[flagged]
> According to the National Park Service, nearly 85% of wildland fires in the U.S. are caused by human activities, such as unattended campfires, debris burning, equipment malfunctions and arson. Severe heat, which persists across the country in dangerous waves, can also fuel wildfires.
Climate change easily makes little accidents more likely to turn into big ones. Hotter, dryer, windier, etc. means that little spark from your campfire winds up sparking a fire.
precisely - when climate tips ground temps close to ignition points it does not take much to spark a huge conflagration, even if the source is human.
Direct sunlight gets much hotter, and in Death Valley for instance you can get third degree burns walking on sand dunes (not even black sand!) [https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/a-man-got-third-d...]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#:~:t....]
Furnace creek had a measured ground temp of 201F not that long ago.
That’s a lot closer to flash point than air temp. And localized reflections can easily boost that.
California wild fires are often triggered by chaparral combusting, helped by high ground temperatures, which are not the same as air temperatures and can be much, much hotter.
Arson-caused: 320,814
Human-caused non-arson: 1,046,983
Natural-caused: 327,319
(Ignoring all fires classified as unknown/unspecified cause).
So, there's as many arson caused fires as natural caused fires, and three times as many non-arson fires from human activities as from arson fires.
Make of that what you will.
Somewhat ironically, while blaming climate change for the problem instead of dealing with the problem, the amount of pollution from mismanagement exacerbates the amount of CO2 released.
0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1243599
1 - https://nationalpost.com/opinion/canadas-burning-because-of-...
https://www.kqed.org/science/1134217/let-it-burn-the-forest-... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda...
The claim is not that climate change “causes” fires (how would that even work, exactly?)
The claim is that the conditions that allow these fires to grow explosively and do so much damage are due in part to climate change. Without climate change, we’d still have human-caused fires, but their effect would not be so severe.
I take no position on this claim, but this is how it is typically advanced.
Not to say you’re implying against that, just clarifying.
Only lightning strikes and humans can. (or volcanos but not a lot of them around the US)
Climate change can, and does depending on the nature of the change, increase the risk of wildfires.
Also bears playing with matches.
edit: It is possible for a large mound of organic debris like a mound of animals that got killed by lighting and then rapidly covered and then decomposed by really vigorous microorganisms to spontaneously ignite but that would be so rare in a world without humans heaping up big piles of the stuff as to be irrelevant.
Hogs will heap up lots of organic debris and sleep in it, choosing strategically where to urinate in order to increase or decrease the heat emitted by the pile.
> The distinctive “pigloos” the animals build consist of mounds of cattails, which they cut down and burrow into, capturing enough heat to steam on cold days, Brook explains.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/huge-fera...
and
https://feralhogs.extension.org/signs-of-presence/#:~:text=F....
> Farrowing nests are rooted-out areas typically round to oval in shape (Figure 8). Nests range in size from 3 to 8 feet long, 2 to 7 feet wide, and 2 to 7 inches deep. Sows excavate these shallow depressions for giving birth to their young. Sows line the nests using readily-available material in close proximity, or some nests are unlined. Nests found in colder or open habitats are more elaborate than those found in warmer or forested habitats. Elaborate nests can have dome-like covers made of vegetation piled to 4-feet high.
A final result can have multiple contributing causes.
...but a human threw the match!