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MPR News Presents

Climate One: The link between climate change and wildfires

Boats are partially obscured by smoke from a wildfire
Boats are partially obscured by smoke from a wildfire at a marina on Detroit Lake on Saturday in Detroit, Ore. The community was largely destroyed by a wildfire.
John Locher | AP

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From the Climate One series at the Commonwealth Club of California: “Living with Fire.”

The devastating wildfires out West have injected climate change into the presidential campaign. Presidential candidate Joe Biden said this week that the wildfires are showing "the undeniable, accelerating, punishing reality" of global warming. President Donald Trump visited California and mostly pinned the blame on forest management and said "I don’t think science knows."

Wildfires are nothing new — they’ve been part of the west’s ecology for millennia. But burning fossil fuels and suppressing the burning of forests over the past century have led to larger, more frequent and ever-more catastrophic wildfires. And burning trees release carbon dioxide.

California’s fires now are so big and fierce that they threaten to erase the state’s progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And even for those miles from the flames, the smoke from raging wildfires presents an extra danger in the age of coronavirus.

Climate One host Greg Dalton’s guests are:

Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary of Natural Resources.

Julie Cart, reporter, CalMatters.

Leroy Westerling, professor of Management of Complex Systems, University of California Merced.
Vin Gupta, affiliate assistant professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.