Category: CALIFORNIA_CN NEWS_NEWS PRECIPITATION_CN Wildfires_CN

It’s something of a Golden State paradox: Dry winters can pave the way for dangerous fire seasons fueled by dead vegetation, but wet winters — like the one the state has seen so far — can also spell danger by spurring heaps of new growth that can later act as fuel for flames.

Climate change is reshaping the American economy. New Mexico is leaning on ecotourism and sustainable industries to see it through, but extreme weather keeps getting in the way….

In September of 2020, the smoke from major wildfires in California made the skies so dark that the state’s solar power production was reduced by 10 to 30 percent during peak hours, according to a National…

A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances found that historical Indigenous “cultural burning” curtailed wildfire patterns on local scales over a period of roughly 400 years in the southwestern U.S.Driving the news: As warming temperatures drive the risk of increased and intensified wildfires across the world, adapting traditional burning practices into fire management could diminish the role of climate in enkindling today’s wildfires.

TOPLINE Rising global temperatures have sparked more frequent wildfires in the Arctic in recent years, according to a new study published in Science, a trend that is expected to worsen as earth’s temperature continues to rise, and which could also contribute to a spike in carbon emissions.

A wildfire that destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and businesses in suburban Denver last winter caused more than $2 billion in losses, making it by far the costliest in Colorado history, the state insurance commissioner said.

California homeowners might soon see some reprieve in skyrocketing property insurance rates. That is, if they take steps to wildfire-proof their houses. The West Coast state is the first in the country to require insurance companies to lower premiums when and where customers enact suggested wildfire safety and mitigation tactics.

But she was more exasperated than scared. She had lived at Creekside Mobile Home Park on Dam Road for 17 years and had lost track of all its close calls with wildfires. Creekside, a park situated on a bend of Cache Creek in northern California, had always survived. About 30 minutes earlier, when Gilbert came home from a visit to the vet with her cat, Pumpkin, and noticed black smoke swirling in nearby woods, she called her son.

Most days, Ken Donnell steals a moment to gaze at the forested valley that surrounds this remote grid of streets in the mountains.Before the Dixie fire came barreling through the Sierra Nevada last year, leveling everything here but a few houses, businesses and a school, this was a charming — if dying — Gold Rush-era town that about 800 people called home. Now, much of the charm is gone along with most of the residents, replaced by the skeletal remains of conifer trees and the deathly silence of block after empty block.

When Stephanie Kampf visited one of her wildfire test plots near Colorado’s Joe Wright Reservoir in June of 2021, the charred remains of what had been a cool, shady spruce and fir forest before the Cameron Peak Fire incinerated it nearly took her breath away.