Full Transcript

Jay Famiglietti:
I’m Jay Famiglietti and the name of this podcast is Let’s Talk About Water, but today let’s talk about the absence of water and the severe problems that poses for millions of our fellow human beings.

I’ve researched California’s dryness for much of the last 15 years, including the increasing severity of drought and the disappearance of groundwater and up the snowpack. The longterm prognosis is not good. And that drying certainly underpins what we believe will be increasingly severe fire seasons in Western North America. Like a lot of other people I’ve been riveted by the coverage of the absolutely terrible wildfires burning up and down on the West Coast of the United States. It’s been especially painful for me to watch all the death and destruction because my wife and I are former Californians. We’ve worked, lived, and played there. We raised our kids there. We were part of the community there.

A lot of the fire swept places you’ve heard mentioned on the news are places that I know of, that I have visited, and in many cases, where we still have family and friends, including our son and daughter who live and work there. This is no abstraction for me. It is very real. It’s also kind of eerie because when I moved to Canada a few years ago, it was yet another super severe fire season. En route to Canada, we drove straight up the I-5 five through the center of California, literally right through the massive car fire of 2018. The air was thick with smoke and the temperature was a sizzling 118 degrees Fahrenheit. So flames figure quite strongly in my last memories of my former home state. All that is back again, but it’s looking to be bigger and badder this season, by the way, we’re getting some of that smoke from the mega fires all the way up to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where I live now. And we know from the news that the smoke has made it all the way to Europe. So, this is becoming a global problem.

Our first guest today is my colleague, my dear friend, and my former neighbor, climate and El Niño expert and former NASA jet propulsion laboratory climatologists, Dr. Bill Patzert. Bill has been studying climate and climate extremes, including how they interact with water, for decades. In addition to his illustrious scientific career, Bill is a renowned science communicator who is routinely sought for interviews by major media outlets around the world. Dr. Bill Patzert joins us today from Sierra Madre, California. Bill, it’s great to talk with you, my friend.

Bill Patzert:
Yeah, hello, Jay. From smokey Sierra Madre, your former hometown. We’re under siege here. Not only in Sierra Madre, but up and down the state of California, we’re having a record-breaking painful fire year here.

Jay Famiglietti:
So, what’s the situation right there, along the front range, right there along Sierra Madre? I’ve seen various things about Monrovia…Arcadia, bits being evacuated. What’s happening?

Bill Patzert:
Well, like most fires in California this one was probably human started and it’s been so dry. August was one continuous heat wave and we haven’t had rain here for months. And so once it started, it exploded. Right now, it’s about 50,000 square acres up above Sierra Madre, right along the boundaries of Sierra Madre, as you know, which is right against the San Gabriel mountains. These are very rugged. These are the kinds of fires that you actually can’t fight them on the ground. Here it’s aerial firefighting and the effort here is mostly, it had been to save lives and structures, essentially saved the town.

Jay Famiglietti:
All right. Yeah. You know, it’s hard. We might want to put some pictures up on our website, but I always felt like Sierra Madre, in particular in Monrovia, they’re so quaint. And part of the reason they’re quaint is that there are these old craftsmen wooden houses, right? And they creep up into the hills and they get too darn close, too, where the fires are. And I always felt like … and if a fire blows down here, the town is just going to go up in flames.

Bill Patzert:
Well, you know, Californians like to live risky. Here in California, we have Sierra Nevada mountains locally to San Gabriel mountains and they interface through Wildlands into all these communities in Southern California. In contrast with Saskatchewan where the total population is 1 million.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah. It’s pretty sparse.

Bill Patzert:
Here in California, smaller than you are, with 40 million people. And so we’ve moved into areas that historically has always burned. We like risky living here in California.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah. That’s for sure. And the earthquakes are part of that, and sea level rise. Those are all part of it. I feel like many people in California and at some point in time my family included, you’re willing to take that risk for the great lifestyle, the beautiful weather, but things are changing. Do you feel like in your lifetime … I mean, you’re clearly a young man, Bill … over your lifetime, just anecdotally, do you think the fires are getting worse? You’ve been up at JPL for a long time and it’s pretty hot up there. Do you sense any of this change personally?

Bill Patzert:
Well, you know, like you, I spent the last 40 to 50 years actually measuring all this. And so there is no doubt. This is the most extensive fire season we’ve ever had in California, the most extensive.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah. And that’s saying something because there’ve been some bad ones.

Bill Patzert:
Yeah. And so at this point, it’s 3.4 million acres on fire in Southern California, not only Southern California, it also goes into Oregon, Washington. And so the whole West Coast is aflame. Part of that is some freak meteorology. But really when you look at it, fire is simple. It’s fuel plus meteorology plus ignition. 95% of the fires are accidentally or intentionally human-caused. A new element, of course, in the equation and that is climate change.

Bill Patzert:
California is getting warmer and drier. The state is heating up. And in all these areas where you have the urban wild land interface, we’ve created our own heat. Southern California is a 20 million population megalopolis and whereas global warming has only been a couple of degrees Fahrenheit, the average in the greater Los Angeles area is six to eight degrees warmer than it was a century ago.

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s amazing.

Bill Patzert:
Yeah. And of course, rainfall patterns have shifted dramatically. The rainfall season comes later or leaves earlier. So it’s a longer dry season.

Jay Famiglietti:
Right. And a shorter snow season and a shorter wet season.

Bill Patzert:
Exactly. And so this has had a tremendous effect on the ecologies of the great forest and the search for affordable housing. We’ve dramatically spread out all over California, rather than building up. And so this makes for an incendiary situation. In the last 22 years in Southern California, 15 have had below average rainfall. And so we’re in a multi-decadal drought, which is not unusual for California, by the way, we had the all hottest August in the history of Southern California last month. And it just dried everything out.

Bill Patzert:
And so the whole state was dried out, and what I call desiccated, and we had this freak meteorological event of tropical hurricane, from the Eastern Pacific that actually broke apart and caused a disturbance in the upper atmosphere. And so we had millions of dry lightning strikes, which started most of those Northern California fires. So that was a freak occurrence, but that goes back to fuel plus meteorology plus the ignition.

Jay Famiglietti:
My last question for you, Bill, you’re an institution in Southern California, well, all over the country, really, but I mean, you’ve been in Sierra Madre. You’ve been in that area in Southern California for a long time. You were at scripts for a long time in San Diego. Have you ever thought about getting the hell out of Dodge?

Bill Patzert:
That’s and interesting question, because I’ve been retired for two and a half years now, but I still had given more interviews and done more consulting work than anybody that’s presently working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So, I don’t know if I’m actually retired, but when I leave LA. You know I love LA, Jay. Mostly because my mortgage is paid for, but it’s an interesting place. It has such a multicultural mix. And I have to say one thing. Even with the smoke Arcadia, Temple City, it’s got the best food in the world. All right? Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Armenian. Plus, I’m an old surfer, so I don’t want to get too far away from the ocean.

Jay Famiglietti:
Okay. Well, listen, Bill, thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure. I look forward to sometime in the near future, we can sit outside Mother Moo in Sierra Madre, California, and have an ice cream together.

Bill Patzert:
Yeah. So great seeing you, Jay.

Jay Famiglietti:
You too. Wish we could see each other in person.

Bill Patzert:
Eventually, you know?

Jay Famiglietti:
Bill Patzert is a climate expert, NASA JPL’s former climatologist, and my dear friend who once referred to my daughter as a younger, more attractive version of me.

We’ve talked about the role climate and weather have played in this disaster with my old friend Bill. Now, let’s go straight into the flames, metaphorically speaking, by talking to a fire expert, Crystal Kolden is a pyrogeographer at the University of California Merced who studies the past, present, and future of wildfires. So you could say as unfortunate as it may be for ordinary folks, Crystal is in her element this month in California. Thanks so much for joining us, Crystal.

Crystal Kolden:
Thank you for having me.

Jay Famiglietti:
How close have you gotten to these fires? Where are you know? Are you in Merced right now?

Crystal Kolden:
I am actually in Fresno and I am about 40, 50 kilometers from the nearest wildfire, which is the Creek Fire burning in the Sierra National Forest, south of Yosemite National Park. We’re close enough to be inundated with smoke and hear some of the helicopters and planes flying overhead, but far enough to not be in any danger. We’ve been monitoring it pretty closely though. There’s quite a few scientific experiments that are actually either in the way of the fire or have already been burned. And so for a fire scientist, we’re sort of watching a lot of these fires very closely, including the one that’s close to where I’m at, because it’s an opportunity for us to ask new and interesting science questions as these areas burn.

Jay Famiglietti:
So, what kind of questions do you ask?

Crystal Kolden:
A lot of what we don’t really understand about fire has to do with sort of the fine scale stuff. And what I mean by that is, we have a decent idea of why fires start where they do, how they burn over large areas, and what some of the drivers are that determine how big these fires are going to get and sort of where they’re going to go, what fuels they burn in and which, which direction they move across the landscape.

Crystal Kolden:
But the things that we don’t know are sort of those things that are the minutiae. We don’t actually even know how trees die from being burned at this point, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. We should know how a tree dies after being burned, but we don’t. And so a lot of the things that we are still trying to work on, and when we see a fire burn an area that has been under scientific study and that we have a really good understanding of how ecosystem and hydrological processes and earth processes are working on that site, when it burns, we’re very keen to get in quickly after a fire burns through and sort of study it closely.

Jay Famiglietti:
Okay. I want to switch to talk a little bit about large scale fire management. And maybe how fire management policy may be changing or should change. So when you look at, say, the forest in the Western US, or in the Northern part of the United States, or even up here, the Boreal Forest in Canada, around the world, what sort of things are we not doing? Let’s just focus on the US? I mean, what sort of things are we not doing that we should be doing?

Crystal Kolden:
One of the key things that we talk about a lot from a science communication perspective that is applicable from the Western US, but all the way up into BC and to some extent in Alberta as well, is that throughout Western North America, we have what are basically considered dry pine forests. So, these are forest that are adapted to fire. For centuries, they had fairly frequent low-intensity fires that were started either by lightning, regular frequent lightning, or by the indigenous populations that would essentially every few years light off a fire. And you would clear out the understory in these forest and for indigenous people, they did this for cultural reasons, trying to promote certain plants or to keep a trail clear and things like that. Lightning areas, of course, there’s an enormous amount of dry lightning in Western Canada, along the Rockies and in the Okanagan Valley.

And so that regular fire kept those forests relatively free of a lot of that understory vegetation. Many of these forests are essentially overstocked. They have a buildup of too many trees. Their density is really high and they have become in many ways unhealthy. And that same high density of trees actually also makes them really susceptible to things like bark beetle infestations, which of course, Western North America, including Western Canada, has seen an enormous amount of tree mortality from bark beetle infestations. And during droughts, those trees are competing for a very finite amount of soil water. And so you have tree mortality associated with drought conditions.

All of this ends up producing forests where there’s a heck of a lot of fuel and there hasn’t been enough fire. And so when wildfires happen, that’s when we see these massive conflagrations in forest that were not adapted to that incredibly high intensity fire. In a lot of Western North America, the sort of big science push right now is towards this combination of removing a lot of that dense understory through some type of thinning. And it’s predominantly understory sending, taking out small trees, not the big logging operations as much. And then re-introducing over multiple episodes prescribed fire into these systems, so that they can be returned to the historical ecological processes that maintain them for centuries. And so that we can reduce a lot of that wildfire risk.

The challenge in the Western US is that, of course, all of this forest management and the problems with the ways that we have managed forest and suppress fire for a century that is contributing to wildfire, increasing wildfire risk and sort of larger, more destructive wildfires, but then there’s also climate change. And of course the science is very clear that climate change is amplifying all those things. It is what we call the threat multiplier. So, if there was no anthropogenic climate change and it was just forest management, yeah, we might see some more active and more intense fires and some bigger fires. And if there had been no forest management whatsoever that produces this problem, we would absolutely still be seeing bigger fires.

So, we’re seeing these in the Boreal Forest, which is not, particularly in the far North where the source have not been managed or fire suppressed really. And we’re seeing bigger fires up there in the Arctic. So that is 100% climate change. And so in Western North America, in the Western US, in particular, we’ve got both of those things, plus a whole heck a lot of people that now live in the Western US and are building homes and communities further and further into sort of these areas that were once sort of Wildlands. And all of those things together end up producing the complex problem with what a colleague of mine once called The Wicked Problem of Wildfire.

Jay Famiglietti:
So, this goes beyond the sweeping of the forest that President Trump advocates. I mean, we need more than 50 people with brooms.

Crystal Kolden:
The complexity scares people. It particularly scares politicians who want single silver bullet solutions. And so for a president whose entire political existence has been about one-liners, it’s not a surprise that he would embrace something like, “Well, if we just rake the forest, it’ll all be fine.” I was a firefighter myself, the tool of choice as a firefighter was a rake, it’s a tool we call a McLeod and it’s sort of a modified rake.

So, for me to say that there’s no raking involved would be false because of course we use rakes to try and do fire management, but it so much bigger and more complex than that. And if we’re going to address the wildfire problem, we have to acknowledge that complexity, acknowledge that climate change is a big piece of it, and that it is only going to continue changing as we see more and more of the effects of climate change. And that forest management is also a piece of that, that is incredibly complex.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, Crystal, I am not surprised that you have found yourself as a professor because you’re a natural teacher and I’ve learned so much today. Crystal Kolden is a pyrogeographer at the University of California Merced. She’s speaking with us today from Fresno, California. Thank you so much.

Crystal Kolden:
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Jay Famiglietti:
We’ve heard from two experts about how climate and the wildfires are intimately intertwined, but to give us a true picture of how ferocious the Bobcat Fires are in LA Hayley Smith joins me from the Highland park area of LA to talk about the direct effects the fires are having on the community. Hayley reports some breaking news for the Los Angeles Times.

Hayley Smith:
I have like the frog easiest throat right now because of this air quality here, is just terrible.

Jay Famiglietti:
Okay. So we need to talk about that because I think it’s really hard for people who are East of the West to really understand. Although we do get some of that smoke up here, it is not the same thing. And people can’t really visualize it, they don’t understand the experience.

Hayley Smith:
Yeah. I mean, residents have been talking to us for several days about the kind of Mesquite-like smell in the air, smells like a barbecue or a campfire here. The sky is kind of white and powdery and hazy. It looks bad and it smells bad. So definitely not ideal here. So the fire started burning on September 6th and it’s been growing pretty steadily every day since then.

It is primarily within the confines of Angeles National Forest, which is a good thing in the sense that it’s not totally creeping up into neighborhoods and places where people live, but it’s a bad thing because it’s creating a ton of smoke, a ton of poor air, and it is threatening those foothill communities, including Sierra Madre, which you just mentioned that are sort of at the base of that national forest.

Jay Famiglietti:
Do you live away from the fires?

Hayley Smith:
I live right next to Pasadena, in a neighborhood called Highland park, I’m not in evacuation notice zone, but I’m right on the border of it. So, I’m getting bad air quality and smoke here for sure.

Jay Famiglietti:
Let’s talk a little bit more about what people experience. I know from my experience for almost 18 years in Southern California and especially the last four, when I lived there, living in Sierra Madre, when the fires are bad, there’s nowhere to go. Unless you evacuate, but if you’re staying in town, if you have nowhere to go … the current COVID conditions, people can’t really move around. What is it like? What are people experiencing in terms of smoke and heat and air quality and so on?

Hayley Smith:
Well, smoke and heat and air quality are kind of the three biggest things. From a heat perspective, August was the hottest August in California on record and that contributed to a lot of this dry vegetation that’s really fueling these fires. And then from a smoke perspective, we are, I believe, on our 11th straight day of smoke advisories, our air quality is hovering in the unhealthy to very unhealthy range.

So, all the guidance from experts on the air quality front are saying, “Stay indoors, keep your doors close, your windows closed.” But that’s creating a psychological challenge for people who already felt really confined from the COVID-19 restrictions and now can’t even go for a walk or a hike or a bike ride, or any of the things that we’re kind of providing some respite from the pandemic. The other day, I decided to brave the outside for a little while with my dog, because she was going stir crazy. I masked up and I suited up as best I could. And I went to the closest park and I saw this group of kids. There was a place that … you know, the swings and the slide, and it had caution tape all around it because it had been closed off for the pandemic. And the kids were playing around the caution tape, under a very brown, ugly sky. And the sun was kind of orange, filtered through this haze. And it was just a really sad scene. And my heart kind of went out to those kids under that massive, massive plume of smoke.

Jay Famiglietti:
Thanks so much for joining us today, Hayley. Really appreciate all the insights you’ve given us into the experience on the ground.

Hayley Smith:
Absolutely. Stay safe, guys.

Jay Famiglietti:
Hayley Smith has reported with the Los Angeles Times who has been covering the Bobcat fires in LA.

TAPE: That was my hat. Are you…Dad, stop! It’s…the same as a hat.

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s the sound of me, my family, and local people building a snowman last Christmas in my old hometown of Sierra Madre, California, near Pasadena. Yeah, that’s right. A snowman in Southern California. It’s not easy to get the raw materials, but it’s a local tradition that every December somebody gets a load of snow from high up in the nearby San Gabriel mountains and brings it to Sierra Madre so that the locals could build the community snowman. A happier time, for sure, but now there’s fire in those mountains and it’s been burning close to Sierra Madre, too. Things have let up a bit now, but the town was under an evacuation warning just a few days ago and the Bobcat Fire just North East of the community is still out there burning and menacing.

When I think about this, lots of things come to mind, like wondering, in addition to the risk of fire, is climate change moving so fast? Will those mountaintops in the San Gabriel range be free of snow year round? And will our beloved Christmas tradition be over in Sierra Madre forever? So you can take it from me and the rest of us here at “Let’s Talk About Water.” Climate change is real and the effects are coming at us fast. Today, it’s the US West Coast and the Gulf Coast. It’s going to be somewhere else, perhaps someplace close to you in the not too distant future.

You’ve been listening to Let’s Talk About Water and our special edition, “Let’s Talk About the Absence of Water” in the fire stricken Western United States. It’s a presentation of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan. If you want to hear more, subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us on Facebook, at Let’s Talk About Water Podcast, or on Twitter at LTAW Podcast.

Thanks to our guests this week, Bill Patzert, Crystal Kolden, and Hayley Smith. Thank you to all of those who helped put the show together, including Mark Ferguson, Laura McFarlan, Amy Hergott, Jesse Witow, our producer, Sean Prpick, and as always Linda Lilienfeld. Thanks also to the Walrus Lab. I’m Jay Famiglietti.

Be sure to listen again when we’re back in two weeks. A reminder, if you set an alert on your phone or other digital device, you’ll never miss another episode. Please review us, give us a thumbs up if you like the show. That helps move us up the podcast charts, it makes it easier for new listeners to find us, and your comments are always welcome.

See you again next time!