by Peter Mertz
DENVER, the United States, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- While American eyes focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and the closely contested presidential election in 2020, history was also made by the wildfires that ravaged America's West on an unprecedented scale.
In 2020, an astonishing 52,113 fires burned close to 9 million acres (about 36,400 square kilometers) across the nation, and claimed 53 lives and 6,500 structures, according to the latest data released by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), an Idaho-based federal agency in charge of co-ordination of wildland firefighting resources in the United States.
It was a record-setting year for devastation in numerable categories, and overall acreage almost doubled the land burned in 2019.
But no state was slammed harder than California. The Golden State which suffered deadest "Camp Fire" in 2018, saw 86 deaths, 18,804 buildings torched and 16.65 billion U.S. dollars in damage by 8,527 wildfires 24 months earlier, however, none imagined, that in 2020, the destruction would be even worse.
America's most populous state, with close to 40 million people, saw 9,279 fires burn 4.2 million acres (about 17,000 square kilometers) this year - the most in history - caused by five of the six biggest wildfires ever recorded. In 2018, a total of 1,975,086 acres (about 7,992 square kilometers) of land were burned down by wildfires.
Some 10,488 structures were damaged or destroyed and at least 31 people died in 2020, according to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).
Smoke from these infernos, teaming with Colorado's record blazes, drifted some 5,000 miles (8,045 kilometers) across the globe into skies over Europe, the Washington post reported in September.
In Colorado, the three biggest wildfires in state history occurred in 2020, and were only stopped by early snow in the Rocky Mountains.
But before snows fell last month, some 700,000 acres (about 2,832 square kilometers) in the Centennial State had been torched in 2020, NBC News reported.
The Colorado fires were so "intense, they defied logic as they continued to burn while surrounded by snow," Denver Channel-7 reported.
And in Oregon, fires in 2020 burned approximately 1 million acres (4,046.9 square kilometers), more than double the 10-year average, resulting in 11 deaths and more than 2,200 homes destroyed, according to the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.
Across America's West in 2020, between Colorado and California - almost half of the continental United States - historic drought conditions and global warming triggered more than 10,000 wildfires and caused damage that is still being calculated by fire officials.
In 2020, American scientists banded together, like never before, to hammer social media and the Internet with their long-standing message that climate change and global warming are drivers behind the record infernos.
Not known for their public exposure and statements, 2020 saw environmental scientists, criticized and ridiculed by President Donald Trump, respond by publishing numerous studies supporting scientific evidence and refuting the outgoing president's unfounded claims that climate change is a "hoax."
In 2020, National Geographic added to the scientific community's outrage against the president's position, joining Carbon Brief, Inside Climate News, and even the government-run National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
"Climate change has inexorably stacked the deck in favor of bigger and more intense fires across the American west over the past few decades," National Geographic said last month.
"2019 saw the third worst fire in Amazon history and intense blazes in Indonesia, Siberia, and North America," Carbon Brief reported in July.
"Globally, Climate change is driving an increase in weather conditions that can cause wildfires," Carbon Brief added.
"Climate change is affecting wildfires in two main ways. The first is an increase in the risk or likelihood of wildfire. The second is longer wildfire seasons - and this is mostly coming from warmer temperatures," Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a Canadian climate researcher, said last month.
According to CalFire earlier this year, the wildfire season has been extended almost three months since the 1970s.
After being elected in 2016, Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signed in 2016, "a legally binding international treaty on climate change," that had been signed by 196 nations across the world.
Trump's position was consistent with his advocating fossil burning and exploration, and his denial of climate change, media pundits said.
He also continuously blamed "bad forest management" as causing the historic blazes in California and Colorado, both run by Democratic governors.
Scott McLean, deputy chief of Cal Fire, was quoted by Mother Jones news website in an article as saying that it was changing global climate leading to more severe and destructive fires in the state, and politicians' attempts to extract simple political wins from the complex problems was meaningless to resolve those real problems. Enditem
