water, were looted and eaten. Mr. Shehadeh and the other scientists eventually sent out what they could — including a few of the sheep — and fled, joining half the country’s population in exile.
And Icarda’s most vital project — a seed bank containing 155,000 varieties of the region’s main crops, a sort of agricultural archive of the Fertile Crescent — faced extinction.
But the researchers at Icarda had a backup copy. Beginning in 2008, long before the war, Icarda had begun to send seed samples — “accessions” as they are called — to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the so-called doomsday vault, burrowed into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle. It was standard procedure, in case anything happened.
War happened. In 2015, as Aleppo disintegrated, Icarda’s scientists borrowed some of the seeds they had stored in Svalbard and began building anew. This time, they spread out, setting up one seed bank in Morocco and another just across Syria’s border with Lebanon in this vast valley of cypress and grapes known as the Bekaa.
“We are doing our best to recreate everything we had in Aleppo,” Mr. Shehadeh said.
The Aleppo headquarters still contains the largest collection of seeds from across the region — 141,000 varieties of wheat, barley, lentils, fava and the like — though neither Mr. Shehadeh nor his colleagues know what shape it’s in. They haven’t been able to return.
Seed banks have always served as important repositories of biodiversity. But they’re even more crucial, said Tim Benton, a food security expert at the University of Leeds, at a time when the world needs crops that can adapt to the rapid onset of climate change.
“We have to grow considerably different things in considerably different ways,” Mr. Benton said. “Certainly for our prime crops, like wheat, the wild relatives are thought to be really important because of the genes that can be crossed back into the wheat lines we have in order to build resilience and adaptation to climate change.”
Especially important, Mr. Benton said, because they could easily vanish without protection.
How much Syria’s agricultural crisis was to blame for the outbreak of war is debatable. There is little debate, though, about the impact of global warming on the region, which seems certain to make agriculture here extremely precarious.
Temperatures have climbed by at least 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade across the Middle East from 1961 to 1990, and risen by close to 0.4 degrees Celsius in the period since then, according to Andrew Noble, who until recently was Icarda’s deputy director of research.
This summer, in already hot, dry countries like Iraq, temperatures shot up well past 50 degrees Celsius, about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, on some days. Droughts are more intense and more frequent. Where farmers rely entirely on the rains, as they do in most parts of the Middle East, the future of agriculture, Mr. Noble said bluntly, “is pretty bleak.”
This, Mr. Shehadeh says, is why he is obsessed with the wild relatives of the seeds that most farmers plant today. He eschews genetically modified seeds. He wants instead to tap the riches of those wild ancestors, which are often hardy and better adapted to harsh climates. “They’re the good stock,” he said.
He hunts for the genetic traits that he says will be most useful in the future: resistance to pests or blistering winds, or the ability to endure in intensely hot summers. He tries to select for those traits and breeds them into the next generation of seeds — in the very soil and air where they have always been grown.
Wheat is a staple of the Middle Eastern diet, and the Middle East is what Laura Wellesley, a researcher at the London think tank Chatham House, calls the “greatest wheat importing region in the world.” Syria was once the exception, but war has made wheat a potent weapon, and it, too, now imports wheat to feed its citizens who remain.
As summer draws to a close, Mr. Shehadeh’s greenhouses are nearly empty. In one, there are wild barley seeds, normally found in highland pastures, held together in small canvas pouches. In another, there are small pots of clover.
The seeds will soon be taken indoors, dried, bagged, and labeled. Some are for the collection here, contained in a series of walk-in cold storage rooms. Some are for farmers to try out in the fields. One full set of seeds is for Svalbard: Icarda is gradually putting back into the seed bank what it withdrew. In early September, Mr. Shehadeh carried 31 boxes of seeds in the latest shipment to Norway.
Icarda’s entire collection houses seeds that have sustained the people of the Middle East for centuries, including some 14,700 varieties of bread wheat, 32,000 varieties of barley, and nearly 16,000 varieties of chickpea, the key component of falafel. The Lebanon seed bank houses about 39,000 accessions, and Morocco, another 32,000. Most of it is backed up in Svalbard.
In Sudan, Icarda has introduced a wheat variety it hopes will be more resistant to drought and heat. It is breeding a fava bean variety that can withstand a parasitic weed and lentils that can mature in a short growing season.
That’s useful not just for the Middle East, Mr. Noble said. The hot, dry summers that are common to the Middle East may well become familiar to many other parts of the world. “The climates of the future will be similar to the climates we are experiencing,” he said.
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California’s wildfires aren’t “natural” — humans made them worse at every step.
We fuel them, we build houses by them, we ignite them.
Raging infernos in California are burning through shrub land and neighborhoods this week while inching perilously closer to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
This year is shaping up to be one of the state’s worst fire seasons ever, as windswept flames have scorched more than 190,000 acres, caused at least 29 deaths, and shrouded communities with the worst air pollution they’ve ever measured.
Though seasonal wildfires are a natural occurrence in the Golden State, humans are making them worse and increasing the harm from them every step of the way.
Firefighters are now working to contain 21 large fires across the state that have already destroyed at least 3,500 homes and businesses. The Tubbs fire in Napa and Sonoma counties alone killed 11 people, making it the sixth-deadliest wildfire in California history.
You can view a map of current wildfires in California below:
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection says the deadly blazes are barely contained, and firefighters are now bracing for shifting winds that could drive the flames in new directions, putting more Californians at risk.
“Personally, I think it will be one of the worst disasters in California history,” Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano told a town hall in Santa Rosa.
For California, this may be just the beginning of a mounting disaster as stiff, dry air currents pick up throughout the state and many more combustible acres lie in the fires’ path.
It’s also just the latest unfolding tragedy in what has already been an epic fire season across the United States, burning through more than 8.5 million of acres of land and sending choking smoke throughout much of the West.
Fires are more damaging because we keep building in harm’s way
The California fires stretch the definition of “natural disaster” since human activities have exacerbated their likelihood, their extent, and their damage. Deliberate decisions and unintended consequences of urban development over decades have turned many parts of the state into a tinderbox.
This year’s blazes particularly stand out because of how close they are to suburbs and major cities.
“When we get wildfires close to residential areas, that’s what makes them extraordinary events,” said Heath Hockenberry, fire weather program manager at the National Weather Service. It’s also getting increasingly hard to keep people at a safe distance from the embers.
Harrowing scenes of flames and smoke have emerged, like this video from Santa Rosa, 55 miles north of San Francisco:
“We are definitely seeing [construction in fire-prone regions] happen more and more: 95 percent of the population of the state lives on 6 percent of the land,” said Lynne Tolmachoff, a spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Californians are drawn to views of mountains, forests, and grasslands and are building ever closer to these features that often have a propensity to burn. And places like Napa and Sonoma counties, picturesque regions that are now charred, have some of the fastest-growing property values and highest-priced homes in the United States.
This proximity is part of what’s driving the death toll. Tolmachoff noted that the ongoing fires galloped through neighborhoods in the middle of the night, riding gusts up to 70 mph.
And the embers haven’t discriminated between wealthy and poor residents. “Where these fires occurred, I think the risk is generalized all around,” Tolmachoff said. “They went from the rural areas to very urban areas. ... It affected everyone pretty much evenly.”
Residents reported waking up to the smell of smoke and were forced to race away from the flames lighting the road ahead.
This pattern of building in or near fire-prone regions has also led to land management practices to prevent fire that paradoxically increase fire risk. For instance, policies for preventing wildfires have in some areas led to an accumulation of the dry vegetation that would ordinarily burn away in smaller natural blazes.
“The thing that gets missed in all of this is that fires are a natural part of many of these systems,” said Matthew Hurteau, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico studying climate impacts on forests. “We have suppressed fires for decades actively. That’s caused larger fires.”
We keep starting these fires
A study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, or PNAS, found that 84 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans, whether through downed power lines, careless campfires, or arson.
“Human-started wildfires accounted for 84% of all wildfires, tripled the length of the fire season, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned,” the paper reported.
Transmission lines appear to be the culprit behind the wine country fires, but officials are still investigating other causes.
Video shows heavy flames, smoke next to California power lines https://t.co/0Lw5ilJog3 pic.twitter.com/4vbE9Pa98i
— kcranews (@kcranews) October 10, 2017
The utility serving the region, Pacific Gas and Electric, has previously been billed for firefighting costs for fires stemming from its transmission lines.
“PG&E; meteorologists reported overnight gusts between 50 and 75 mph, which aided the fires in the Northern parts of the energy company's service area, especially Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties,” the company wrote in a press release about the current fires. “Those winds damaged PG&E;'s electrical system in some locations.”
John Abatzoglou, a climatologist at the University of Idaho who studies wildfires and is the author of the PNAS study, noted that some of the fires in California ignited in multiple places around the same time, hinting at arson. “That is a possibility in play here,” he said. Whatever the cause, these fires don’t seem to be “natural” disasters, he said.
We keep changing the climate, which makes fires more likely
There are some unique weather conditions that are driving the exceptionally swift California fires, like strong winds and high temperatures. But long-term trends linked to global warming also exacerbated this year’s fire season, not just in California but in other states too.
“Fuel, wind, and long-term dry conditions: Those are the three facts that are really what’s causing this right now,” said the National Weather Service’s Hockenberry.
California saw intense rainfall last year and then a cool, wet winter. The increased precipitation led to more growth in combustible grasses, shrubs, and trees.
What followed during the summer was a period of intense, dry heat throughout the state, including the highest temperatures ever recorded in the Bay Area.
California just finished its hottest summer on record. It's no coincidence that this week's wildfires are blazing out of control. pic.twitter.com/7zLOc2l1Bc
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 11, 2017
“When it dried out, it dried out really hard, and it got really hot,” Hockenberry said.
It was the warmest April through September on record, Abatzoglou said. “Big fires typically happen a year after it being quite wet.”
Lastly, the dry autumn Santa Ana winds in the southern part of the state and Diablo winds in the north pushed flames through dry kindling.
Unlike the cool ocean breeze that chills San Francisco year-round, the Diablo winds roll down the Sierra Nevada to the north and the east.
“Just like you pump up a bike tire, you’re compressing the air and heating it,” said Abatzoglou.
These winds were exceptionally strong this year and will likely continue to blow the rest of the year. They typically blow through California at speeds between 35 and 40 mph, but meteorologists reported hurricane-strength gusts this year as high as 70 mph.
Peak of #SantaAna winds expected Mon morning. Strongest winds for eastern Ventura and western LA counties. #LAwind #cawx pic.twitter.com/eWghEScy7d
— NWS Los Angeles (@NWSLosAngeles) October 8, 2017
“Those northerly winds were fairly well forecasted,” Abatzoglou said. “We did see this coming, though people did not probably expect the breadth of fire activity.”
Though the winds are seasonal events and it’s difficult to attribute any individual spike to climate change, humanity’s fingerprints are all over the fuel for these fires.
Abatzoglou co-authored a study last year that found that climate change due to human activity accounted for roughly 55 percent of the aridity in Western US forests between 1979 and 2015.
This led to a doubling of the area torched by forest fires than would have occurred in the absence of human-caused factors.
However, the California fires are burning through grasses and shrubs, not forests, and Abatzoglou was hesitant to make similar pronouncements about the current blazes.
“I would be cautious in saying climate change was a significant factor here,” he said. “This is very different from the fires we had [last month in forests] in much of the Western states.”
Nonetheless, the California fires do align with what researchers expect to see as average temperatures rise.
“The length of the fire season is increasing in the Mountain West,” said the University of New Mexico’s Hurteau. “The mechanism for that is in part because [as] the atmosphere warms up, the air expands and can hold more moisture.”
This warming draws moisture out of plants, creating drier conditions earlier in the season. It also causes an earlier snowmelt in the spring, leading to more arid conditions in the summer.
“We could have a lot more fire on these landscapes,” Hurteau said.
Wildfires also contribute to global warming: Flames coursing through woodlands and grasses send greenhouse gases and particulates into the air.
“When the plant material in forests combusts, we’re putting a lot of emissions of different types into the atmosphere,” said Hurteau.
Some kinds of particles trap heat while other particles have a cooling effect. Both pose a huge health hazard, and when they land on snowcapped mountains and glaciers, they accelerate melting.
The good news: We can take steps to reduce fire risks
Tactics like cutting fuel breaks — or strips of land where the vegetation has been cut back to block the spread of fires — between combustible vegetation and homes can help reduce risks. Better forecasts, early warning systems for fire risks, and mandatory evacuation can also keep people out of danger.
“It doesn’t solve the larger problem, but it does reduce the risk to property,” Hurteau said.
Firefighters are now bracing for more winds that will expand the range of these fires, but are hoping for a “season-ending” precipitation event to quench the dry grass and forests before the flames can ignite them.
“It’s sort of a little bit of a game of beat the clock,” Abatzoglou said. “What we typically see is the jet stream will start moving further south and it will start raining in California.”
“We’re hoping we get one of these juicy precipitation events pretty soon, because the longer we go without rain, the more tenuous the situation is,” he added.
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