‘Those fires might rev up’: Cliff Mass warns of rising winds stoking Spokane Complex Fires

As a series of Spokane Complex Fires continues to burn through roughly a quarter million acres of land, at least 65,000 people have been evacuated, and more than 700 homes have been destroyed.

Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, set the scene for how and when the wildfire smoke will disperse from western Washington, and why that might be detrimental to the fire containment progress on the eastern side of the state.

“In the west, it should get much better very quickly,” Mass said on “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “[By Friday] most of the west will be free of all smoke. It’s already starting to happen. You wake up [Friday], there’ll be blue skies in much of western Washington, so that’s good. The winds are going to come out of the west and blow it away. The problem is the east side.

“The problem is the winds will pick up from the west, and that’s a problem because the winds have been relatively light, so the fires haven’t grown very much, like the fire near Lake Chelan,” Mass continued. “The winds will pick up substantially [on Friday] and Saturday, especially later in the day, and so those fires might rev up. That’s the issue.”

Mass pushes back hard on claims tying the fires to climate change

Curley highlighted a recent article from The Seattle Times, which pinned poor winter snowpack, warm spring, and a hot, dry summer that pushed Washington into a dangerous fire period earlier than expected. Mass shut down those claims, explaining the real driving factor behind the fire’s inception and why global warming also cannot be to blame.

“It’s nonsense, and it’s not supported by observations of the science,” Mass said. “There’s certain components of this last fire event; No. 1 was lightning. It turns out this was one of the greatest lightning events in the history of our region. We had this massive lightning occurrence that started these fires. By the way, is lightning increasing due to global warming? There have been claims of that, but the facts show it’s not.

“We have the data now to show that lightning is not increasing,” Mass continued. “The lightning and these crazy people starting fires has nothing to do with climate change. Winds were very important, and there is no indication that the winds descending into eastern Washington will increase. Finally, it’s the fuels. What’s the moisture level of fuels? It turns out that they were near normal at the time the fires started. So every claim that this has to do with global warming fails if you look at the real data.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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