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California is Toast
Lightning Strikes: Get Used to Catastrophic Wildfires and Worse
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted July 18, 2008.
In California there were 8,000 lightning strikes in one event, and that was months before fire season. There is more of that in store across the West.
Barely a week before the so-called freak lightning storms set fire to California, the NOAA, Tentinger's own agency, released an exhaustive report on extreme weather events specific to North America, explaining that there is an unequivocal trend upward for abnormally hot days and nights, severe droughts and lower precipitation, especially in the Western regions of the nation.
Mix all those variables together, and you have 8,000 lightning strikes coming out of nowhere to torch a cumulative land mass the size of Los Angeles, the largest city in California and the second-largest in the United States. Tentinger might be disinclined to worry, but he's growing more alone by the day in that confidence. And even he, once pressed, gives way.
"If we keep having continuously dry rainfall seasons and conditions," Tentinger admitted, "then it's going to be a problem. If they persist, you're going to see the type of events that we've seen this year continue."
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