The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: U.S. Deals With Severe Climate Change Influenced Fires on Both Coasts
Dear Diary. Yesterday I presented newly complied data for October 2024 indicating that it has been very dry and warm from coast to coast.
In fact, last month was the second warmest October since 1895. Only October 1963 was warmer.
I’ve reported many warm records from the Northeast going into November, which continues to be warmer than average, such as:
All of that record warmth has led to wildfires across portions of the Northeast brought to us by climate change. The same goes for California:
In California over the summer, we saw record heat that dried out vegetation that quickly grew after another drought breaking winter in association with an El Niño. A very destructive fire called the Mountain Fire sparked after a typical but strong dry, offshore fall Santa Ana wind pattern set up early this month. Both West and East Coast fires were influenced by climate change. Here are more details from Reuters:
Firefighters gaining control over devastating wildfire near Los Angeles | Reuters
Firefighters gaining control over devastating wildfire near Los Angeles
By Rich McKay and Daniel Trotta
November 9, 2024
Mountain Fire, Santa Paula, California, November 7, 2024. REUTERS/David Swanson Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
- Summary
- Mountain Fire burns 20,630 acres, 14% contained
- Residents of 3,500 homes able to return but 2,000 remain under evacuation orders
- Red flag warning lifted after 132 buildings destroyed, 88 damaged
Nov 8 (Reuters) – Firefighters started gaining control on Friday over a stubborn wildfire near Los Angeles that destroyed at least 132 buildings and damaged 88 others, as many of the more than 10,000 people forced to evacuate were able to return home.
Some 2,400 firefighters were aided by more favorable winds coming from the Pacific Ocean after previously hot and dry winds coming from the desert fanned the so-called Mountain Fire, which broke out on Wednesday about 50 miles (80 km) northwest of Los Angeles.
The fire had consumed 20,630 acres (8,350 hectares) by Friday, virtually unchanged from 24 hours earlier, and was 14% contained, up from 7%, Cal Fire officials told a press conference.
“We had no external or lateral movement today. That is fantastic,” Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner told a news briefing.
Residents of 3,500 homes were able to return home but another 2,000 homes remained under evacuation orders, Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff said.
Fueled by dry brush and steep, rugged terrain, the fire remained a threat to critical infrastructure and islands would continue to burn within its footprint.
Among those who lost a home was Dennis Gottlieb of Ventura County. He counted himself lucky to be alive as he waited early on Friday morning at a shelter at Padre Serra Parish Catholic Church in Camarillo, California. He said he lost all his possessions except his truck.
“It was windy, real windy, but that’s all, so I just started my regular day until I saw the smoke and then the fire,” he said. Gottlieb said he grabbed some garden hoses and thought he could keep the blaze away from the house.
“Suddenly the smoke got real heavy and embers were falling all around,” he said. “It was hot, real hot, like 150 degrees (65 C). So I grabbed the keys to my truck,” he said. He and his wife, Linda Fellerman, barely made it out. One road was blocked by a fallen tree until a neighbor with a chainsaw cut it away.
He went back on Thursday to see if he could salvage any keepsakes but said, “Everything is gone. All gone. Burned up.”
A red flag warning for the area was lifted as winds were expected to calm to less than 15 miles per hour (24 kph) and humidity was due to climb, the National Weather Service said.
The dry Santa Ana winds that fanned the flames at first with gusts of 80 mph to 100 mph earlier this week are expected to stay calm over the weekend, topping out at 20-to-25 mph, said Ariel Cohen, a meteorologist with the NWS office in Oxnard, California.
“The rain chances are low to none,” he said. “But while the winds are calmer now, they’re going to pick up again by Tuesday.”
Officials braced people for a difficult recovery.
“The only thing left standing of our house is the two chimneys,” Darren Kettle told the Los Angeles Times. “My heart dropped to my stomach. It’s just shocking, traumatic.”
Climate scientists say warming temperatures have created wet winters that allowed California’s coastal chaparral – areas dominated by small trees, shrubs and bushes – to thrive. Record-high temperatures this summer dried out hillsides, priming them for wildfire.
The United States is experiencing a strong wildfire year with 8.1 million acres (3.3 million hectares) burned to date, compared with an annual, full-year average of around 7 million acres over the last decade, according to National Interagency Fire Center data.
So far this year, California wildfires have burned more than three times as much land as last year at this time, according to Cal Fire data.
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Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California, and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Frank McGurty, Sandra Maler and Raju Gopalakrishnan
Thomson Reuters
Daniel Trotta is a U.S. National Affairs correspondent, covering race, guns, LGBTQ+ issues, immigration, homelessness and breaking news in the 50 states. Previously based in New York and now in California, Trotta was awarded the NLGJA award for excellence in transgender coverage. He was previously posted in Cuba, Spain, Mexico and Nicaragua, covering top world stories including the normalization of Cuban-U.S. relations and the Madrid train bombing by Islamist radicals.
New Jersey wildfires trigger smoke warnings in New York City | Reuters
New Jersey wildfires trigger smoke warnings in New York City
By Maria Tsvetkova and Rich McKay
November 8, 2024
A morning jogger gestures as he runs past a fire lit by members of the New Jersey Forest Fire Service as part of back burning efforts alongside Palisades Interstate Parkway in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, U.S., November 8, 2024. Julian Leshay Guadalupe/NorthJersey.com / USA TODAY NETWORK via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
- Summary
- Wildfires burning in five New Jersey counties, mostly central and southern
- NYC warns residents about smoke, urges caution with outdoor gas and grills
- Farmers struggle to protect crops amid drought, high irrigation costs
NEW YORK, Nov 8 (Reuters) – Wildfires were burning from one end of New Jersey to the other on Friday after one of the driest months on record, leading New York City to issue smoke warnings and forcing farmers to take steps to protect their harvests.
The blazes were burning in five New Jersey counties, mostly in the central and southern parts of the state, on Thursday and Friday, the state Forest Fire Service reported on its Facebook page. The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for the area due to strong winds that can make wildfires worse.
“Those conditions – dry weather and gusty winds – have a potential to spread any fires that develop through today,” said Matthew Tauber, a duty meteorologist at a local office of the National Weather Service.
The New York City government warned residents that they may see or smell smoke from the wildfires and urged people to exercise caution using grills and outdoor gas during “increased brush fire risk.”
One of the wildfires was burning along the Palisades in New Jersey’s Bergen County, across the George Washington Bridge from the city. Smoke from the blaze was wafting across the Hudson River into neighborhoods on the northern tip of Manhattan, video posted on social media showed.
On the opposite end of the state, a fire in Gloucester County could be seen burning across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. At least three other fires were burning in Ocean, Camden and Burlington counties.
The New York City area has not seen any significant rain since mid-September and no major rainfall is in the forecast. The National Weather Service expects a quarter to a third of an inch of rain (up to 0.8 cm) on Sunday night.
“That’s not a lot of precipitation,” Tauber said. “It will take quite a bit to alleviate the dry conditions from the past five to six weeks.”
To be sure, the New Jersey wildfires – the largest on Friday was 360 acres (146 hectares)- were much smaller than those that typically break out in California. The Mountain Fire north of Los Angeles, for example, had already consumed more than 20,000 acres (8,094 hectares), Cal Fire said on Friday.
But the outbreak across New Jersey – the most densely populated state in the country, according to the U.S. Census – highlights the extremely dry conditions affecting most or all of the state, which experienced a relatively wet spring.
The past month was the driest October on record in Newark, the most populated city in New Jersey, since 1949, according to the weather service.
New Jersey farmers say they are struggling to protect crops.
“It’s a crisis for all us growers,” said Stephen Lee, 78, patriarch of Lee Brothers Cranberry Farm in Burlington County, a 130-acre farm of bogs and reservoirs he runs with his sons and grandsons. Burlington County stretches across a swath of southern New Jersey.
“We’re not at our breaking point, but it’s a very tense situation right now,” Lee said. “We haven’t had any real rain for three months, going on four now. Without some serious rain, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
They are just now finishing harvest for the season and barely made it through with well water, bringing diesel fuel bills for the pumps to $800 a day, he said.
But their reservoirs are “almost non-existent”, and usually they drill 7 feet in the ground to hit the water table for their pumps. “Now we have to drill 28 feet down,” he said.
New Jersey is the third largest producer of cranberries in the United States, behind Wisconsin and Massachusetts.
Bill Exley, 52, of Exley’s Christmas Tree Farm in Monroeville, New Jersey, was out at sun-up on Friday checking the irrigation pumps on the farm he co-owns with his father, Bob Exley, 82. “This drought is killing us,” he said, adding that he doesn’t want to think about the bill for the electricity running pumps at the two farm locations, covering thousands of trees across 50 acres.
Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.
Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova in New York and Rich McKay in Atlanta Editing by Frank McGurty and Frances Kerry
Thomson Reuters
Maria Tsvetkova is an investigative journalist from Moscow who focuses on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as part of an international team of reporters. She has reported from the conflict zones in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as doing reporting stints in Armenia, Turkey and Iraq.
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is more brand-new October 2024 climatology (More can be found on each past archived daily November post.):
Here is More Climate News from Saturday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)