Letters to the Editor
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Is climate change even needed?
Climate change doesn't even have to be brought in as a causal factor for there to be plenty of fuel here (sorry) for environmentally concerned comment. Throughout the rockies and southwest, it's a pretty well-known fact: fire happens. Whether it's lodgepole pines in northern Montana or chaparral scrub in SoCal, fire happens. And, when it happens, you don't want to be in its way. Further, we can't stop it from happening - we can put out the fire now, but it only leads to a bigger fire next time.
Yet in spite of these perfectly simple facts, we're building our homes further and further into these fire-prone (or even fire-loving) ecosystems. How can we claim to be surprised when a house burns down after we've built it in a location that we know is going to burn eventually?
There's an easy environmental message here: sprawl gets your house burnt down. So don't sprawl. Live in locations and housing types appropriate to your locale. (Hint: living downtown means you're at very low risk of wildfires.) We don't need to go into whether climate change means dryer weather, which leads to fires, or whether climate change means wetter weather, which leads to fires - just stop building homes in fire-prone locations.
(This is, of course, a sneaky way to get around to climate change. As stated in the recent Urban Land Institute report, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, our land use patterns are a significantly more important part of addressing climate change than how fuel-efficient our cars are.)