by Tom Kenworthy

The vicious 2012 wildfire season now unfolding in the interior West is hardly a surprise. Much of the region has been in a drought for more than a decade. This winter’s snowpack was sparse, particularly in Colorado, and it melted and ran off early. Temperatures have been high, and humidity has been low—making fuels from grasses to trees very dry and flammable.

All of that means conditions ripe for fires, which have come with a vengeance. New Mexico has had its biggest fire ever, and Colorado has seen the most destructive fires in its history, with the Waldo Canyon Fire near Colorado Springs and the High Park Fire near Fort Collins destroying more than 600 homes combined. Even as firefighters have brought the big Colorado fires near containment, other large blazes have broken out in Wyoming, Utah, and Montana.

Yes, it’s looking like a big fire year. And yes, this is part of the new normal. It’s pretty much exactly what climate experts have been predicting and what the data have been telegraphing for some time. While there are various proposals on the table to deal with increasingly destructive wildfires, they are likely to continue and become worse unless we tackle climate change.

More severe wildfires, right on schedule

Numerous studies in recent years have predicted that higher temperatures and drought conditions brought on by climate change will accelerate wildland fire activity in the West.

In 2004 U.S. Forest Service researchers studying past fires in the West constructed a model that predicted as much as a fivefold increase in burned areas by the end of the century.

Two years later a Scripps Institute of Oceanography study looked at the relatively recent spike in wildfire activity and determined it was due to changes in climate rather than forest management practices:

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.

Three years ago, in a thorough report on the impacts of climate change across the country, the U.S. Global Change Research Program said that earlier melting of snow and drier soils and plants had already increased fire activity in the West, and that the situation would grow worse:

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American citizens and political leaders are increasingly drawing the connection between climate change and extreme heat, drought, fires and floods. That seems like a good thing. Until we see what that really means.

It’s people like Colorado resident Hani Ahmad facing the brutal reality of extreme weather who are making that connection. After losing his home to the Waldo Canyon fire — the most destructive fire in Colorado’s history — Ahmad asks if people will start paying attention: “It bothers me when people say this is junk science. I’m convinced that this planet is warming and that this is part of the result of that. The west is a tinderbox and it’s so early in the season. I’m terrified for everybody in the west.”

Ahmad’s story comes from the Climate Desk, a fabulous outfit covering the impact of climate change on the ground level. Check out the short film below to see how Ahmad and others are reacting to the destructive wildfire season:

As wildfires, heat and drought intensify, U.S. officials are increasingly warning about the link to climate change.

One of America’s top science officials says the current onslaught of extreme weather in the U.S. is raising awareness of climate change among Americans.

Speaking at a university forum today in Australia, Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Americans are increasingly connecting the dots between climate change and the severe heat, drought, wildfires, and storms hitting the country. The Associated Press reported on her comments, made at the University of Canberra:

“Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events,” Lubchenco told a university forum in the Australian capital of Canberra.

“People’s perceptions in the United States at least are in many cases beginning to change as they experience something first-hand that they at least think is directly attributable to climate change,” she said.

Lubchenco’s comments are backed up by actual research. According to a recent poll conducted by the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, an increase in extreme weather has increased Americans’ understanding of climate change — bringing public acceptance of the problem to the highest level since 2009.
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by Jill Fitzsimmons, Jocelyn Fong, and Shauna Theel, via Media Matters

While numerous factors determine the frequency, severity and cost of wildfires, scientific research indicates that human-induced climate change increases fire risks in parts of the Western U.S. by promoting warmer and drier conditions. Seven of nine fire experts contacted by Media Matters agreed journalists should explain the relationship between climate change and wildfires. But an analysis of recent coverage suggests mainstream media outlets are not up to the task — only 3 percent of news reports on wildfires in the West mentioned climate change.

News Outlets Avoid Topic Of Climate Change In Wildfire Stories

Only 3 Percent Of Wildfire Coverage Mentioned Long-Term Climate Change Or Global Warming. The major television and print outlets largely ignored climate change in their coverage of wildfires in Colorado, New Mexico and other Western states. All together, only 3 percent of the reports mentioned climate change, including 1.6 percent of television segments and 6 percent of text articles.

METHODOLOGY: We searched Nexis and Factiva databases for articles and segments on (wildfire or wild fire or forest fire) between April 1, 2012, and June 30, 2012. News outlets included in this study are ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. MSNBC and Fox News were not included in this analysis because transcripts of their daytime coverage are not available in the Nexis database.

Evidence Suggests Climate Change Worsens Fire Risk In Parts Of Western U.S.

Climate Central: “Wildfires Require Several Factors To Come Together.” A Climate Central article about the 2011 fire season noted that “major wildfires require several factors to come together,” and that wildfires are strongly influenced by regional climate conditions, which in turn are influenced by global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions:

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Photo: US Dept. of Agriculture

A top official overseeing the health of America’s lands is warning about the influence of a climate change on the intensity of wildfires.

With Colorado facing a severe drought, less summer snow pack, and a strong heat wave, the state is experiencing the most destructive wildfire in its history. Scientists are warning that human-caused warming will continue to fuel these factors, increasing the intensity and frequency of wildfires across the western U.S.

The last decade has already brought a major increase in wildfire activity. And Harris Sherman, the nation’s Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment, tells the Washington Post that climate change is contributing to the factors driving western fires:

“We’ve had record fires in 10 states in the last decade, most of them in the West,” said Agriculture Department Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the Forest Service. Over the past 10 years, the wildfire season that normally runs from June to September expanded to include May and October. Once, it was rare to see 5 million cumulative acres burn in a year, but some recent seasons have recorded twice that.

“The climate is changing, and these fires are a very strong indicator of that,” Sherman said.

Sherman’s comments reflect those made in recent weeks by officials responsible for managing the country’s natural resources. As Colorado and other Western states deal with a persistent drought, pest infestations, and a heat wave fanning the flames, talk of the connection to human-fueled warming has also increased. Speaking at symposium on fire preparedness last week, experts on forestry, water and energy policy all discussed the link between wildfire intensity and climate change. The Colorado Independent reported on the forum:

“If we accept that the world is changing – this whole new normal [of global warming] – why don’t we accept that we have to change?” said Jack Sahl, director of environment and resource sustainability for the Southern California Edison power utility. “I think a lot of our urban and rural planning has just been goofy, and we have to find a way to rethink that.

“How many times do we have to have a flood, or how many times do you have to have a fire burn out a community or how many times do you have to have a hurricane take out a community before you say, ‘There has to be a better way?’”

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Fueled by a warming climate, Colorado is experiencing its worst fire season in its history.

As researchers at Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) joined 32,000 other Coloradans in fleeing the fires, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations about the “manageable” risks of climate change:

Rex Tillerson said at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that climate change was a “great challenge,” but it could be solved by adapting to risks such as higher sea levels and changing conditions for agriculture.

“As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”

Tillerson’s flippant remarks about “adapting” to the “manageable” consequences of climate change come at a time that Exxon is making record profits. In 2011, the company made $41.1 billion in profits, and Tillerson pulled in $34.9 million total compensation — a 20 percent raise from 2010.

A 2011 study found that “9 out of 10 top climate change deniers [were] linked with Exxon Mobil.” So it’s no surprise that Exxon’s CEO would spread misinformation on global warming.

Climate Progress is unaware of any serious climate scientists who think that global warming is “manageable” simply through adaptation if we listen to the do-nothing Exxon crowd and stay anywhere near our current emissions path. We know a great many who have written that the reverse is true (see below).

It’s also worth nothing that by mid-century, wildfires in the West  our projected to be far, far worse. Here’s the grim projection from a presentation made by the President’s science adviser Dr. John Holdren in Oslo in 2010:

We can barely manage the wildfires we have today. How exactly would much of the West “manage” a 4-fold to 6-fold increase in wildfires? And that’s just from a 1°C increase in temperatures. We could see 5 times that this century.

Tillerson pushed standard denialist obfuscation talking points:

He added: “In the IPCC reports … when you predict things like sea-level rise, you get numbers all over the map. If you take what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that, we believe those consequences are manageable. They do require us to begin to spend more policy effort on adaptation.”

While it’s true that the IPCC and other analyses have reported a range of sea level rise and other impacts, much of that is due to the fact that they consider some very low emissions scenarios that would require aggressive action of a kind that Exxon has spent millions to stop. And the IPCC report was based on science and observations that is 6 years old — it ignored virtually any contribution to sea level rise this century from the disintegration of the great ice sheets. Now there is a widespread convergence of scientific analysis that says on the do-nothing path, sea level rise by 2100 is likely to be 3 feet and could be double that.

The key point is that the Exxon strategy – taking no serious action to reduce emissions —  eliminates most of the uncertainty concerning future emissions and makes catastrophic impacts all but a sure thing.

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Waldo Canyon Fire via twitpic

If a tree burns down in a globally-warmed forest but the media doesn’t report why, does it make a sound?

Record-setting heat waves, wildfires, and deluges  – at the same time —  just what climate scientists have been forecasting for decades. That’s why I titled my 2006 book Hell and High Water.

The scientific literature increasingly says it’s happening now goosed on by human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases (see “Must-Read Trenberth: How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change“). See also study (4/12) finds Arctic warming favors extreme, prolonged weather events “such as drought, flooding, cold spells and heat waves.” And see study (9/10) finds global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told the NY Times, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.” At the same time, the wildfires in the west, which include the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, are being fueled by climate change.

UPDATE: After flying over the Waldo Canyon blaze, Governor John Hickenlooper said:

“It was like looking at the worst movie set you could imagine. It’s almost surreal. You look at that, and it’s like nothing I’ve seen before.“

But here’s the PBS story, “Tropical Storm Debby Saturates Florida, Extreme Heat Fans Fires in Colorado,” with nary a mention of global warming. Same for the ABC Evening News story last night on the Colorado fires and Midwest heatwave (“we’re rivaling some of the warmest temperatures on the planet right now”) and their morning story (“temperatures never seen before in that region”). Same for the ABC Evening News story last night on the Florida floods (over two feet of rain in places — “disaster by a million raindrops” and don’t miss the part about the snakes and balls of fire ants in the water!).

ABC now even has an “extreme weather team.” It would be great if they included some experts discussing how global warming has “juiced” the climate, as if it were on steroids, as, for instance, ClimateWire (subs. req’d) did in its story, “Minn. floods, early tropical storms fuel questions about changing climate”:

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by Andrew Freedman, via Climate Central

The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history continues to burn, having already charred an area larger than New York City. Known as the Whitewater-Baldy Fire Complex, the wildfire has become another in a series of “megafires” to torch the American West due to an unprecedented combination of drought conditions, climate change, and alterations in land-management practices. To make matters worse, according to The Guardian newspaper, congressional budget cuts may restrict the federal government’s firefighting efforts during what is widely expected to be a busy wildfire season.

The Whitewater-Baldy Complex is burning in New Mexico’s rugged and mountainous Gila Wilderness, an area with steep terrain that has rendered much of the fire off limits to firefighters. Instead of attacking it from within, firefighters are trying to dig in around it, hoping to slow its spread.

The megafire is the result of a merger of two separate, relatively modest-sized fires. When the two merged in late May, the fire dramatically expanded, burning 70,000 acres in just one day. As of Friday, the fire had burned 216,000 acres, and was only 10 percent contained. More than 1,200 personnel were battling the fire. There have been no fatalities or major injuries.

The fire has surpassed New Mexico’s record fire, which occurred just last year. The Las Conchas fire burned more than 156,000 acres and came perilously close to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.

New Mexico Gov. Susanna Martinez took a helicopter tour of the fire on May 31. “She described the terrain as “impossible,” saying there was no way for firefighters to directly attack the flames in the rugged areas of wilderness,” the Associated Press reported. She warned that it would continue to burn more acres as firefighters struggle to contain the blaze.

Much of New Mexico is experiencing drought conditions. Credit: U.S. Drought Monitor.

As Climate Central reported on May 23, the 2012 fire season is likely to continue the trend of severe wildfire seasons in the Southwest, due largely to the prevalence of long-term drought conditions in the region. Long-burning, massive wildfires have become more common in the U.S. recent years.

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The winter that wasn’t is bleeding into a spring of fire, with freakish warmth and dry ground breeding a disturbingly early start to wildfire season across the nation:

ALABAMA: A wildfire burned 70 to 100 acres of land in Tuscaloosa County before being contained. [WBRC]

Firefighters are still fighting a forest fire that has blackened more than 350 acres north of Waterloo in Lauderdale County since Monday. [Florence Times-Daily]

ARIZONA: Emergency personnel said a wildfire that broke out in eastern Santa Cruz County burned close to 450 acres Saturday night. [Nogales International]

COLORADO: Residents on Colorado’s eastern plains are trying to determine the extent of damage and the number of farm animals killed following a wildfire that charred more than 37 square miles, destroyed two farmsteads, and forced 1000 people to evacuate. Three firefighters were injured, one with critical burns, while trying to escape from a stranded fire truck after the fire broke out last Sunday. [AP]

FLORIDA: Statewide, the dry conditions and the lack of tropical systems last year have helped cause 986 wildfires that have burned more than 16,000 acres since Jan. 1. [Palatka Daily]

The Florida Forest Service is working to contain a 50-acre wildfire northwest of Baldwin in Baldwin Bay. [News 4 Jacksonville]

GEORGIA: A wildfire forced officials to evacuate four homes and shut down one road for a couple of hours Tuesday evening in Cook County. [WALB]

MICHIGAN: Wildfire season has descended upon Michigan early this year, as unseasonable temperatures combined with low snowfall this winter have dried out grass and wood earlier than usual. [Arenac County Independent]

The remains of a bonfire left unattended in Tuesday’s high winds and heat caused a 40-acre wildfire in a swampy section of Custer Township bounded by Johnson, Stephens, Hansen and Reek roads. [Ludington Daily News]

MINNESOTA: Wildfire activity has picked up significantly, and people are reminded to obtain burn permits and keep an eye on weather conditions. [Grand Forks Herald]

VIRGINIA: U.S. Forestry Service and Virginia Department of Forestry crews are responding to a wildfire that began in the Wise County side of High Knob Tuesday afternoon. [Kingsport TImes News]

WISCONSIN: As of Tuesday morning firefighters had responded to 160 wildfires over roughly 300 acres on state-protected lands. Two people were killed in grass fires in the last week. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]

Meanwhile, wildfires are burning in Costa Rica and ravaging northern Kenya, including a fire on the slopes of Mount Kenya, the nations’s tallest mountain, which “is sending big game animals like elephants fleeing for their lives.”

Scientists have warned for decades that the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution added to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels would bring these disasters. The states that are now burning are now also polluted by dozens of politicians who claim the science is a lie.