California’s extreme wildfires are triggering “fire whirls”

Thousands of acres are burning as of Wednesday from California and Oregon to Washington and the US-Canada border, all due to wildfires being exacerbated by climate change. Because humans are emitting greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels, we are exacerbating unprecedented extreme weather events like extreme wildfires.

As of Wednesday, California’s York fire has torched more than 82,000 acres of Mojave desert, including thousands of iconic Joshua trees. Perhaps the most seemingly bizarre detail: Firefighters battling the wildfires along the California-Nevada border have noticed so-called “fire whirls,” or wildfire plums that spin with naturally rotating air to form tornado-like spinning funnels.

“In some locations, firefighters on the north side of the fire observed fire whirls also known as whirlwinds,” the Mojave National Preserve explained on Monday in a Facebook post. Meanwhile, Oregon’s Bedrock fire has been consuming 1,000 acres every day, with some estimates that it won’t be contained until October. Climate change experts agree that the current extreme weather patterns are not only caused by global warming, but are going to increase in frequency and intensity.

“It’s a ‘new abnormal’ and it is now playing out in real time — the impacts of climate change are upon us in the form of unprecedented, dangerous extreme weather events,” climatologist Michael E. Mann told Salon last month. “And it will only get worse and worse as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels and generate carbon pollution.”