Warming-driven peatland fires are an amplifying climate feedback. Credit: NASA

News story via NASA

Forests and bog land in far eastern Russia have been burning since the beginning of June 2012. Contributing to the record fires have been the record temperatures of this past summer. This summer in Siberia has been one of hottest on record. The average temperature ranged around 93 degrees Fahrenheit and there doesn’t seem to be any break in the weather coming anytime soon.

The fires in eastern Russia have affected the districts of Krasnoyarsk, Tuva, Irkutsk, Kurgan, and the Republic of Khakassia. Especially hard hit is the city of Tomsk. According to official figures, over 24,000 acres of land had been burnt in Tomsk by early August. The city has been covered by heavy smog for weeks and the airport has been out of operation since the beginning of July.

On August 23rd, the Russian Information and News Agency (RIA Novosti) reported that “firefighters extinguished all six forest fires over the past 24 hours that remained raging in Russia’s Siberia this summer, the regional forestry department said in a statement on Thursday. There are no more registered fires in the region, but the emergencies situation still remain in force in three areas of the Tomsk region due to the high risk of new wildfires outbreak,” the statement added. However, it also reported that “more than 200,000 hectares [494.210 acres] of forest already burned down in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where fires are still raging, since the start of the summer.” On August 28, RIA Novosti reported that: “The majority of wildfires triggered by the summer heat wave in Russia have been put out, but 11 wildfires with a total area of 838 hectares [over 2000 acres] are still raging in Khabarovsk Territory.” These are the fires that still burn in the image taken today by the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite.

Of course wildfires are devastating to any area, but ecologically this is catastrophic for this region with many rare animals living in Siberia’s unique ecosystem.

So too the fires burning in Russia will have worldwide effects as the torched peat bogs whose layers consist of dead plant materials will end up releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the air accelerating the greenhouse effect and making the air nearly unbreathable. Record numbers of fires in the summer of 2010 drew attention to this damaging situation (see NY Times article cited below).

In the early 1900′s Soviet engineers drained swamps to supply peat for electrical power stations. It was eventually stopped in the 1950′s but the bogs were never reflooded. Unfortunately, that approach is currently causing some of the wildfire problems and air quality issues that Russia is dealing with today.

Officials and residents are hoping that the upcoming expected harvest rains will help extinguish the wildfires and bring a much needed natural remedy to the affected regions.

NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner with information from The New York Times and RIA Novosti (en.rian.ru)

Related Post:

• Stunning Peatlands Amplifying Feedback: Drying Wetlands and Intensifying Wildfires Boost Carbon Release Ninefold

by Michael Kodas, via On Earth

In a little over a decade, the largest mountain pine beetle outbreak on record (by a factor of 10) has killed more than 70,000 square miles of Rocky Mountain forests — an area the size of Washington State. From above, the infested pine trees seem color-coded: green is healthy, red is dead, and after three or four years, the dead red needles fall off, leaving behind a graveyard of bare gray bark — or, if you’re worried about wildfires, what amounts to a field of 100-foot-tall matchsticks.

Colorado, already facing the most destructive wildfire season in state history, has 3.3 million acres of beetle-killed forests to worry about. No one doubts that dead and dying trees are a potential problem, but fears that the beetle infestation will fuel larger firestorms might be premature (at least in the short term). Across the West, some 40 scientific studies have failed to produce a clear picture of how millions of beetle-killed trees will burn.

One recent paper by researches at the U.S. Forest Service and University of Idaho predicts that during the “red phase” — when trees are dead but still have rust-colored needles — severe crown fires may burn through the treetops with greater speed and intensity than they would in healthy green forests. A study last year by ecologists with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station showed that in beetle-infested forests, the red, dead needles ignite three times faster than their living counterparts, largely because they have 10 times less moisture and different chemistries than living, green needles.

The intensity of the crown fires in red, beetle-killed forests, the researchers predict, could also launch embers farther, thus spreading the fire faster over a greater territory. Another model shows that lower fuel moisture in the canopies of red and gray forests and dead trees that fell to the ground during and after the gray phase increased the intensity of ground fires, which allowed crown fires to erupt with less wind than they usually require. Other studies show that gray forests, in which the needles have fallen from the trees, are likely to slow down crown fires. Trees in those forests, however, have a great risk of “torching” — which means they burn individually with high, intense flames.

But other research contradicts the studies showing that beetle-killed forests are a cause for alarm.

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by Michael Kodas, via OnEarth

Last fall scientists and foresters from more than a dozen nations gathered for the world’s first conference on the growing threat of megafires. Considering that the American West has experienced record-breaking fire seasons over the past decade, the choice of venue for the conference was a bit surprising: northern Florida.

Living in Colorado and watching as massive fires bloom across the Rocky Mountains — sparked  by a combination of heat, drought, and poor decisions about forest management and housing development — it would be easy to think that the East Coast is relatively safe from smoke plumes and fireballs. Indeeed, during last year’s conference visit to Tall Timbers, a nonprofit fire research station in Tallahassee, one of the scientists in my group pulled out his phone and announced that a wildfire was threatening his home back in Nevada.

But as we learned at Tall Timbers, the humid hardwood forests of the East have their own history of fire problems, and just like out West, climate change and a century of fire suppression have primed them for danger.

Last spring, a thin snowpack, high winds, and drought — the same conditions that drove fires in the Rocky Mountains this year — also fueled fires from New England to Florida. This year, all 25 states east of the Rockies experienced their warmest recorded January-to-March periods in more than 110 years of record keeping. Many also experienced extreme drought. Last April on Long Island, wildfires threatened Brookhaven National Laboratory, destroyed three homes and nine businesses, and burned three firefighters. In Connecticut, a wildfire shut down an Amtrak line. And in New Jersey, fire spread through 1,000 acres of the state’s beloved Pine Barrens. In Virginia’s George Washington National Forest, more than 20,000 acres burned in early April — four times the previous record. Throughout the spring, much of Florida and Georgia were in extreme to exceptional drought — drier even than in 2007, when a record-setting drought brought on the Big Turnaround fire, the biggest in both states’ recorded histories.

The size of Eastern wildfires may not rival Western blazes — half a dozen of the active fires in the West this week were larger than 100,000 acres — but the East Coast is more densely populated, meaning that smaller fires can still threaten a great number of lives and property and require large resources to fight. “Even if the fires don’t look that spectacular, they can do a lot of damage,” says Kevin Robertson, the fire ecology program director at Tall Timbers.

This month authorities declared more than 1,000 counties in 26 states as natural disaster areas, in what has become the worst drought to strike the nation in decades. The conditions that have already contributed to massive wildfires across the West are bringing more fires to parts of the eastern U.S., including North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, according to the federal National Climatic Data Center.

The East, in fact, has a forgotten history of big burns. In New Brunswick, Canada, the Miramichi fire of October 1825 — one of the three largest ever recorded in North America — burned over three million acres, devastating the towns of Newcastle and Fredericton and killing 190 people. Hundreds more drowned in rivers where they took shelter with their livestock.  And on October 8, 1871 — the same day that the Great Chicago Fire exploded — a wildfire twice the size of the state of Rhode Island overran Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing between 1,200 and 2,400 people, marking the greatest loss of life to a wildfire in the nation’s history. Seventy years later, British and American militaries studied the dynamics of the Peshtigo fire to plan the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.

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I testified last Friday at a House hearing on the ever-growing crisis of bark beetles, drought, and wildfires. The full C-Span video is here.

My written testimony is here. I decided to practice what I preach in my forthcoming book and use the figures of speech to make my points in the oral testimony (which you can see here, with transcript).

Congressman Ed Markey, a man who understands the figures, especially metaphors, had a great chart on the explosion of players hitting more than 40 home runs during the steroid era. He and I talk about that chart in the clip below.

I also discussed the GOP strategy of dealing with our Western wild fires and droughts and bark beetles solely through thinning, while reject climate science and climate solutions. Apparently, the GOP missed the day in school when they read the Lorax (see “The Lorax Speaks For The Trees — Get Over It Conservatives“).

Here’s the video (and a partial transcript follows):

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UPDATE: What is below is what was prepared. I added a bio sentence on the fly upfront (in italics) and changed one word. This was my very first piece of testimony using the secrets of the most memorable and persuasive communicators in history that I detail in my forthcoming book.

Oral Testimony of Joseph J. Romm

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee. Thank you for inviting me to testify. I’m a physicist, former acting assistant secretary of energy, and climate expert who runs the blog ClimateProgress.

Four score and seven years ago our grandfathers and grandmothers were enjoying life in the roaring 20s.

Now imagine you are in Congress back then and imagine that the nation’s leading scientists are warning that human activity – years of bad land management practices – has left our topsoil vulnerable to the forces of the wind. And that the next time a major drought hits, much of our farmland will turn to dust. Dust in the wind.

YOU WOULD TAKE ACTION.

Over the past two decades, the nation’s leading scientists have issued stronger and stronger warnings that human activity – burning fossil fuels and deforestation – will lead to longer and stronger droughts that dry out topsoil and timber, creating the conditions ripe for multiple, multi-decade Dust Bowls and wildfires.

In fact, we’re already topping Dust Bowl temperatures in many places – and the Earth has warmed only about 1 degree Fahrenheit since the 1930s Dust Bowl. Yet we are poised to warm some 10 degree Fahrenheit this century if we stay on our current path of unrestricted carbon pollution emissions.

I repeat, several studies now project the world may warm 10 degree Fahrenheit this century if we don’t act. And that is the average warming of the globe. Much of our country would see far higher temperatures. The recent heat wave would be considered a pleasantly, cool summer.

Another study looked at mid-century warming of just 2 degrees Fahrenheit. It found that wildfire damage in many of your home states — Utah, Colorado, Idaho, South Dakota, Nevada and Washington – would double, triple, even quadruple from current levels.

Imagine how big the government would have to be to deal with rampant wildfires and with a Dust Bowl choking the bread basket of the world. A lot bigger government than today, for sure.

So of course this great deliberative body is debating various bills to avoid this catastrophe by slashing carbon pollution.

Except it isn’t. We are here discussing bills aimed at “fuels treatment” – a euphemism for cutting down trees and using controlled burns.

Ignoring carbon pollution and focusing instead solely on fuels treatment to address the epidemic of bark beetles, the epidemic of drought, the epidemic of wildfires is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Or, more precisely, it is like burning some of the deck chairs and removing some of the umbrellas on the Titanic. Same outcome, more time wasted.

As I explained in the journal Nature last year, what we are discussing here today is the single most important question facing the nation: Can we prevent the extreme drought and wildfires ravaging the country today from becoming the new normal?

But the real question — and I am addressing myself to the members of the majority now – is how you want to be remembered. Do you want to be remembered as a Herbert Hoover, who sat by and did nothing in the face of obvious calamity, or as Abraham Lincoln, who took every measure to save the Union?

Lincoln said at Gettysburg “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” That of course wasn’t true. But after testifying to Congress nearly a dozen times since 1995 (when I was principal deputy assistant secretary of energy), I am quite convinced that nobody remembers what we say here – and in the case of these bills, everyone will forget what you did here.

Are you Nevil Chamberlain — Or will you be Winston Churchill, who worked tirelessly to warn and prepare Britain for what was coming and told the House of Commons in 1936 “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”

The consequences are here, now, just as climate scientists predicted.

If we fail to take action, many scientists predict ruin for large parts of this country – ruin for large parts of your districts – ruin that lasts 50 generations.

Americans have fought for generations to defend government of the people, by the people, for the people. In the hour of crisis, we need that government to do its job. Now is that hour.

Thank you

The House Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands is having a hearing Friday on 3 bills responding to the growing crisis of bark beetles, drought, and wildfires.

The hearing is at 9 a.m. Details are here and below the jump. You will be able to watch it here.

I will live tweet the first panel (the Member panel) here.

Supposedly everyone else will be on one big panel. I have no idea how long  the Member panel will run. I’d guess I’ll be speaking by 10:30, but that can easily be off by 30 minutes or more.

In case anyone doesn’t know what I think about these subjects, you can read:

• My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security
• Western Wildfires Getting Worse In A Warming World
• We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming

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by Michael Kodas, via OnEarth

Praying for rain is common when your state is beset by record-setting blazes, but as always, be careful what you wish for. Heavy downpours create their own hazards. The irony was highlighted for me two weeks ago when the city of Colorado Springs found itself simultaneously under a “red flag” fire warning and a flash flood warning.

The good news is that monsoon rains in Colorado over the last week helped firefighters bring an end to the High Park Fire in the foothills above Fort Collins, as well as Colorado Springs’s Waldo Canyon fire, which was declared 100 percent contained Tuesday night. Between them, the two most destructive wildfires in Colorado history burned nearly 600 homes, so no one was sad to see them quenched.

But before the firefighters had even finished scratching their firelines around the blazes, residents were facing new threats — including floods fed by runoff from the burnt land, along with mudslides, debris flows, and contaminated water supplies, all a result of the heavy downpours that fell over the weekend.

Like wildfires, powerful afternoon thunderstorms are a regular part of Colorado’s summer. (The National Weather Service reported that one area between Denver and Colorado Springs received 2.5 inches of rain in an hour last Friday afternoon.) But when fires and floods mix, bad things happen: a mudslide from the High Park burn zone covered the highway with ash, branches, and black mud up to a foot deep; volunteers filled thousands of sandbags to protect their neighbors’ homes and used snowplows to clear ash and mud; and the Cache la Poudre River turned as black and turbid as India ink when inundated with the ash and cinders from fire runoff.

Post-wildfire debris flows can destroy houses, bury or wash out roads, contaminate reservoirs, block drainages and water pipes, and threaten lives. Some flows are strong enough to carry boulders, automobiles, and parts of houses. Debris flows that followed Southern California wildfires in 2003 killed 16 people on Christmas Day that year. In 1994, after the South Canyon fire killed 14 firefighters near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, debris flows crossed Interstate 70, overrunning Jersey barriers, burying 30 cars, and pushing some of them into the Colorado River. Miraculously, there were no fatalities.

But the threat from the combination of fire and water can last for years, or decades. Initially the grasses, shrubs, and small trees that would hold soil in place are burned away. Larger trees that are killed by fire leave their roots in the ground, and as those decay or give way during the coming years, they perpetuate the risk of debris flows. Flows from 2002’s Hayman fire, Colorado’s largest on record, destroyed homes and washed out a highway four years after the fire.

But the longest-term threat in Colorado is to the water itself.

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