Have you looked at the sun this week?
Which you really shouldn’t do, because it can damage your eyes, but some of us fools have done it anyway. And instead of the blinding light radiating from an indistinct center, we have seen a solid, flat disc hanging in the sky. A perfect circle with clear edges (an oxymoron perhaps, but you know what we mean) emanating a gentle yellow or orange-ish glow. There’s a haze in the atmosphere, like a bridal veil, that allows us to see the shape and form but dulls the radiance.
One might mistake it for fog at first, but even a rising fog still hovers close to the treetops before dissipating entirely. No, this haze hanging over West Virginia for the last few days is wildfire smoke.
Yes, the smoke from the fires on the West Coast has drifted all the way to West Virginia and is obscuring our skies. That’s how massive, how powerful, these fires are. And we may send our thoughts and prayers to the far coast of the U.S., but the devastation of the raging fires feels so distant to us. California’s dusk-red skies at noon, Oregon’s ash-filled air, snow storms churning over dancing flames, fire tornadoes whirling over Northern California — images from a sci-fi film or the Twilight Zone, an alternate reality that doesn’t feel real. But here it is: The smoke from these blazes hangs over West Virginia like a specter of doom.
Do you believe in climate change yet?
Melodrama aside, California’s yearly fires have been exacerbated by climate change. The fires are becoming more severe, more widespread and harder to control. According to Scientific American, climate change has all but turned California into kindling waiting for a spark: “Hotter temperatures, less dependable precipitation and snowpack that melts sooner lead to drier soil and parched vegetation. Climate change also affects how much moisture is in the air …” And that spark came in the form of 12,000 lightning strikes in a week in August that ignited around 600 fires. A scientific study published earlier this year said, “climate change has doubled the number of extreme-risk days for California wildfires,” according to Scientific American.
Is climate change what causes wildfires? Not necessarily. Mother Nature plays a hand in it, with droughts and lightning storms. Human stupidity is often an ignition point (like pyrotechnic gender reveals), and a focus on controlling fires after they start instead of removing potential kindling before the blazes begin contributes as well. But climate change has (metaphorically) added fuel to the fires. Climate change has made the conflagrations bigger, more aggressive and more dangerous than in the past.
The California wildfires are a highly visible example of climate change’s impacts, but they are not the only example. So says NASA: “Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner.”
Let the haze of smoke lingering over West Virginia be a reminder that we are not untouchable — the effects of climate change can and will reach us — and be a call to action to do what we can to slow and reverse the current course before we face such devastation as well.
