A bit strange this comes via a story from the UK’s Telegraph, but an important, science-based message from someone in the front lines nonetheless:
Thom Porter, staff chief at Cal Fire believes climate change is in a large part responsible for the increase in fires. “As a firefighter I’m a student of the weather and I’ve noticed that there is a change that has occurred over the last several years.”These patterns are not what I’ve grown up with. They are also not what I’ve seen in the historical record. We are starting to see more monsoonal style weather which is causing more dry lightening which ignite fires”
For completeness’s sake, I’ll include some key links and studies for those interested in the underlying science of the connection between human-caused global warming and wildfires that CP readers have seen many times:
Back in 2004, researchers at the U.S. Forest Services Pacific Wildland Fire Lab looked at past fires in the West to create a statistical model of how future climate change may affect wildfires. Their paper, “Climatic Change, Wildfire, and Conservation,” published in Conservation Biology, found that by century’s end, states like Montana, New Mexico, Washington, Utah, and Wyoming could see burn areas increase five times.
In 2006 Science magazine published a major article analyzing whether the recent soaring wildfire trend was due to a change in forest management practices or to climate change. The study, led by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, concluded:
Robust statistical associations between wildfire and hydroclimate in western forests indicate that increased wildfire activity over recent decades reflects sub-regional responses to changes in climate. Historical wildfire observations exhibit an abrupt transition in the mid-1980s from a regime of infrequent large wildfires of short (average of 1 week) duration to one with much more frequent and longer burning (5 weeks) fires. This transition was marked by a shift toward unusually warm springs, longer summer dry seasons, drier vegetation (which provoked more and longer burning large wildfires), and longer fire seasons. Reduced winter precipitation and an early spring snowmelt played a role in this shift.
That 2006 study noted global warming (from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide) will further accelerate all of these trends during this century. Worse still, the increased wildfires will themselves release huge amounts of carbon dioxide, which will serve as a vicious circle, accelerating the very global warming that is helping to cause more wildfires.
A July 2009 study, “Impacts of climate change from 2000 to 2050 on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” finds a staggering increase in “wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario:
We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day “¦ with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.
The future could look like this:
“This graph shows the percentage increase in area burned by wildfires, from the present-day to the 2050s, as calculated by the model of Spracklen et al. [2009] for the May-October fire season. The model follows a scenario of moderately increasing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and leads to average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050. Warmer temperatures can dry out underbrush, leading to more serious conflagrations in the future climate.”
It’s most certainly not too late to avoid this hellish future.
Related Posts:
- Global warming and the California wildfires
- Global warming and the California wildfires “” Update
- Memo to Baucus: Your state’s trees are being ravaged by warming-driven pests now and Montana faces 175% to 400% increase in wildfire burn area
Previous in TP Climate Progress
It’s difficult to argue that a warming climate will result in more and hotter wildfires, but don’t overlook timber “management” practices:(translation: clearcut, burn or remove slash, douse with herbicides, replant with merchantable softwoods, bypassing nitrogen fixing pioneer species such as tanoak and madrone). This has made remaining degraded forests far more vulnerable to both pests (as in BC) and hot fires.
Historically, fires that swept through old growth forests left many surviving trees, or we wouldn’t have had millions of acres of centuries old trees in the West- as we did until the timber and homebuilding industries liquidated 90% of them. There is much data showing how old growth, or even baby old growth, results in much cooler microclimates and increased ability to survive fire.
The other issue is that Dr. Hansen from UC Davis told me recently that the Western forests are even now in a fire deficit, due to fire suppression. Fire, including hot ones, is part of the ecological cycle in the West. Many species show up only after fires, and are key to restoring soil fertility. This includes pest eating birds as well as nitrogen fixing decidous species. Fire suppression in the West has led to a trap, causing much hotter fires and little resistance to them, due to the sparse and degraded characteristics of our Western forests.
This has enormous implications for climate, and our forests’ ability to sequester CO2. The difference between logging and no logging scenarios in our carbon budget are on the order of 400 million tons of annual CO2 emissions, based on my own research last year.
Tough to avoid a hellish future if we take no steps in that direction. The delay in getting an international agreement suggests that we will have to do more on the back end, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because we will fail to do the easy part of cutting our emissions promptly. There are several ways to do that but I’ve begun to settle on a new one because it has an aesthetic appeal. My though is to illuminate ocean bed that would otherwise be too deep to grow reef building coral so that such fast growing coral can prosper in an environment with a stable temperature. This provides sequestration that is permanent and may help to draw down the threat of acidification in the oceans. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2009/11/davy-jones.html
Not so surprising that this is in a British paper. There seems to be a lot that gets reported there and not here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/world-on-course-for-catastrophic-6deg-rise-reveal-scientists-1822396.html
I seem to recall that sometime in the 70′s – during the age of nuclear proliferation – that one national firefighters organization stepped forward with the message “Don’t call us for the nuclear firestorm” … Essentially they issued a very gutsy statement that conventional firefighting would be pretty much worthless in a nuclear war. … Very responsible of them… and good to hear this one firefighter make a statement on global warming. ..
But I have to wonder if larger organizations are silent for some reason. … Not much appears on http://www.iaff.org/Politics/index.asp
Do they expect there will be no increase in fires? .. Or do they want to avoid controversy? … I am sure they are fully aware of the Australia fires and the increasing rate in both California and Alaska.