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smokehouse creek fire
1 Million Acres Burned by Texas Smokehouse Creek Fire
Experts say the Smokehouse Creek fire is a vision of what the climate crisis has in store for the world.
Mar 04, 2024
Climate experts are warning that the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas panhandle—now the largest in the state's history with over over 1 million acres burned and counting—provides a horrifying look into a future of runaway temperatures that result in extreme destruction.
The fire is currently only 15% contained, but firefighters said Sunday they are hoping an approaching cold front will help them bring it under control. It's not clear what started the fire, but high temperatures, dry conditions, and strong winds have fueled it. Wind speeds have reached over 50 miles per hour.
President Joe Biden was at the Texas border on Thursday and criticized climate deniers who don't believe the climate crisis is contributing to these fires.
Climate change is contributing to the conditions that are making the fire so destructive, and more fires like this one are likely in the future. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) posted on Sunday about the need to fight the climate crisis to help reduce the frequency of these kinds of natural disasters.
We are in the middle of a climate crisis. We cannot sit back as these tragedies, like the devastating wildfires in Texas, become more frequent and more widespread. We must act. pic.twitter.com/ie6CC8ybxd
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 4, 2024
Writing in the New York Times over the weekend, journalist John Vaillant, author of the award-winning "Fire Weather: a True Story From a Hotter World," argued that the recent scenes from Texas represent a "terrifying" preview of what's to come—not just in Texas or any one place—but across the world. According to Vaillant:
It is alarming to see these fires and warnings in what is supposed to be the dead of winter, but fire, as distracting and dangerous as it is, is merely one symptom. What is happening in North America is not a regional aberration; it’s part of a global departure, what climate scientists call a phase shift. The past year has seen virtually every metric of planetary distress lurch into uncharted territory: sea surface temperature, air temperature, polar ice loss, fire intensity — you name it, it is off the charts.
At least two people have died from the Texas fire, and approximately 500 homes and businesses have been destroyed. Thousands of cattle have also died because of the fire.
"There's a lot of fuel on the ground," Texas A&M Forest Service spokesperson Jason Nedlo told CNN. "When you add high winds and low humidity to high fuel load levels, that's when you get the conditions that are ripe for large, fast-burning wildfires."
Climate scientists have been have been warning that the Smokehouse Creek fire is a vision of what's to come if the world doesn't address the climate crisis. A United Nations report from 2022 claimed that wildfires could increase by 30% by the year 2050.
The official wildfire season in Texas doesn't start until April, but with 2024 expected to be the hottest year since records began, experts predict such seasons will start earlier and generate larger and more numerous fires in regions across the world.
In his piece for the Times, Vaillant equated the growing wildfire threat to metaphorical dragons moving in on human and animal populations from the horizon.
"My earnest advice is to listen to climate scientists, to meteorologists, to fire officials," he concluded. "They are trying to save your lives. And if you see fire on the horizon, don’t fixate on the flames; pay attention to the wind. If it's blowing toward you, the embers are, too, and you better get ready to go."
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The Year Without a Winter
We’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow.
Mar 01, 2024
I don’t write that often about developments in the actual climate in these pages—it’s uniformly depressing, and it is the part we can do the least about. None of us has the power to change how much heat a molecule of carbon dioxide traps, nor can we alter how the jet stream reacts to changes in polar temperatures. All we can do is determine how much carbon dioxide and methane there is up there in the air—and so that’s what I concentrate on.
And yet the changes underway on our planet are now so extreme, and so remarkable, that sometimes we do need to stand back and simply gaze in awe and sadness. At my latitude (43.97 degrees north, or very nearly halfway between the North Pole and the equator) the changes in winter may be the most dramatic signs yet. And the most dramatic in my heart for sure, because winter is the time I love the most.
We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.
This year in North America has been about as close as we’ve ever come to a year without a winter—the geological obverse of 1816, the year when an Indonesian volcano put so much sulfur into the air that there was no real northern hemisphere summer. We’re the volcano now, and the gases we produce increase the temperature: it was 70°F in Chicago Tuesday, in February—which was also the day that the Windy City decided to join other American cities in suing the fossil fuel industry for damages. But that was just one of a hundred heat records broken in the course of the day, from Milwaukee to Dallas (94°F). But it wasn’t a single day of heat—it’s been an almost unrelentingly warm winter, with by far the lowest snow coverage for this time of year ever recorded (13.8% of the lower 48 as of Monday, compared with an average of more than 40%) and with the Great Lakes essentially free of ice.
We can surmise that this year’s puny winter has something to do with the strong El Niño in the Pacific, but of course the far deeper problem is the ongoing warming of the Earth—we’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow. There simply is a smaller supply of cold air in the Arctic than ever before. As The Washington Post put it on Tuesday:
The amount of cold air above the Northern Hemisphere this winter is near a record low, an unambiguous signal of the planet’s warming climate, according to a new analysis of 76 years of temperature data from about a mile above the ground.
The depleted cold-air supply means blasts of Arctic air generally lack the vigor of the past, while incursions of unusually mild weather—such as the one swelling over the central United States now—can be more frequent and intense.
The cold-air supply in the Northern Hemisphere is being evaluated using temperature data from about 5,000 feet high in the atmosphere. For about a decade, Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has analyzed the size of the cold pool at this level—or the area of the hemisphere covered by temperatures at or below 23°F (minus-5 Celsius).
We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.
That comes with serious pragmatic consequences. In the high Arctic, previously unheard-of thunderstorms are melting ice faster than ever. As Ed Struzik reported last week from Greenland, “surface crevassing, which allows water to enter into the interior of the icecap, is accelerating, thanks to rapid melting. And slush avalanches, which mobilize large volumes of water-saturated snow, are becoming common: In 2016, a rain-on-snow event triggered 800 slush avalanches in West Greenland.”
Further south, those record winter temperatures let forests and grasslands dry out fast. That’s why Canada’s boreal forest burned at a record rate last summer, and it’s why huge blazes are driving Texans for cover today—the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Panhandle, which only started Monday, is already the largest blaze in the state’s history; it forced the evacuation of the country’s biggest plant for disassembling nuclear weapons.
The higher latitudes need the annual rest that winter provides. It’s how these places—and the creatures in them—evolved. In Maine, which has the largest moose herd in the lower 48, 90% of calves died last winter because they were sucked dry by ticks that can now last all winter long. Biologists find moose with 90,000 ticks; they rub their hair off trying to shed the pests. “Ghost moose” is what they call these hairless beasts. You can’t have the Earth that we’ve known without some cold at the north and south; it’s functionally required, a part of the Pleistocene.
It’s not functionally required that we be able to glide across the surface of the Earth—but losing that is a deeply human cost, at least for some of us. Winter is the most whimsical season by far: Nature releases friction for a time, and all of a sudden you can skim across the ground. I was in Minneapolis two weeks ago for the Nordic skiing world cup race—the first held in the U.S. in a quarter century—and two days beforehand the first substantial snowfall of the Minnesota winter rescued the proceedings, letting 20,000 people come out for a stinging cold day to watch the fittest athletes on earth sail across the trail. This weekend I’ll be helping man the finish line here in Vermont as 700 little kids from around New England show up for the annual cross-country festival at our local ski area. Or at least I hope it will—it was pouring rain Wednesday afternoon, and the forecast for race day is 55°F.
All of which is to say that the impact of the climate crisis is psychological as well as physical. The deepest patterns of our lives—the ways our bodies understand the cycle of the seasons and the progress of time—are now slipping away. The fight to slow the warming of the planet is the fight to save billions of people and millions of species, but it’s also the fight to hold on to profound beauty and profound meaning, not to mention sheer gorgeous powdery magic.
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Fingers Point at Big Oil Climate Villainy as Record Wildfire Rips Through Texas
A Greenpeace campaigner argued that fossil fuel giants' drilling and production must be "rapidly phased out—and their billions in profits must pay for the damage they've caused."
Feb 29, 2024
"This is what climate change looks like."
That's how University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck responded Thursday to reporting on the Smokehouse Creek Fire—the biggest blaze ever recorded in Texas and the second-largest in U.S. history.
The fire has swiftly spread across 1.1 million acres in the Texas Panhandle, where "lampposts are now melted, power line posts are split in half, and homes and properties have been reduced to charred remains," according to CBS News.
The New York Times reported that for this fire "to grow so big so quickly, three weather conditions had to align: high temperatures, low relative humidity, and strong winds, said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University."
As the newspaper detailed:
Temperatures in Texas have risen by 0.61°F per decade since 1975, according to a 2021 report by the state climatologist's office. The relative humidity in this region has been decreasing as well, Dr. Nielsen-Gammon said. It's less clear whether the winds have changed significantly.
Climate change is likely making fire season start earlier and last longer, he said, by increasing the number of days in a year with hot and dry weather conditions that enable wildfires.
While firefighters continue to battle the Smokehouse Creek Fire and others blazes, climate campaigners and experts are taking aim at the fossil fuel industry for helping create the current crisis in Texas, the nation's leading producer of planet-heating oil and gas.
"Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the massive fires near Amarillo, Texas. We will continue to fight against the fossil fuel emissions that cause these climate disasters," the group Food & Water Watch said on social media.
Ian Duff, head of Greenpeace's Stop, Drilling Start Paying campaign, similarly said that "these fires are an unfolding tragedy. Our hearts go out to those who are experiencing loss across the state."
"The blazes we're seeing in Texas are not just fueled by high winds and exceptionally dry weather," he stressed. "As emissions from burning more oil and gas [make] the climate crisis worse, we can only expect to see more of these out-of-control disasters."
Noting United Nations projections that the number of global wildfires will soar by 50% by the end of this century and "climate change is expected to make these fires more frequent and intense," Duff said that "as the largest oil driller and producer in the United States, oil companies in Texas are literally fueling the flames on their doorstep."
"The corporations threatening our planet and its people—including Chevron, Exxon, Equinor, Eni, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies—have just announced mindboggling annual profits," he added. "They must stop drilling and start paying. Oil and gas drilling and production from ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel giants [need] to be rapidly phased out—and their billions in profits must pay for the damage they've caused."
Environment Texas executive director Luke Metzger also emphasized that "we have to stop feeding the fire by burning fossil fuels."
"We shouldn't have to worry about wildfires in Texas in February, but climate change has upended any reasonable expectations of when or where these devastating fires might happen," he said. "From the deep freeze of Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 to the spate of fires traversing North Texas this February, the abnormal is the new normal. At best, these climate change-fueled extreme events are major inconveniences. At worst, they're death-causing or life-changing events."
As of Thursday evening, the Smokehouse Creek Fire has killed at least two people and also spread to parts of Oklahoma, according to The Texas Tribune. The two reported victims are Cindy Owen, a truck driver from Amarillo who was traveling through Hemphill County, and Joyce Blankenship, and 83-year-old from Hutchinson County.
"It's time for Texas to take climate change seriously—and take steps to mitigate its worst effects," Metzger argued. "Foremost, that means weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, transitioning to renewable sources for electric power, and cutting way back on the air pollution that warms the atmosphere and makes Texans sick."
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