alt Hacker NewsYes there were fires, but unless something changed, the NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change.
So I doubt there will ever be fires in the NE that compare to the West. This is due to a drough that does happen once in a while.
If there was no fire new NYC, I doubt this article would be published :)
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Global warming causes more precipitation and more intense drought periods. We're going to see more extreme wet events and more extreme droughts.
Warmer temps increase evaporation, which leads to more precipitation. But increased evaporation decreases surface water and dries out soil/plants/vegetation (drought). This makes periods with low precipitation drier than they would be with cooler temps (more intense drought).
Some of our worst fires in California were the summer after winters with extreme rain events.
If you have a dry season, you can have a fire season, and the wetter your wet season, the worse fire season will be.
Even if it doesn't compare to fire risk or intensity in other regions, the occurrence of more fires that are hotter or wilder is still a big deal for regions that haven't had many in recent history.
Most ecosystems in traditional "fire country" are adapted to those fires and sometimes even need some volume fires to keep working the way they have been, with the life that inhabits them.
That's not the case for ecosystems in the Northeast. Large fires will take much longer to recover there, and traditional biomes and inhabitants may not recover from them at all. That's not only sad for naturalists, but can have pretty significant downstream effects on the human communities in the region.
> NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change
At least in CA, rain causes more grass growth for fires to connect up through.
The fire material just builds up as growth pull carbon out and builds up a pile of it (because when a tree grows, most of its mass comes from the air & rain).
And then the fires were started by a "Lightning complex" on top of a hill.
If climate change reaches the tipping point where clouds cannot form then we probably won't be seeing much rain anywhere.
This isn't in the news yet, but the VAST majority of fires, like 9/10 in CA in 2024 were arson.
Just a warning if that trend spreads to the NE.
> the NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change.
One of the biggest challenges with climate change is that it continually increases variance in the system as warming increases. It's hard enough to correctly model a stable climate system, but modeling one that will be continuously changing for many human lifetimes is very hard.
We're not headed to a "new normal", if we ('we' being life on this planet and human civilization) were we'd simply adapt to it, it would be costly, but survivable.
But climate change will continue to cause radical and increasingly difficult to predict changes, and those changes themselves are subject to equally radical future transitions. This is why climate change is such a true crisis: it cannot be "adapted" to, because there is no stationary state we'll arrive at any time soon.
Just look at Europe: the last few years it's been experience extreme heatwaves, but if the AMOC collapses (which it may, even in our life time) that will likely cause it to experience extreme cold. Even then the exact details of an event as extreme as the AMOC collapsing are hard to predict, and the AMOC collapsing is just one of countless other similarly extreme events we are going to be facing in coming decades.