The latest wave of deadly fires in California, which have claimed more than 50 lives and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, are “part of the world we live in right now,” according to Gina McCarthy of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In a November 13, 2018 interview on WGBH with Jim Braude, McCarthy, director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE) and former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said that climate change, which has spurred warmer temperatures and lack of rainfall in California, is largely to blame and will continue to exacerbate the fire threat in the future.
Although President Trump claimed that poor forest management caused the fires, McCarthy disagreed.
“We all know that California and much of the West is prone to these types of forest fires,” said McCarthy. “But their intensity, their frequency, the way they’re moving as quickly as they are, the way individuals and communities are moving into areas that used to be uninhabited—these are all real challenges that we have to think about and we have to plan for now.”
Watch the WGBH interview: Blaming The Victims Of The California Fires