Turning science into action against wildfires and climate change


We know we have many readers in the Los Angeles area, and our thoughts are with each of you. The following will not be much solace, but your pain has given us fresh determination to apply our reporting and writing skills to find and explore technologies and policy initiatives that could generate better results against wildfires. Some of those ideas, no doubt, will involve aerospace science and technology, and they will come from scientists, technologists, engineers and entrepreneurs in Southern California and elsewhere. If that’s you, we would love to hear from you: editors@aerospaceamerica.org.

The losses in LA should, once and for all, inspire a national-scale effort by researchers and government policymakers here in the United States to take on the fire threat and, and more broadly, climate change and its consequences.

Scientists and forward-thinking policymakers have long warned us that our carbon footprint will likely drive unnatural changes to our planet. The fires painfully demonstrate that those changes are upon us.

We as a society need to do a better job of turning science into preparedness. A 2019 paper, “Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California,” now looks especially prescient. Writing in the journal Earth’s Future, the authors warned of “increased atmospheric aridity caused by warming” and noted that “fuel drying is increasingly enhancing the potential for large fall wildfires.” January is not the fall, but it’s close enough. Many Californians in the years since have experienced exactly what the authors warned of.

What change did that paper and other warnings drive? Whatever was done was not enough. I scanned back over our coverage of aerospace-based wildfire technology. In fairness, American firefighting planes are no longer falling out of the skies, and a vibrant commercial industry of airborne services now exists. But wildfires still rule the night. Drones — the private ones — have been a collision menace in LA, not the help professionally operated ones could be at night and in the wind, when human pilots might not be able to go airborne due to unacceptable risks.

Overall, our current location on the climate change timeline reminds me of Winston Churchill’s “Locust Years” of 1934 and 1935. He chose that phrase because time that could have been spent preparing defenses against Germany “was fruitlessly eaten up,” according to America’s National Churchill Museum.

It’s time to accept that climate change is now a national-scale threat, not unlike terrorism, arms proliferation and nation-state aggression. The response to it should match.

Wildfires are one battle in this war. In the national security sphere, the Pentagon puts out a constant stream of requests for information to generate technology ideas, followed by requests for proposals to select and invest in the best of them. There does not appear to be a single entity coordinating and funding research and development across agencies and academia to meet the wildfire threat.

Perhaps that is a place to start.


About Ben Iannotta

Ben keeps the magazine and its news coverage on the cutting edge of journalism. He began working for the magazine in the 1990s as a freelance contributor and became editor-in-chief in 2013. He was editor of C4ISR Journal and has written for Air & Space Smithsonian, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, Reuters and Space News.

Turning science into action against wildfires and climate change