The scientific literature paints a hellish future if we don’t quickly reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends (see “Climate change expected to sharply increase Western wildfire burn area — as much as 175% by the 2050s”). Even the watered down, consensus-based 2007 IPCC report acknowledged the danger:
A warming climate encourages wildfires through a longer summer period that dries fuels, promoting easier ignition and faster spread. Westerling et al. (2006 — see here) found that, in the last three decades, the wildfire season in the western U.S. has increased by 78 days, and burn durations of fires >1000 ha have increased from 7.5 to 37.1 days, in response to a spring-summer warming of 0.87°C. Earlier spring snowmelt has led to longer growing seasons and drought, especially at higher elevations, where the increase in wildfire activity has been greatest. In the south-western U.S., fire activity is correlated with ENSO positive phases, and higher Palmer Drought Severity Indices….
Insects and diseases are a natural part of ecosystems. In forests, periodic insect epidemics kill trees over large regions, providing dead, desiccated fuels for large wildfires. These epidemics are related to aspects of insect life cycles that are climate sensitive.
Now brutal heat and drought are fueling massive California wildfires once again (see, for instance, the BBC piece “Heat fuelling California wildfire”). We can’t expect much from the status quo media (see “CNN, ABC, WashPost, and AP blow Australian wildfire, drought, heat-wave story”). So here is CAP’s Tom Kenworthy explaining ”What a 1-Degree Temperature Increase Means for Wildfires”—and I’ll end with some comments on this positive or amplifying carbon-cycle feedback:
To the average person a 1-degree rise in average spring and summer temperatures may not seem like much. But for residents of the western United States—including California, which is fighting at least eight fires right now—it could mean a staggering increase in the extent and cost of fires according to a recent study.
In their report, researchers at Headwaters Economics, an independent nonprofit research group in Bozeman, Mont., predict that climate change and the accelerating movement of western residents to areas near or in undeveloped forests will likely prove to be a devastating combination. That 1-degree increase in spring and summer temperatures, they conclude, will increase the area burned by seasonal fires in Montana by more than 300 percent and more than double the cost of protecting homes threatened by fire.
Though the Headwaters paper focuses on Montana, using data from 18 large fires in the state during 2006 and 2007, it has implications for fire-prone areas throughout the Rocky Mountain West. And it builds on a growing body of evidence that inaction on climate change will cost the western United States dearly.
Earlier this summer, for example, Harvard University scientists published a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research predicting that areas burned by wildfires in the West could increase by 50 percent by 2050, with even larger increases of 75 percent to 175 percent in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain West. Those increases could have “large impacts on human health” because of the added smoke and particulates released into the air, the study said.
Federal and state agencies responsible for fighting western wildfires, particularly the United States Forest Service, are already struggling to cope with the rapidly increasing costs of protecting lives and property. Since 2000, wildland fires in the United States have burned an average of more than 7 million acres a year, about double the average acreage for the previous four decades.
Federal firefighting costs have also risen dramatically, according to the Government Accountability Office, averaging $2.9 billion per year from fiscal 2001-2005 compared to $1.1 billion in the previous five-year period.
The Headwaters study predicts that state wildland firefighting costs in Montana will double to quadruple by 2025.
The increasing popularity of building homes in or near forested areas, known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, is a major factor in the escalating costs of fire suppression. A 2006 report by the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General found that “the majority of [Forest Service] large fire suppression costs are directly linked to protecting private property in the WUI,” with Forest Service managers estimating between 50 and 95 percent of large fire costs spent on that purpose alone. Though federal agencies shoulder the major financial burden for protecting those homes, development decisions in wild areas are made by local and state officials.
“While fire-prone lands are being developed, the climate is warming, leading to more large fires,” write the authors of the Headwaters Economics report, which notes that with just 14 percent of the wildland urban interface developed in the West, the cost of protecting those areas will increase significantly. “More development in these sensitive areas would lead to more wildfire suppression costs, even in the absence of climate change. Climate change will only exacerbate this effect.”
Climate change and its impacts on temperature, drought, and snowpack runoff will affect fires as well as many other aspects of life in the West.
Climate models predict that global warming will significantly reduce snow runoff in the West, the region’s major source of water. A study published in April by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography estimated that the Colorado River, the lifeline for 27 million people in the Southwest, will not be able to produce its allocated water supply 60 percent to 90 percent of the time by mid-century. That would have major impacts on food production, recreation, and development in the fastest-growing region in the nation. It will also mean forests will dry out sooner, with a likely increase in fire activity.
And in recent years, a widespread and so far unchecked epidemic of mountain pine beetles that has killed millions of acres of trees from Colorado north into Canada has laid the foundation for a potentially large increase in catastrophic fires. Climate change has played a role in that outbreak, too, as warmer winters spare the beetles from low temperatures that would normally kill them off, and drought stresses trees.
In the western United States, mountain pine beetles have killed some 6.5 million acres of forest, according to the Associated Press. As large as that path of destruction is, it’s dwarfed by the 35 million acres killed in British Columbia, which has experienced a rash of forest fires this summer that as of early this month had burned more than 155,000 acres. In the United States to date about 5.2 million acres—an area larger than Massachusetts—have burned this year.
Destruction of trees by the mountain pine beetle, combined with climate change and fire, makes for a dangerous feedback loop. Dead forests sequester less carbon dioxide. Burning forests release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. More carbon dioxide adds to climate change, which raises temperatures, stresses forests, and makes more and bigger fires more likely.
It’s a frightening prospect, as British Columbia’s Forests Minister Pat Bell told an International Energy Agency conference last week. “I am not a doomsayer,” said Bell. “I am not one who wants to say we are beyond the tipping point. But I am afraid that we are getting close to that.”
The final reason to worry about the climate-wildfire connection is that wildfires are a classic amplifying feedback, since burning forests release carbon dioxide that accelerates global warming. As the 2006 Science article, “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity” (subs. req’d), concludes soberly:
… virtually all climate-model projections indicate that warmer springs and summers will occur over the region in coming decades. These trends will reinforce the tendency toward early spring snowmelt and longer fire seasons. This will accentuate conditions favorable to the occurrence of large wildfires, amplifying the vulnerability the region has experienced since the mid-1980s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s consensus range of 1.5° to 5.8°C projected global surface temperature warming by the end of the 21st century is considerably larger than the recent warming of less than 0.9°C observed in spring and summer during recent decades over the western region.
If the average length and intensity of summer drought increases in the Northern Rockies and mountains elsewhere in the western United States, an increased frequency of large wildfires will lead to changes in forest composition and reduced tree densities, thus affecting carbon pools. Current estimates indicate that western U.S. forests are responsible for 20 to 40% of total U.S. carbon sequestration. If wildfire trends continue, at least initially, this biomass burning will result in carbon release, suggesting that the forests of the western United States may become a source of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than a sink, even under a relatively modest temperature-increase scenario. Moreover, a recent study has shown that warmer, longer growing seasons lead to reduced CO2 uptake in high-elevation forests, particularly during droughts. Hence, the projected regional warming and consequent increase in wildfire activity in the western United States is likely to magnify the threats to human communities and ecosystems, and substantially increase the management challenges in restoring forests and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
We are simply running out of time to stop all of the carbon-cycle feedbacks from intensifying and to stop these devastating, record-breaking wildfires from becoming the normal climate.
Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)
Comments
View as Flat
newnoah Posted 6:23 pm
01 Sep 2009
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lasmog Posted 7:12 pm
01 Sep 2009
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kkloor Posted 7:12 pm
01 Sep 2009
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Craig Allen Posted 7:42 pm
01 Sep 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 10:46 pm
01 Sep 2009
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emil300 Posted 10:59 pm
01 Sep 2009
of the environment. Wildfires are a natural part of southern
California's ecosystem and the chaparral native to the state relies on
fire to germinate it's seeds. The hills have been burning long before
man ever settled in California.
The above is way, way wrong. Fire is VERY natural and has occured LONG
before man arrived. Fire would roam California for months at a time -
completely natural. The reason fire is so intense is because man as
continued to put fires out as soon a possible. This would help build up
fuel at an alarming rate. It's just a matter of time before this burns.
It's like a huge bomb! Add to that more and more houses being built in
areas that saw fire on a routine basis and you get a disaster.
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Tyler Durden Posted 1:14 am
02 Sep 2009
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foodprovider Posted 11:59 am
03 Sep 2009
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RaptureForums Posted 11:06 pm
01 Sep 2009
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Tyler Durden Posted 1:10 am
02 Sep 2009
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kkloor Posted 6:19 am
02 Sep 2009
The point I'm trying to make is that Joe Romm is exploiting the wildfires (which are largely the result of a fire-prone landscape, bad fire policy and human settlement) to advance his global warming narrative. I say this is irresponsible because it "misdirects" attention from the real causes, to paraphrase Steve Pyne. Those causes truly need to be better understood and addressed.
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dcashdan Posted 3:27 pm
02 Sep 2009
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phasthutch Posted 7:59 pm
02 Sep 2009
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megaloptera Posted 1:34 pm
05 Sep 2009
Check out http://www.nobiomassburning.org and http://www.massenvironmentalenergy.org
Or join our Tour:
GRASSROOTS GROUP TOURS TO DEFEAT CLIMATE BILL * Climate SOS Tours to "Kill The Bill" and push tougher laws * "Worse Than Nothing is Not Good Enough"
Climate SOS, a grassroots network of environmentalists, scientists, and social justice activists, is launching a nationwide car-free tour to defeat the climate bill now being considered in the Senate and to demand that any new legislation be grounded in science instead of politics.
The Climate SOS Heartland Tour will feature meetings with senate staffers in North Dakota, Indiana, Arkansas, and Ohio. Climate SOS team members Duff Badgley of Seattle, Dr. Bill Sammons of Massachusetts, and Susan Laing, a photojournalist are traveling by bus and train, and will touch down in Bismarck on September 8, in Indianapolis (September 10-11), Little Rock (September 14-15), and Cleveland (September 17-18).
The team’s message? "Kill the Bill - Worse Than Nothing is Not Good Enough!"
Climate scientist Dr. James Hansen has personally endorsed the Climate SOS campaign. According to Hansen, if the senate climate bill is based upon the house-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), it will be "worse for the environment than doing nothing." Climate SOS maintains that cap-and-trade will be ineffective in forestalling climate change, and supports EPA authority over carbon dioxide emissions.
Climate SOS opposes the use of carbon offsets and believes that polluting coal plants should be phased out quickly. Climate SOS asserts that incineration technologies must not be categorized as “renewable” and targets loopholes in the bill that allow unlimited carbon dioxide emissions from biomass and trash burners. Climate SOS holds that social justice concerns must be central to any climate legislation, and maintains that the federal climate bill currently under consideration would:
-Prevent the U.S. from making its fair share of greenhouse gas reductions
necessary to forge an effective global strategy on climate stabilization and to avert catastrophic climate change.
-Lock the United States into a complex cap-and-trade scheme that benefits fossil fuel utilities, Wall Street, and agribusiness. Cap and trade will be prone to Enron-style market manipulations, while doing nothing to save the climate. • Use public money to subsidize the most polluting industries, drawing much needed financing away from real climate solutions.
- Add more polluting smokestacks, especially in backyards of the poor, people of color, and indigenous communities across the U.S., by grandfathering dirty old coal plants, permitting numerous new ones, and subsidizing incinerators as a form of renewable energy
- Trigger rainforest destruction in Africa, the Amazon, and Southeast Asia through its failure to incorporate indirect land use change provisions in the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) for biofuels. Climate SOS - http://www.ClimateSOS.org No dirty climate bill, no false solutions! email : (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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Lezlie Posted 5:41 am
09 Sep 2009
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T Posted 9:21 am
09 Sep 2009
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Lezlie Posted 10:12 am
09 Sep 2009
killed microbes and now soils aren't accumulating humus and thus carbon is
insanely idiotic. These chemicals likely have affects on microbes (i.e.,
fungi and bacteria) but I have seen no study that backs what you claim. All
one needs to do is look at any thesis on biogeochemistry to see that carbon
is still being cycled through the forest, but perhapds at altered rates than
previously found in non-human distrubed forests"You contradict yourself completely, have you ever wondered why the two forests are different? Yes carbon is being recycled through the forest in burning. Now an occassional fire is not a bad thing but what you are experiencing say in California is a call for you to wake up & see the whole picture. Few ever do. As for no real studies well they are there real data from real scientists in this area. I will provide them for you if you are really interested. To believe what another has written in a thesis again does you no favours for who is to say they are correct? Proof is in the pudding & I have made many, one learns one learns more, sometimes you have to start from scratch as the pudding is no good.I speak from experience & I am also a farmer, I have gone into land that is totally denuded in topsoil & humus both in forest areas & grazing areas holding no moisture. With the right practices which I use & the biodynamic preparations which reinstates the right microbial life one can turn the non existant top soil & non existant humus into rich humus soil & thus healthy environments with no over infestation of pests. Every symptom of pests is an indication of an imbalance. All serious imbalances such as these fires today are direct cause to what I wrote in my previous post if you can see the whole picture & not just a symptom. You can never cure a wound by merely treating the symptom, you have to get to the real cause.With pests one has to ask why what is the imbalance & then rectify it. No healthy plant like any healthy human can even carry pests or diseases.What I really find with all this so called education is this, most do not question if what they are being taught is in fact the truth, second they have forgotten how to think or have never been shown how to think, third they never really see the hidden principles behind anything, they really do not understand nature at all, & it is not your fault. You are bombarded my misinformation at every turn all with agendas behind it. That is why it is so good to have a long historical perspective. If you have that you can then tell if indeed a spade is a spade. For you to fail to see the delicate interactions of life requires real observation not what you have been told or studied or read out of a book. But few can see these days they are so clouded by everything they have filled you with. Your strong tone suggests that you feel somewhat threaten by this & that is good, it is never comfortable to break ones bubble of illusion, & truth is rather more strange then fiction. Plus the more one knows the less one knows & to want to know needs you to question your premise but please try to be logical. If you know so much then why the fires & why the infestation of the pests?If you are serious of knowing more I am willing to teach you. With real things you can do that are practical & perhaps you can join he others rectifying problems in a real way on this rather abused planet.
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splashy Posted 10:27 am
09 Sep 2009
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Lezlie Posted 10:35 am
09 Sep 2009
killed microbes and now soils aren't accumulating humus and thus carbon is
insanely idiotic. These chemicals likely have affects on microbes (i.e.,
fungi and bacteria) but I have seen no study that backs what you claim. All
one needs to do is look at any thesis on biogeochemistry to see that carbon
is still being cycled through the forest, but perhapds at altered rates than
previously found in non-human distrubed forests"You contradict yourself completely, have you ever wondered why the two forests are different? Yes carbon is being recycled through the forest in burning. Now an occassional fire is not a bad thing but what you are experiencing say in California is a call for you to wake up & see the whole picture. Few ever do. As for no real studies well they are there real data from real scientists in this area. I will provide them for you if you are really interested. To believe what another has written in a thesis again does you no favours for who is to say they are correct? Proof is in the pudding & I have made, one learns one learns more, sometimes you have to start from scratch as the pudding is no good. Sometimes the simplest things the things staring you in the face are what you are missing.I speak from experience & I am also a farmer, I have gone into land that is totally denuded in topsoil & humus both in forest areas & grazing areas holding no moisture with infestations of various pests. With the right practices which I use & the biodynamic preparations which reinstates the right microbial life one can turn the non existant top soil & non existant humus into rich humus soil & thus healthy environments with no over infestation of pests. Every symptom of pests is an indication of an imbalance. All serious imbalances such as these pests & fires today are direct cause to what I wrote in my previous post if you can see the whole picture & not just a symptom. You can never cure a wound by merely treating the symptom, you have to get to the real cause.With pests one has to ask why what is the imbalance & then rectify it. No healthy plant like any healthy human can even carry pests or diseases.What I really find with all this so called "education" is this, most do not question if what they are being taught is in fact the truth, second they have forgotten how to think or have never been shown how to think, third they never really see the hidden principles behind anything, they really do not understand nature at all, & it is not your fault. You are bombarded my misinformation at every turn all with agendas behind it. That is why it is so good to have a long historical perspective. Also one theory or so called truth is then found to be incorrect, to be closed minded with never lead to any real breakthroughs but before a breakthrough you must have the right premise. If you have that you can then tell if indeed a spade is a spade. For you to fail to see the delicate interactions of life requires real observation not what you have been told or studied or read out of a book. But few can see these days they are so clouded by everything they have filled you with. Your strong tone suggests that you feel somewhat threaten by this & that is good, it is never comfortable to break ones bubble of illusion, & truth is rather more strange then fiction. Plus the more one knows the less one knows & to want to know needs you to question your premise but please try to be logical. If you know so much then why the fires & why the infestation of the pests? CO2's is not the cause it is yet another symtom, & in real reality they are not at the height they say they are it is just a misdirection, to stop you from seeing what is really causing these problems.So all I ask is please question more look at things from many different angles & I hope I can at least provide a prod.If you are serious of knowing more I am willing to teach you. With real things you can do that are practical & perhaps you can join the others rectifying problems in a real way on this rather abused planet. If you want other research & data I can provide it I am old enough now not to shoot from the hip & old enough to always keep an open mind & test new ideas first through thinking as not all ideas are to be tested out of the playground, which is why we have these problems.To end I have a little saying. "Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds" That is why God gave you seeds.
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T Posted 12:59 pm
09 Sep 2009
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