Press Briefing: Wildfires and Climate: Experts Help You Get the Story Right

Transcript

Sammy Roth, Climate-Colored Goggles: All right. Thank you, everyone, for being here with us this morning, or afternoon, or perhaps even evening, wherever you may be. My name’s Sammy Roth. I’m an independent journalist. I write the newsletter Climate Colored Goggles. I should get the name of my own newsletter right. And we’re here to talk about covering climate change and wildfires. I’m guessing that’s a topic a lot of you are actively engaged in right now, which is why you are here. We’ve got three really excellent panelists who are going to help help us talk this through and figure out, as journalists or whatever your interest may be, the connection between climate and wildfires. What are some of the other factors that impact wildfire severity? Talk through the fires that are going on throughout the United States and other parts of the world right now, because stuff is really bad in a lot of places. So I’m excited to just briefly introduce our panelists. We’ve got Zach Labe, who’s a climate scientist at the nonprofit Climate Central, which produces some of the best and most up-to-date and relevant research on climate science. Which, if you’re a journalist, you’re probably quite familiar with them. Kylie Mohr, who’s a correspondent and contributing editor at High Country News, who produces really fantastic journalism on wildfire and other topics, and Max Boykoff, who’s an environmental studies professor at UC Boulder, excuse me, Colorado CU Boulder, and produces MeCCo. And if you’re not familiar with MeCCo, you should look them up. That’s M E C C O. They track media coverage of climate change and have a really excellent database of how the major media in the United States and around the world covers or as maybe does not cover climate as they should be. So really excited to chat with these panelists. Just for you know brief overview, there’s tons of real bad wildfire activity right now. Again, probably folks are familiar here. We’ve got major wildfires going in Utah and Colorado. More recently, in Oregon, in the Western United States, we’ve had the millions of acres burning in Ontario and Canada, which have been wafting smoke all over the Eastern and Upper Midwest in the United States. There’s extraordinary wildfire activity in Spain and France right now. So this is this is really a worldwide phenomenon, and I think the question that probably a lot of journalists have, and I know I’ve had colleagues who have dealt with this frequently, is if you’re covering a fire, do you mention climate, especially if there’s, you know, it’s an active fire and there has not been attribution science yet, because as rapid as some of these attribution analyzes are, it does take time to get those out. What do you do? Do you do you make a climate connection right away? Do you wait? Even if there is an attribution analysis, if you’re on the fire lines, if you’re writing about something that is not climate change or does not seem to you to be climate change, what do you say about climate, if anything? And that’s a question that I, you know, would would like to pose to all of you. And Zach, as the as the scientist in the room, I think I’m going to pick on you to to start us with that one. But then I’d love to extend that to to Kylie and Max as well.

 

Zachary Labe, Climate Central: Yeah, thanks. I’ll kick us off, and I’m I’m very interested in hearing the journalistic perspective, so I’ll speak to the science, and I think the science says yes, in that you can make the linkages between climate and wildfires. And where that framing is really coming from is not specifically about that specific wildfire event, but more broadly, how is climate influencing fire weather. So when we talk about fire weather, it’s really referring to weather variables like temperature, wind speed, humidity, things that are influencing like how dry the soils are and the vegetation. And so for areas like across the western U.S. there has been extensive research over the last several decades linking the warming due to human-caused climate change, to those drying conditions across the West, fueling more fire weather days. So, in parts of the Southwest, already over the last 50 years, we’ve seen these days with fire weather conditions, so, hot, dry, windy weather being up to 30 more days of these types of weather conditions. So, when a fire does occur, the the conditions are more favorable environmentally to support its growth in severity. So we can directly link climate change to increases like in wildfire area, burn area across the West, or the intensity. So I think the really the connection here is that sort of broader how is climate influencing the environmental factors for the fire, not necessarily going right to the climate linkage for that specific event.

Sammy Roth: Kylie, is that an approach that you take in your coverage, or how do you handle this?

Kylie Mohr, High Country News: Yeah, I completely agree with Zack. I think that you absolutely can and should make the broader link that wildfires are basically, or sorry, climate change is basically setting the stage for the severity and the intensity of the fires, the way that Zack just described. And I think, you know, I’m not someone who’s in breaking news, but I do understand that if you’re in sort of a breaking news type of situation, there’s human life and property on the line that maybe that linkage and that broader connection isn’t going to make it into the you know evacuate now story, but I think that it should definitely make its way into any and all coverage after that.

Max Boykoff, University of Colorado Boulder: Maybe also just to layer on to what you both said, Zack and Kylie, you know, at the most fundamental level, that climate change is a threat multiplier; that it also is intensifying the drying of certain places, extreme droughts, and then flooding in other areas. But when we’re talking about wildfires, there is a fundamental link there. I guess Sammy, without parsing words too much, you had asked, you know, in your question, if you don’t think it is as a journalist, and if I could just pick up on a piece, there is that one of the challenges that we have now is that there are many generalist journalists that are covering these issues, and so while specialist journalists feel confident about understanding what Zack has said, what Kylie has said, that those generalist journalists, when they’re picking up on stories that are happening in local communities and such, given the maybe political environment in the United States, and and given some of their own hesitancy within journalism, that they may be a little bit reluctant to make those connections to a changing climate. They want to just tell the story as they’re seeing it then. So embedded in your question, Sammy, I think helps us draw out the difference between when specialist journalists are covering these issues, and then when generalists jump in and just try and tell that story, not to get caught up in in some of these more complex issues about linkages to changing climate.

Sammy Roth: There are several threads I want to pick up on there. I mean, definitely, Max, different types of journalists and different approaches to stories. Kylie, what you were talking about, different types of stories, you know, the evacuate now versus you know thinking more broadly. Before we get into all of that, Zack, let me just circle back to you here and let’s dig into the science a little bit more. I mean, you you talked specifically about you know weather conditions in the Western United States and how you know fire or climate is setting the stage for conditions that you know allow for more intense fires. I guess could you could you just speak at a at a high level to sort of what we know about the the climate fire connection, how they’re related, and maybe also how that varies by geography, perhaps because I know we we have folks who are on this webinar from a lot of different places. So the the West is a big one in the American the American West, but then you know this is going to vary place by place as well.

Zachary Labe: Sure thing. So I’ll I’ll start off with the West and a meteorological term that you might hear a lot if you cover wildfire and climate conditions, and it’s called vapor pressure deficit. And so it’s a bit technical, so I’ll break it down. So in a warming world, we know that the atmosphere can hold more moisture. So, what vapor pressure deficit is that term is trying to do is it’s trying to measure the total amount of water vapor that the atmosphere could hold, which is rising because the atmosphere is rising due to climate change, versus how much water vapor is actually in the air. And so the atmosphere is trying to act like a sponge. It’s trying to fill up with water. So as you increase the amount of that total water vapor in the air, it’s trying to basically suck more and more moisture out of anything possible. So it’s trying to pull moisture out of the soil, out of the vegetation. So it’s just further drying sort of the land surface, so you’re getting lower humidity at the surface. So those rising temperatures are fueling and increasing the intensity of some of the heat. You’re drying out the land surface because of this difference in the vapor pressure deficit that’s increasing, and so that’s one of the key linkages that researchers have made directly between vapor pressure deficit going up, and burn area increasing across the West, and so in other Mediterranean climates, we are also seeing these types of connections where the atmosphere is drying, it’s warming, like across parts of Europe, where we’re seeing increases in wildfires. There’s also other areas like in the higher latitudes, so we’re seeing increases in the boreal forests across parts of Siberia, Canada, Alaska, for wildfire conditions, and in some of these far northern areas, where where temperatures are rising some of the fastest in the world, two to four times faster than the global average, and it’s also again drying out that land surface. In many of those areas, they’re filled with peat and all of this carbon organic rich material that’s drying out, and so…

Sammy Roth: You’re describing like the Canadian boreal forests that are burning right now and spreading smoke into the United States.

Zachary Labe: Yep, absolutely. So those areas, due to the really rapid warming and that different types of surface material, are also contributing to these increases in wildfire conditions, and we’re also seeing it not only these changes in the burn area, the intensity, but also the season. So historically, you could define wildfire season during a certain time of year, but what we’re seeing is actually the length of when wildfire environmental conditions are most favorable expanding throughout the year. We’re seeing out of season wildfires because it’s it’s hotter, it’s drier, and all these conditions are coming together. So we’re seeing multiple factors that are contributing to these changes in wildfires, all coming from this climate perspective.

Sammy Roth: Are there are there scenarios where you might have really bad wildfire activity where where it just might so happen, like wow, climate change actually had nothing to do with this, because I think that might be a concern for a lot of journalists who you know don’t have that expertise and are working quickly. You know, for me as a as a climate journalist, I feel pretty confident being able to say, you know, hey, I’m covering a fire in California or in Colorado or in Oregon, and saying, “Hey, there’s a climate connection here.” What do you do if you’re, you know, working quickly and you’re on deadline and you don’t have time to, you know, go figure out climate science really fast?

Zachary Labe: Yeah, I’ll be honest. Even coming from the science, wildfires are tough. So I’ll get to your question, but I wanted to mention it in case any journalists missed last week. There was a new report from the National Academy of Sciences, which took a look at attributing extreme events. So, how much climate change affected different types of extreme weather, and so wildfires is an interesting case where we have like medium confidence in the connection between climate change and wildfires, but lower confidence in attributing specific events, and that’s because these wildfires are tough. There’s many other factors that go into play for a particular wildfire: the ignition source, the land management, pests that, like the bark beetle, that might have influenced existing, you know, dry materials at the surface. So there’s all of these other contributing factors. So, like for me, at least speaking of the science, I think the connection between the warmer, thirstier environment is one you can clearly make with climate without going into detail on that specific fire. You can throw it in that more condition weather fire weather conditions are likely in a warmer world. Just kind of as a broad statement in the article, I think is a very strongly supported in the science type to add.

Sammy Roth: Yeah, and by the way, I should mention if folks have questions, we’re going to have a long period for audience Q and A here, so please use the Q and A feature of Zoom and put your questions in the chat, and and we’ll we’ll get to that. Kylie, I’m so curious for you. I mean, how you and I, I think, have probably both dealt with this as reporters. I mean, all of these different factors that contribute to wildfire, you know, severity and damage. Knowing that there’s this climate connection, but also that, you know, Zack mentioned bark beetles, and you know, when you look at urban fires, you know, people who have built out into the wildland urban interface. What is the ignition source? I mean, how how how do you deal with that? And then with people inevitably being mad at you when you focus on one thing but not another thing.

Kylie Mohr: Right, right. I know you can’t you can’t really win, and that is one of the tough things about wildfires that it’s so like there’s so many overlapping factors. I do think that it’s safe to say, you know, in general, and then what we’ve been talking about with climate science. I think journalists we can we can couch that and and be safe and bringing the science forward, but also recognizing that you know it’s really impossible to attribute a wildfire to just one factor, and that’s true across the board. I think any time outlets or discussion, often political conversation, blames one specific factor that is a great time for journalists to step back and be like, okay, it’s never just one factor. It’s everything that we’ve been talking about and then some, right? Like, and this is tough if you’re on deadline, but if you’re thinking about it from a broader perspective, like we have over 100 years of forest management, and that is a whole other category. But you know, there are reasons why we have so much burnable fuel on the landscape. There’s a history of fire suppression, which we’re seeing a return to today in this administration. Fire cycles are out of whack because so many places that used to burn with some sort of regularity haven’t burned for so long. Like you said, there’s development into the WUI or the Wildland Urban Interface, I think in a lot of these kind of urban or semi-urban fires that we’ve seen recently in California, in even Colorado, like there are big questions to be had about you know the massive amount of development that we’ve had into more burnable areas, what homes are made with, how new neighborhoods are constructed-like you can just go on and on and on and on-and so I think it’s our job as journalists to, in the most concise way possible, you know, show that there is this complexity and nuance, because otherwise, if we’re simplifying it down to just one factor, we’re doing a disservice to our readers, even if that’s what feels easiest or quickest. 

Sammy Roth: Yeah, I know that I’m you know I’m a columnist and not a straight news reporter, so sometimes I can do stuff that others can’t. But I was very proud of myself once. I maybe others will think this is stupid and not clever, but I um I got I got mad at someone who ran a headline that climate change did not cause the LA fire, and my my quip in one of my columns in response to that was, “Well, yeah, the the assassination of Franz Ferdinand did not cause World War One, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”

Kylie Mohr: I remember seeing that, and I think that’s a great. I mean, you know, climate climate change is not lighting the spark, right? Like the spark, the physical spark that’s starting a wildfire is coming from lightning, it’s coming from a power line, it’s coming from a person, an unattended campfire, whatever. But like, that’s not what we’re saying, right? Climate change is setting the stage for once the spark comes from any other factor, the result is going to be the fires that we’re seeing today.

Sammy Roth: Max, I’m curious how you’ve seen all of this because you track media coverage of all this stuff. I’m curious how you’ve seen it play out in practice, whether in you know past fire cycles, which I hate even fire cycles because it’s just constant now, but or you know, or even in the most recent round with the fires in you know in the West and in Canada right now. What what are you seeing?

Max Boykoff: Well, overall, media coverage has been dropping. So what we do at our media and climate change observatory is track about 130 sources across television, newspapers, radio, month to month. We have tracking back to about 2000 or 2004, depending on the sources. And so, in general terms, media coverage of climate change or global warming has been decreasing, and so just comparing the first six months of 2026 to the last six months, coverage has fallen overall 32% I could get much more into those details if you’d like. Your questions about wildfires, and there are several stories that don’t make the attribution to climate change or global warming, and so we’re not necessarily picking up those going into July, we do our monthly updates. But I just did a little search within our data set and took a look at the the data that we’ve got, and just looked across Canadian, U.S. EU print that we cover, and then also the international wires, and you know, among the wildfire mentions within these articles, on average in Canadian print, there’s there was about five per source in the month of June. There were about 12- 13, per source in USA in the month of June. There were just about three per source in the EU in the month of June, though that is a larger territory. It may not include some of those burn areas like Spain. You know, it’s harder to isolate that. But then in the wires, picking up on it, there’s 53 per source across the four sources. So what that for me is just a signal that when we’re looking for good wildfire coverage, that the the wires have really been coming through for us. In particular, Seth Borenstein is among those that, with Associated Press, that reaches you know their distribution is 15,000 outlets, as they say, and they claim half the planet if people are paying attention. So there is this difference in terms of the coverage that we’ve been picking up on through our media and climate change observatory…

Sammy Roth: This coverage that specifically references climate change that you’re talking about.

Max Boykoff: Climate change and wildfires, yeah.

Sammy Roth: Okay, so it’s it’s kind of not there from the the major print outlets you track, but the the wires are doing it. The

Max Boykoff: The wires are significantly higher, 53 per source. So for looking at that, the wires that then feed into are places where there are good signals for wildfire coverage that that make attributions to climate change and global warming.

Sammy Roth: Why? Um, I mean, and that, I mean, you’ve seen this downward trend in just overall climate mentions at the you know the major print and broadcast outlets that you track. Where do you think the you know the responsibility for that lies, or how do we start to fix this problem? I mean, I know we’re here talking specifically about climate and wildfires, so I’ll ask about that. I mean, it you know as Zack has been saying, it’s a it’s a complicated subject. You know, for journalists who are not climate or environmental experts, although we need you know, is it an issue of, you know, needing to get more climate and environment journalists back in newsrooms? You know, is it is it a question for editors to solve? Should everyone be working with Covering Climate Now? I mean, how do we how do we get more people making that connection to climate that is that is not there? Like, what do where would you start with that one?

Max Boykoff: Except for me specifically, or yeah….

Sammy Roth: Kylie, please weigh in if you want to. 

Max Boykoff: But sure, I’ll follow on some thoughts Kylie you may have

Sammy Roth: Yeah.

Kylie Mohr: Sure. Yeah. I mean, that is the million or trillion dollar question. What are global

Sammy Roth: What are global insurance losses? How many trillions?

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, exactly. So I don’t have an easy answer. I do think it’s symptomatic of resources being cut in newsrooms. I know that you know environmental teams at major publications have been cut recently. I believe NPR just folded their entire climate desk into a broader desk. So there is kind of that lack of maybe more experienced, more specialized journalists who feel comfortable making that connection. There’s also you know major factors at play within the media ecosystem that’s just kind of probably beyond the scope of this conversation. But I do think resources and education for the people who are left, people who remain, and just trying to hammer home, like, hey, in general, this is a, we know this is true. Like, this is a fact, right? Journalists love facts, and we love facts that are not disputed. We love facts that are, you know, we can feel confident standing behind accuracy-wise. And so, I think maybe the conversation needs to kind of get to a point of, hey, you don’t need to attribute specific, you don’t need to get lost in the sauce of the specific fire, but like here’s this thing, here are all the studies we know this is true, like this is a fact that your readers need to know, so just kind of like leaning on the on the proven science a bit more, but yeah, there’s so many factors at play. I’m not sure.

Max Boykoff: Well, I may get into maybe what you thought might be beyond the scope, and just say a few words from where I sit in the research community. And having done this work now for a few decades, is that I’ve seen waves of of newsroom cuts to climate desks, and some of the rationale being that this is becoming more of a mainstream story that touches all different aspects of it. That’s good, but then we see another wave coming through, including NPR and other places. And frankly, corporate media structures aren’t working for productive and valuable information flows, including climate change and wildfire coverage, so maybe in the immediate, Sammy, I think you hit it on the nose. Others have been saying too, you know, helping build the confidence for people just to say that these are the kinds of things that happen in a changing climate. There are connections, and there’s attribution to follow. But then we have to take a bigger look at this: is that the workings of mass media, they’re situated in wider cultural politics of the environment, and that just means processes involving how meaning is constructed and negotiated across spaces, and how representations and messages gain traction. But also those that are silenced and that are absent. And so, if we take that wider look, if you’ll allow me to do that from the research community, is just that when these when these assessments of how we’re talking about it get related then to the material realities on the ground, we have just been caught up in these cycles. And I think thinking bigger, you know, relying on Covering Climate Now, relying on other independent media outlets, we must be building towards something much bigger than we’ve got right now because the way in which corporate media has continued to consolidate across the two plus decades that I’ve been doing this work, 111 billion dollar merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers, among the most recent, just being put on hold. But these massive corporate entities that are that are really controlling the information flows have let us down. They have squeezed out much more of the individual journalists, and we haven’t been able to get a fuller picture to this stage. So I guess I am calling for that bigger scope set of considerations.

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, I’m glad that you went there, Max. And I wonder too, since we are kind of getting a little bit meta, you know, so many Americans are getting their news from social media. They’re not even getting their news from you know corporate media, mass media. There’s this fragmentation of information with kind of pseudo influencer journalists and also kind of the intense movement to platforms like Substack, and so I just wonder, you know, maybe this is ripe for future analysis. Are those kind of micro sources on different platforms, you know, how is climate coming up in those conversations around stories, or not? And maybe there’s room, maybe there’s room for that as well, because I do, I do think, yeah, the mainstream media sources, the information that we’re getting is just not not ideal, and people aren’t even paying attention to it if it is. So it’s kind of a layered problem.

Sammy Roth: I love the high level stuff, and I want to I want to try to ground it with one specific thing. Zack, let me pull you back in here. I’m so curious with with the science of wildfires and climate, which is one of the you know relatively more complicated climate science areas, even if the you know the the connection can be stated you know to exist in a in a confident and straightforward way, I’m curious. Like, have you seen on social media like good ways to communicate you know how climate is affecting wildfires, or ways to just like talk about that in a way that you know doesn’t mingle the science, but you know gets the information across that’s you know strong and visceral and gets people’s attention. Because I think for a lot of journalists, you know, a lot of journalists, and this is true for me too. Like you know, we’re we’re used to just explaining stuff in a way that’s nuanced and thoughtful, you know, over the course of you know many paragraphs and hundreds of words, and we know we we should be and want to be on social media doing videos, but that’s not our native format. But if we want to get people’s attention with this stuff… I’m just curious if you’ve seen examples of that from climate scientists, or if that’s something you’ve you know done yourself, or just what your experience is in in that space?

Zachary Labe: Yeah, I I think social media is a really interesting form of getting the science out there. You know, as this discussion has said, the science is tricky, and then finding where to go to understand the science is even harder. Finding climate scientists that are willing to talk with the media or finding the resources to make these connections. And so, at least for me, social media has been a really fascinating way, actually, to get some of the science out. So I admit I spend too much time on social media, probably, but I find it a very useful way to make connect the dots, and also connect the dots to other resources. So there is a lot of climate scientists that are on social media that are trying to make these connections to current weather and to talk about like this past winter we had a historic snow drought across the West. It was record warm, so climate scientists were talking about both. Here’s the current conditions. It’s not snowing this winter. Also, here’s what this might lead to for this coming summer, with wildfires happening, and making these like short factual graphics that are more accessible visualizations of the data, and then providing links to resources on where is the publications, where is a plain language summary of the research going on, and so at least I think climate scientists were finding a very valuable way to like talk about the science, try to break it down a bit, and using social media as as one outlet to get this information out, and to also connect to journalists. I mean, I’m speaking coming from a research background, so as a scientist, we don’t get any training in communication, and there’s often a lot of times pressures. You know, they want you focusing on your research, maybe less so on the communication side of things, and so a lot of times there’s a lot of scientists, a lot of early career scientists who are really excited to get this information out. They want to engage in science communication and don’t know how to get started, don’t know how to connect with reliable journalists and outlets, and so we see social media as a way where we can, you know, spread this information to a wider audience and remake those connections to individual journalists. So I encourage journalists who want to learn more about current and you know research efforts around the connections between climate and wildfires to follow some of the climate scientists talking about this information in real time, even as events are occurring, and providing some additional context.

Sammy Roth: Yeah, since that’s that’s super helpful. And just since you mentioned snow drought, it reminded me one study that just came out this week that really struck my attention that I’m putting in the chat. There was a new study out of the Colorado School of Mines that the snow drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin that was one of the factors behind the terrible wildfire activity in Colorado and Utah. That’s snow drought was made 14 times more likely by climate change, according to this new study. So just one of the you know one of the many ways to think about the fire climate connection. Let me follow up with one thing, Zack. A climate topic that’s on a lot of people’s minds right now is El Nino, and so I, you know, I just this is going to be you know going forward as you know this potentially historic or mega El Nino or whatever term is going to come into vogue to refer to it. What should people be thinking about in terms of what that means for you know wildfire conditions in the United States, I know that’s a complicated question, but what’s the you know what’s the lowdown on that?

Zachary Labe: Yeah, so I think El Nino is going to be the climate story of the next year, probably, and how it’s affecting all sorts of things around the world. So a question is, what’s the connection to wildfires? And so typically, we see El Nino’s linkage to like weather patterns more the strongest connections are typically during the winter season. So in past strong El Nino events, it’s made it more likely, for example, the West to be wetter, so to have more precipitation falling across like California. So the connection can be there can be a possible multiple connections. On one hand, you could have a really wet winter that leads into potentially a very hot summer, and then so you have all this new vegetation that grew during the winter, and then potentially it could dry out the following summer and be more fuel for the fire to burn. But those so those connections are tricky. So El Nino can make certain impacts more likely, but every El Nino is different, and as we’ve already seen with this current event, it’s showing to be one of the strongest in our historical records, and it’s happening in a world that was warmer than any past El Nino events. So we can, while El Nino again makes some of these impacts more or less likely in some areas, we’re in a new world with how climate change is modified, sort of the background state. Some of the connections more globally to wildfires are a bit more clear. So we often see during El Nino events a drying, like across Indonesia, across Australia, across even into India. So this can increase the likelihood of wildfire conditions in those regions due to less precipitation during El Nino events, so I think a lot of meteorologists and climate scientists will be really looking into those areas in particular to see if those connections also hold for this particular event over the next six to 12 months.

Sammy Roth: So let me let me pivot for a minute here. So and and by the way, in a few minutes again, we’ll start doing audience questions, and we’ve got a bunch coming in already. But if you have more, please use the folks use the Q and A feature, and you know we’ll have at least 20 minutes for you know audience questions here. You know we’ve talked a lot about science. I think most of the wildfire coverage that I’ve seen, and Max, tell me if this doesn’t track with your experience. You’ve you’ve got most of it is just like you know, “Hey, here are the you know here are the fires that are happening. Here’s how many acres they are. Here’s the you know devastation and destruction that’s going on.” No mention of climate. And then you’ve got the small handful of stories that are like you know here is the climate science and here’s the climate connection. And those are typically being written by climate reporters, and that’s a small percentage. I’m interested in what other types of stories you guys think there are that can be done surrounding wildfires. You know, either while they’re happening, or you know, in sort of the long tail of aftermath of fires, which is a really important period which we’re going to be you know entering soon for the current fire activity. What are you know? What are the other types of stories that are not just hey you know here’s the basic science or hey here is the terrible thing happening right now especially stories where you can work in a climate connection, even if it’s not the main part of the story stories where climate you know might be raised. Kylie is the you know as the journalist, I want to throw that to you first, but um you know Max and Zack, I’m definitely interested what you guys think also.

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I could have an entire panel just on all of the other story ideas. So I’ll please

Sammy Roth: So please speak for the next hour, and everyone will listen gratefully.

Kylie Mohr: I can just ramble. No, but I mean, I like to think about fire holistically, and I think one of the things that’s you know, if you think about something that’s going on all year round, maybe the fires aren’t burning all year round, but there is always so much interesting research coming out about everything from wildfire smoke health impacts to you know how wildfires are shaping microbes in the soil. If you’re doing local or regional news, chances are your closest university or research hub probably has work that you could cover. So that’s one thing that you can do all year round. Another is policy. Like there are attempts at at the state and federal level to you know quantify wildfire risk. Try to consider you know, new building codes to make communities safer. Things like that don’t get a lot of coverage usually. Pre-fire, I think there are tons of stories about you know how communities are preparing. That could be anything from like prescribed burns to building homes in a in a safer way. Obviously, during fires, there’s all the breaking news stuff that we’ve already talked about. But also, there’s you know the health impacts of smoke. There’s firefighter safety. There’s how federal policies are maybe impacting the current fire efforts, fire staffing, things like that.

Sammy Roth: By federal policy, do you mean like unwinding all of the agencies that manage forests and firefighting?

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, I mean like massive cuts across the Forest Service and other land management agencies that are the ones who are fighting the fires right now, and by that I mean too, especially as we get into what’s considered “Angry August” in the fire community, like that’s when the cracks really start to show because people have been fighting fire for months. Maybe they’re understaffed. There’s been you know injuries and fatalities even this year, and so I think there’s a lot of questions to be asking about how we are fighting fire in this country right now, and if we have the resources to adequately do it. And then post fire, there are so many stories, and some of those are I think more on the solutions end, or on the kind of like okay, a fire happened, but we can think about how to you know build back better or reforest the land that burned. At the same time, there’s a lot of negative stories. Things to look out for after fires would be debris flows, which is where rain falls on soil that’s just been burned to a crisp and isn’t holding together anymore, and can create these water-based hazards. There’s so many different health hazards lurking after fires, especially in urban contexts. There’s been a lot of great reporting, I think, about all of the different health hazards in the Los Angeles area following those fires. And then there’s a lot of opportunity for accountability reporting as well, like predatory land buyers come in and often try to scoop up burned communities post fire. There’s insurance reimbursements or the lack thereof. You know, I’ve done some coverage in New Mexico where several years after the state’s biggest fire, people are still waiting for reimbursements from FEMA and having a really tough time navigating just getting the money to you know rebuild their lives. So I really think I’m I always like to beat the drum of wildfire is a year round beat and if you start thinking about pre during post and then everything that’s going on around specific fires kind of like the broader wildfire research ecosystem, policy ecosystem, etc. There’s honesgtly endless stories.

Sammy Roth: Every one of those ideas was fantastic and all sounded like stories you had done. And I don’t actually want to make you talk for an hour, but I will follow up and just ask. Um, I was so the story you did recently on polymarket, one of the more horrifying things I’ve ever read, but also such a creative idea for a fire story, just talk briefly about that. People can place bets on this prediction market, polymarket on fire activity?

Kylie Mohr: Yes. So I first learned about that in the context of the LA fires. People were betting on you know, as I think 16 people were dying, and or no, was it 33 Anyways, as people were were dying, and you know…

Sammy Roth: 31 people were killed in the fires.

Kylie Mohr: Okay, and then maybe like 16,000 structures or something. Anyways, getting the numbers mixed up. But basically, as as people were fleeing and communities were burning. There were people on the prediction market called Polymarket who were actually making bets on how you know how big the fires would get, when they would be contained, if they would reach certain communities by certain certain days, et cetera. And about $1.2 million was actually exchanged on those questions during the fire, and you know it’s not illegal to bet on wildfire outcomes right now. Ethicists are concerned that not only does it really devalue human life, but it also could incentivize arson. Theoretically, people could light a fire to win a bet, which is a crazy dystopian scenario. And yeah, I think my story just exposed that that’s something people have done. That’s something people are continuing to do. And prediction markets are kind of the wild west. And this is just one example of that.

Sammy Roth: Yeah. Well, I mean, what I found valuable about that story for the purposes of this discussion, truly god awful as it is, is that I think it kind of highlights the point. I mean, you did that story a year and a half after the fires, and I think it shows, you know, any there are fire stories everywhere. Anyone can be a fire reporter, and by extension, anyone can be a climate reporter in a certain way. That’s not a story that you had to rush to do on the front lines of the fire. Like, you know, there’s plenty of time to go back and look at these things from all different angles and really figure out, you know, how to tell a story in a way that’s smart, and you know, take the time that you need to, you know, figure out how to make that that climate connection too, if you want to. We’ll go to audience questions in a minute, but but Max, just you know, from your from your vantage point, looking at climate coverage of you know media coverage of climate and fires, what are you know what are some stories that you think are you know underexplored or might you know might be right for the picking.

Max Boykoff: Thanks. I too could could add on to the great comprehensive take Kylie just provided. I mean, maybe I just leave it to two more examples. I found that article shocking as well. And as it relates, I’m going to precede the two examples by just saying that climate ethics has really grown as a field around ethicists around the morals and ethics because of the complexity of climate change. There aren’t really a… Dale Jamison spoke about this from NYU recently. There aren’t really a field of ozone ethicists because climate change has just seeped into every aspect of the way that we live, work, play, and relax in society. And so many of those ethical questions provide storylines. I guess I’ll just say that one other track is to put it in historical context. That is a way I read an Atlantic article last week by Nancy Walecki talking about, you know, there’s the human history we could talk through and the changing conditions, as Zack has described very well from the sciences. But putting it in a large historical context that these smoke days are nothing compared to the ones 66 million years ago with the dinosaurs, and so that’s just a different angle that really got my attention. And then I’ll just say the second example is just that even yesterday, you know, if if journalists are able to interview and ask people questions about these linkages and ask people who are there, authority figures, you’ll get very striking responses. And so, even just yesterday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who was surveying some of the fire damage in Spain, he had urged political parties to set aside partisan politics, talk about our common enemy, which is a climate emergency, and he said, “This is not political, not ideological. This is science.” So, for journalists asking those authority figures, you’ll get those quotes that had traveled throughout a lot of the feeds, throughout a lot of the news sources that I’m reading, and those are the sorts of ways that you can get resonant conversations. conversations moving through media.

Sammy Roth: So we’re going to go to audience questions, and there are a lot of good ones. So we’ll see how many we can we can get through here. I love this question. How do you all balance reporting on fire mitigation tactics when different scientists support many different types, sometimes conflicting, of forest management? Yeah, not a topic that’s come up so far, but definitely something that you know has come up in my life with you know with logging and forest thinning and controlled burns. I mean, I think the logging issue is at the heart of that, but not the only thing. Who who wants to try that one? Thank you for the good question.

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, I mean, I can jump in. I think Sammy, you and I have both kind of covered covered this issue and dealt with the sourcing there. While there are disagreements in the nuance, there isn’t, I believe, reputable disagreements within the science when it comes to you know clear cutting something, is not going to increase its wildfire resilience. Oftentimes, thinning and prescribed fire need to go together to actually have the wildfire risk reduction benefits that people are touting. I think this is a ripe area where if you’re covering you know sort of wildfire mitigation projects that are proposed in your community by an agency like the Forest Service. There are lots of questions to ask, and there are a lot of reputable scientists, usually you know, with work in published peer-reviewed journals. And you know, there are some, I don’t want to like name check anyone, but there are a couple people who are kind of known for being very much on one side of the debate, not necessarily backed up by science. Who unfortunately get platformed by major publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Sammy Roth: You don’t want to do the name check?

Kylie Mohr: You can do the name check if you want. I don’t want to put anyone on blast necessarily, but yeah, I if if you have the time, and you know, in this debate, you should have the time to interview some reputable scientists, and and they can tell you who to look out for and who is kind of a fringe person in this debate. I don’t know if anyone else has anything to add.

Sammy Roth: Yeah, I mean that would be pretty much my answer too. I think that I’ve I’ve seen a number of stories that present a you know contentious debate, and it’s sort of like wait, there’s 12 scientists who are listed as being on one side who you know are very quickly set aside, and then one person who gets most of the story who seems to be the you know one of the maybe two voices who are on that side, but they were willing to spend a bunch of time with the reporter. And if you find yourself in that situation as a journalist, maybe question why that’s what your story looks like. That’d be my advice. But it’s a it’s a very good question, and occasionally there are difficult situations, but but not always. I like this question too. What is the biggest misconception of wildfire trends changing globally with climate change? I like that because it just gets it. You know, there’s misconceptions and misinformation, and you know, it’s not always clear what the right answer is. So, what is the biggest misconception globally with wildfire trends and climate change?

Zachary Labe: I’ll get started with a quick answer where there’s a statistic about global burn area going down, and so that oftentimes gets advertised to talk about oh that means the wildfire risk is going down around the world. And in the in the case of most things, it’s a lot more nuanced than that, where the trends in global burn area going down are more related to changes in land use and agricultural expansion, where there were previous grasslands, like in the Central Africa and such, so that’s that’s often a misconception about this statistic that gets shared quite frequently when wildfire trends, especially again focusing on those wildfire weather environmental conditions, are much more regionally related, and so I would encourage if you have again, as we’ve been talking about, the time to do a deeper story to really dive into regional information about what’s happening with burn area in a particular area, the severity of the fires, what are some of these natural versus human elements that are causing this sort of complicated story about differences and trends.

Max Boykoff: I could add to that a bit of what Kylie picked up on earlier of people moving into the wildland urban interface. Is that sometimes stories can construct a misconception that this is simply a matter of damage because people are moving into the wildfire areas rather than climate change also factoring into all of this. 16,000 structures in the LA fires devastating. There were over 1000 here in the Marshall Fire in 2021, devastating as well on that scale. But some of the misconception is that well, just people are moving into those spaces, and that’s why it’s getting more news and such, and then diminishing, and for that matter, other extreme events such as hurricane events and floods and such. That is something that I think distracts us, you know, like like a red winged blackbird looking at something shiny from really what’s going on around a changing.

Sammy Roth: Yeah, I think that I mean that’s a people have limit… only so much attention and there’s so much pulling at our attention. I get frustrated when there’s all these arguments and debates over well it’s it’s this and not that why are you talking about this thing and not that thing I mean can we not accept that there’s there’s a lot of important you know factors and and problems and climate change is hovering very badly above them all. I, I think as journalists, we should be able to to handle that one. I really like this question as well. We haven’t talked that much about wildfire smoke, so as wildfire impacts like smoke increasingly affect areas and populations unfamiliar with them, how do we as journalists better communicate the ongoing risks of these impacts? E.g. Americans may see the Canadian wildfire smoke outside their house and say it’s only for a day. It doesn’t seem that bad. The kids can still go to the pool even if the news says the air is hazardous. I mean, I think that’s a common one across a lot of a lot of climate impacts. I mean, heat comes to mind as well. So how, you know, how can folks really communicate? Like, oh yeah, you know, it seems normal even if the air is bad. But this is this is really something you got to take seriously.

Kylie Mohr: I mean, I think that’s a great place to you know platform public health experts, right? Because they can communicate in a way that is accessible and understandable. The fact that you know, yeah, we have these different levels of AQI, and here’s what each level means. Here’s what it means for sensitive groups. A lot of people fall under sensitive groups. You know, there’s a huge amount of there’s been a lot of lack of research, and a recent Grist story actually got into smoke impacts for pregnant people and how those people are often like left out of the conversation when it comes to smoke days and how to protect yourself. And so, yeah, I think I think there is a perception, especially before the smoke hits you know 500 and the sky is glowing bright red. There’s a perception that maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s fine to go out and exercise, etc. But it really depends on the person, and depends on the activity, and depends on the individual conditions in that space. And so, yeah, local and regional experts, I think, can speak really well to kind of how that translates, and then how you can protect yourself, whether that be, you know, making a filter with a box fan, or you know, just doing various things on a longer term to your house or to a place that you rent that can make it safer. But yeah, wildfire smoke is incredibly dangerous, and I think we’re just we’re still like pulling back the layers of the onion, and every layer that researchers pull back is bad. I haven’t seen a single study that’s like, never mind wildfire smoke isn’t bad for any number of human health issues. 

Max Boykoff: My colleague Colleen Reed is a health professional within academia who’s been on NPR, and she’s been a great resource. I agree with you to go to those experts, and maybe just in the wider sense, I’ll say that you know there’s we’re sometimes when we diminish these problems, we just try and muddle through our day, just get to the you know get to the end, get some sleep, get back up, get going again. We might diminish these problems, and good on you if you don’t have some of these vulnerabilities through pregnancy or young kids or elderly folks among us, but you know there’s there’s this notion of denial that’s been developed in sociology of three layers. One’s just literal denial that’s just like hand over your ears, don’t want to hear it. The second could be interpretive denial where we’re hearing the expertise of Zack, but you know I disagree because I read something else, and then there’s just implicatory denial, which is I think where a lot of us reside. Is that by implication, if we really want to face the tremendous challenges we’re facing around wildfire smoke, even if it does pass after a few days, it rains out or what have you, we must confront this, and we’re all trying to get through our day and dealing with other things, and so we may have this tendency to live in implicatory denial, just to, just to get, you know, just to keep going.

Sammy Roth: Another question here. Again, we’ve managed to go, you know, almost an hour here without talking that much about the Trump administration. With the federal government… which is incredible, and I’m grateful for that. But with the federal government deleting more climate-related data, what are panelists currently recommending? What are your recommendations for reliable sources for fire-related data? That is a great question. Zack, do you have any any thoughts there?

Zachary Labe: Yeah, I’ll kick us off. So I think I saw David put in the chat some resources from here from us at Climate Central. So what we like to do is we partner with media and journalists to sort of break down the science, provide accessible data, bring the data to your backyard, so for your community, your region, and translate the scientific science information. So there were some links put in the chat about our resources to wildfires and fire-related information. We have a toolkit where you can better understand the most up-to-date trends and what we’re seeing for temperature, for drought, for all these conditions related to fire weather. And so I encourage you to reach out to us, and we can track down some of the data that may exist. There’s also still an abundance of weather and climate data. There’s institutes all over the world, sort of trying to improve our monitoring through satellites, through weather stations. And so, if you’re looking for a specific data set, I encourage you to reach out scientists. We’re always happy to help point you in the right direction, or or even do some analysis for you to help sort of track down some of this information, because like we’ve been talking about long term records of like wildfire data or smoke in particular, and air quality measurements going back for decades, it’s really hard. You know, there’s a lot of data challenges both in the length of the record to really assess those trends in the data, as well as getting the type of fine data you need at like your local backyard to understand what’s going on. So, again, at least speaking for Climate Central, we’re always happy to help point you towards these resources in terms of the weather and climate data.

Kylie Mohr: I would just add add to that. This isn’t a data resource necessarily, but if any journalists aren’t familiar yet with the Wayback Machine, that is a website that has archived just millions, if not billions, of pages that may have been changed or taken down, et cetera. So if you go to that website and you know the link of a certain report that you’re looking for, or a government page that might have been altered or whitewashed or whatever. Oftentimes, that’s a great way to go back pre-election and find what you’re looking for. So, if you don’t already know about the Wayback Machine, you should.

Sammy Roth: Yes, I use the Wayback Machine constantly, even for not the federal government, stuff just sometimes disappears from the internet at this point. Great resource. Let’s try to get in one or two more questions here, and then we’ll start to wrap up. This is this is an interesting one, and see what you guys have to say. Can you talk about soil moisture levels and whether we can draw attribution to climate that way. This is seemingly a science question, so I think maybe Zach, any thoughts on soil moisture levels?

Zachary Labe: Yeah, I’ll have a first go at it. So, like everything we’ve been talking about, it’s nuanced. So, really, trends and changes in soil moisture is going to depend on where you’re talking about. So again, using the Western U.S. as an example, this is a region where we have seen declining soil moisture trends. So we can make these connections to wildfire conditions. A lot of times, it’s also looking at conditions that happen before the fire season. So thinking about the winter times, we were talking about how to tell you know wildfire stories throughout the year, and often what happens during the winter in terms of temperature, the snowpack in the higher elevations, how high or low that snowpack actually fell in the mountains can affect which areas of the forest dry out, and so it’s we can look at current soil moisture conditions like in the present. You can find data in real time to monitor areas right now in the U.S. like today, where conditions drier, wetter for soil moisture, and then also those long-term trends where we’re having drought that’s in like a long-term mega drought type that’ll also influence sort of the soil. So it’s it’s regionally dependent, but there’s a lot of different ways of framing it for the data, both like the current data and looking back in the antecedent conditions.

Sammy Roth: We also got a question from a journalist in Pennsylvania who says, “I’m writing about unhealthy air quality due to the wildfires. I’m curious if other states have enacted or proposing worker protections for outdoor workers or for kids at summer camps, for us having really unsafe air here is a newer threat.” I’m not sure if any of you are familiar with the specifics of what states are proposing, but I think it is just a good conversation topic. And wondering if any of you can you know weigh in at all or want to weigh in at all on just you know importance of outdoor air protections for you know folks who are spending time outside, or just stories that can be done there, because I mean that’s definitely been a topic in in California, and I just think that’s a valuable area for journalists to get into.

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, I was going to mention California. I think that might be the only state that’s really tried to do anything on that, but I could be wrong.

Sammy Roth: I don’t know if there are others.

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, you’d have to fact check us on that, but great story. 

Sammy Roth: Everyone, go ask their capitals.

Kylie Mohr: Yeah, good story idea. Whoever put that in the chat.

Sammy Roth: Yeah. Okay. I think we’ll we’ll start to wrap up here. The the one last question that I I want to ask you guys before we before we close it out, and I alluded to this earlier. I think most of the journalists watching this are probably environmental journalists who you know are following Covering Climate Now, or maybe reading my newsletter and you know heard about this. So I, you know, I think one of the big problems that we sort of discussed earlier is that people who are not you know folks who don’t have expertise in covering climate and the environment might not you know, have the expertise, or might not feel they have the comfort level to, you know, make the connection with climate, you know, even if, you know, even if they should be able to, or even if, you know, it’s not that hard to to figure it out. So I’m wondering what you all would say to the environmental journalists or environmental editors, to the extent that they exist in newsrooms can do to help their colleagues with this stuff. You know, if you want to be a resource in your newsroom and help your colleagues, you know, figure out how to make the the climate connection with wildfires. If that’s something you care about, you know, what what can you do? How can you be that resource? How can you help your newsrooms do better at this?

Kylie Mohr: I would just say share your sourcing. You know, like if if this is something that you cover frequently, then hopefully you have people like Zack in your role at X. You’ve talked to researchers before, even if you haven’t maybe interviewed them directly. Maybe you follow them on social media and you say, oh, I I always see this guy who’s a you know scientist here. I always see this woman who’s you know working on blah blah blah? Like let me go track this person down and connect you, right? Because at the end of the day, like journalism is you know speaking with people who know more than we do, and then you know helping translate that to a general audience. And so I would just encourage you know source sharing and you know use the relationships that you’re building with scientists, and then help help you know give people that on on a quick turnaround. That would be kind of my first and foremost suggestion. And maybe too, if you’re looking for something a bit more systemic, like make a resource sheet for your newsroom that has you know here are sources of data, here are sources who get back to you quickly and kind of have like a wildfire cheat sheet that you could, you know, give to general assignment reporters during the summer or during whatever your fire season is, so that that kind of reputable, solid information can be accessed on a tight deadline.

Sammy Roth: I love it, Max, Zack? Final words here.

Max Boykoff: But also, just say that if if you do have access to those resources and sources for stories, please have the confidence to go forward. You know, there are people in this world who will say you’ll start to bring something up that’s new and developing and complex, like climate change and wildfires, and they’ll say, “I don’t know anything about it.” Instead of saying that, understand that you have the confidence you’ve learned about this, and then be a partner to help connect the dots for those journalists within your newsroom and journalists within your community.

Zachary Labe: Last words for me is you know there was a question about data, and I really recommend supporting and reaching out to your local experts. Who, for the weather and climate space, there are state climate offices, there’s local national weather service offices, there’s regional climate centers. They are rich, full of expertise and data that understand these regional nuanced connections about fires, and they have long data records that can help put it in the perspective. How unusual is this event? So I really encourage reaching out to those resources for both the expertise and and open source data.

Sammy Roth: And I will just add: if you want to share this video of this webinar with your colleagues to help them out, it will be available on the Covering Climate Now YouTube channel, and I will also be sharing it at my newsletter, Climate Colored Goggles, which you can sign up for at climatecoloredgoggles.com. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Thank you to Zach and Kylie and Max for this great discussion and for CCN to organizing. This has been great.