TheEconomistAugust 29th 2020 171T
he webcam above her nest shows In-
iko, a four-month-old California con-
dor, high in the trees of the Ventana wilder-
ness area, looking out as flames advance
towards her. She is part of a 20-year breed-
ing programme to reintroduce the giant
birds, which were extinct in the wild, to
California’s central coast. She is alone—her
parents have fled the danger—and cannot
yet fly. At 10:40pm on August 20th the web-
cam shows a flash of wing feathers, then
the live stream goes dark, as the flames,
presumably, engulf the nest.
Had the fire been in a previous year, In-
iko would probably have been old enough
to fly: the worst of the fire season takes
place in September or October. But the sea-
son of 2020 has started early and with as-
tonishing force. The California Depart-
ment of Forestry and Fire Protection (cal
fire) said that there had been over 700
wildfires between August 15th and 26th,
burning 1.3m acres (500,000 hectares).
That is two-thirds as much, in just 12 days,
as burned as in the whole of 2018, the worst
year to date, and the season has not yet
reached its peak. The two biggest confla-
grations, one east of San Jose, the other
north of San Francisco, are the state’s sec-
ond- and third-largest on record. Gavin
Newsom, the governor, was not exaggerat-
ing when he said: “We simply haven’t seenanything like this in many, many years.”
Some previous fires have been man-
made. One started when a car tyre blew and
the wheel’s metal rim scraped the pave-
ment. This year’s fires are the latest and
starkest example of a different man-made
influence: climate change.
On August 16th a monitoring station in
Death Valley measured a temperature of
54.4°C (130°F). If confirmed, that would be
the highest reliably recorded anywhere on
Earth. It may reflect a broader trend of glo-
bal warming hitting Californians harder
than most places. According to the Nation-
al Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion, temperatures in many parts of the
state, including Santa Clara County, which
is being scorched by the largest of the fires,
rose by 2°C between 1895 and 2018, roughly
twice the global average.
The state is drier as well as hotter. Cali-
fornia has experienced droughts through-
out history, but the one between 2011 and
2019 was the longest and driest recorded.
According to a study in Nature Geosciences
in 2019, that drought killed almost 150m
trees, leading to a state of emergency in
2019 intended to help reduce the huge
build-up of flammable dead wood. Too late.
Drought returned this year, when the state
had its driest February on record (matters
improved a bit later). A recent study in En-
vironmental Research Letters by MichaelNatural disasters
The condor’s cry
California has been roiled by covid-19, drought, heatwaves and now two of the
biggest fires on record
United States
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