
A wildfire that broke out in Florida's Panhandle Saturday that should have been easy to contain was quicker to spread and harder to fight because of debris left over from Hurricane Michael.
The fire burned around 678 acres over the weekend and forced 20 homes to be evacuated in Bay County, AccuWeather reported. The fire burning near Allanton, Florida was 50 percent contained at only 15 acres Saturday evening when wind caused it to spread to 100 acres within an hour. Winds also pushed it south Sunday, and the Florida Fire Service described it as "stubborn."
The #AllantonRoadFire is now estimated at 500 acres with zero percent containment. 20 homes have been evacuated.… https://t.co/Z95TmLchGS— FFS Chipola (@FFS Chipola)1554057700.0
"Under normal conditions it would have been a few hours and a few acres," Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said during an update on the fire reported by The News Service of Florida. "But because of the fact of all the timber on the ground and because the weather conditions, it escalated to be the 600-plus (acres) because of all the fuel on the ground and the inability to get there."
The most recent update from the Chipola division of the Florida Fire Service Monday said that the fire was 75 percent contained at 668 acres. It was also started by a debris burn that got out of control.
The #AllantonRoadFire is up to 75% contained and holding at 668 acres. Office of Agricultural Law Enforcement inves… https://t.co/j6RdhYwfuj— FFS Chipola (@FFS Chipola)1554159437.0
Officials are worried that the weekend's fire could be the start to a particularly dangerous fire season for the state. Hurricane Michael downed 72 million tons of trees between the Gulf Coast and the Georgia border, and most of them have yet to be cleared.
"Even a normal fire season in the Panhandle could be catastrophic because of all the fuel," Florida Forest Service Director Jim Karels said Monday, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
However, this year's fire season, which peaks in April and May, also comes during a particularly dry year for the state.
"[S]tatewide we have been drier than normal over the past two months," state climatologist and Florida State University Climate Research Center head David Zierden said, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
This could make life even more difficult for Panhandle residents still recovering from Hurricane Michael, which slammed the area in October of 2018.
"Our house was destroyed in Hurricane Michael, and now this," Amy Carter, who was preparing to evacuate due to the fire, told the Panama City News Herald, as the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Hurricane Michael, a category 4 hurricane, was the strongest to ever hit the Panhandle. It intensified rapidly due to warmer than average water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, a sequence of events consistent with predictions about how climate change will influence hurricanes.
Fried used the occasion to call for state and federal aid to help with Michael recovery.
"Other parts of our country have seen (federal) disaster packages within weeks after a disaster," Fried said, according to The News Service of Florida. "And now almost six months later we are still waiting. This is absolutely unacceptable."
Fried has requested $39 million from the state to remove debris, plant new trees and buy new firefighting equipment, but the Florida House and Senate are still negotiating a final budget.
What Wildfires Do to Our Minds https://t.co/lrAVtUeriN #wildfires @NRDC @UCSUSA @Defenders @ClimateReality @Earthjustice @foe_us— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1533746614.0
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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