Gongol.com Archives: February 2025
February 28, 2025
The first Red Flag Warnings were issued by the National Weather Service in the 1960s. The warnings advise people that temperatures, winds, and relative humidity conditions are primed for wildfires. The warnings are fairly commonplace in some places, like California, which had at least 84 such warnings in 2024. ■ Other locations are less wildfire-prone. Central Iowa is just such a location. The National Weather Service office in Des Moines seems to have issued its first of the warnings in 2012, when there were four all year. A few were issued each year after that, rising to eight in 2015. The warnings lulled for a few years, then rose again in 2021, with five. ■ In 2024, the Des Moines office issued ten. And with 2025 barely underway, most of Iowa spent the day under a red flag -- in February, when there ought usually to be snow on the ground. ■ Any given year can be an aberration. And warnings are still human matters, so they are subject to some discretion. But the pattern has mostly pointed in an upwards direction, and that's indicative of chronically higher temperatures and lower relative humidity. Perhaps not by much, but by enough to count, especially in the aggregate. ■ It's a trend worth monitoring, to see whether it continues or abates. Odds seem pretty good that they will continue. That should give the relevant policy-makers reasons for caution about the road ahead. Chronically hotter, drier conditions would change the look of a lot of things -- and no matter what activists might try to say on either side of the issue, facts are facts. Mother Nature seems to be having an attitude problem.
