Lightning Strikes: Get Used to Catastrophic Wildfires and Worse

"This is a specter against which grand inquisitors and wars against terrorism are powerless to protect us," Mike Davis wrote in a 2003 essay titled "The Perfect Fire," which was composed against the backdrop of a massive firestorm that callously rampaged across Southern California, burning thousands of homes and billions of dollars in its wake. "It is, of course," he added, "the right time of the year for the end of the world."

It still is. In late June, an ahead-of-schedule dry lightning event sparked more than 8,000 strikes across California, setting off over 800 fires, many of which are still burning as I write. And if you're the praying type, you might want to start praying they can be put out before the conventional time window for such events arrives in late July and August.

"This doesn't bode well for the fire season," AccuWeather.com meteorologist Ken Clark told the Associated Press in June, shortly after the lightning hit. "We're not even into the meat of the fire season at this point, and the brush is extremely dry. It's not going to get any better," he added. "It's going to get worse."

How much worse? How much time have you got? You might want to spend it packing.

According to a study published in Science last year, the Southwest region of the United States will enter permanent drought by 2050, and that's being optimistic. The seven states dependent upon the Colorado River Basin -- Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and California -- will most likely war over what remains of its diminishing water resources. The region's thirsty population will also be beset by rampant firestorms, as portions of the snowpack that remains bypass the liquid stage and evaporate into thin, dry air.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists argued in the paper "Early Warning Signs of Global Warming: Droughts and Fires," published before global warming consciousness took hold this century, "Warmer global temperatures are expected to cause an intensification of the hydrologic cycle, with increased evaporation over both land and water." As the same organization explained in an analysis of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report, "Nearly 90 percent of the 29,000 observational data series examined revealed changes consistent with the expected response to global warming."

In other words, dry lightning strikes in June might be "climatologically rare" now, as National Weather Service science officer John Juskie explained in the same Associated Press report. But thanks to human-induced global warming, they will soon be utterly logical.

"In the Rocky Mountains, fire season has grown by almost two months over the past decade as a result of climbing temperatures," explains Sierra Club spokesperson Kristina Johnson. "And as we see more droughts in California, we can expect more catastrophic wildfires."

Makes sense to me. But not to some meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including one I interviewed about this matter.

"Microclimate forecasting is hard," dodged Brian Tentinger, meteorologist for the NOAA's San Francisco and Monterey Bay Area Weather Forecast Office. "It's warm, but sometimes certain conditions set up the perfect storm. That's just the way things happen. Yes, there have been record-setting temperatures, but I wouldn't say the lightning storms portend a trend. I would be disinclined to say that it worries me."

Nice sentiment, but unfortunately that kind of reassurance from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Weather Service is, pardon the pun, half-baked. It ignores the data at hand, which is growing more voluminous by the moment.

Barely a week before the so-called freak lightning storms set fire to California, the NOAA, Tentinger's own agency, released an exhaustive report on extreme weather events specific to North America, explaining that there is an unequivocal trend upward for abnormally hot days and nights, severe droughts and lower precipitation, especially in the Western regions of the nation.