COP26 starts in less than three weeks. The importance of the 26th “conference of the parties” has been driven home to me while I’ve been in the southwestern USA carrying out research on recovery after wildfires. I’ve been working in a big burn, from Horseshoe Two Fire of 2011, which burned within a perimeter of over 200,000 acres. You can see the changes wrought by the fire in the photo below. What used to be a complex forest with tall pines and shorter oaks is now an oak shrubland. This is happening in many places across the Southwest. Our data suggest that some of these lands will not return to the previous forest type.
Even more striking to me was the boat ramp (near Bulfrog) on Lake Powell shown below. If you look closely, you’ll see a road and then a boat ramp running from left to the right in the middle of the photo. Notice what’s missing: water! That’s because the drought and high temperatures of the last couple of decades has caused Lake Powell to drop nearly 150 feet. As a result, the lake is now far from this lonely boat ramp.
The impacts of climate change are much more than just hotter temperature.
The World is On Fire 
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