Global warming makes wildfires more likely and more destructive -- as many scientific studies have concluded. Why? Global warming leads to more intense droughts, hotter weather, earlier snowmelt (hence less humid late summers and early autumns), and more tree infestations (like the pine beetle). That means wildfires are a dangerous amplifying feedback, whereby global warming causes more wildfires, which release carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating global warming.
The climate-wildfire link should be a special concern in this country
where, since 2000, wildfires have burned an area larger than the state of
Idaho.
I write this as my San Diego relatives wait anxiously in their hotel room to find out if their Rancho Santa Fe home has been destroyed. This is a beautiful home that I lived in for a month when I moved to the area in the mid-1980s to study at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Can we say that the brutal San Diego wildfires were directly caused by global warming? Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer put it this way on NBC Nightly News Tuesday:
Thomas Swetnam, University of Arizona climate scientist, who coauthored a major study on the subject (see below) said in 2006:
I researched wildfires for my book -- hence the "Hell" in Hell and High Water -- and my view is closer to Swetnam's for several reasons.
First, Southern California is experiencing the "driest year in 130 years of recordkeeping," precisely the kind of extreme weather event we expect from climate change. We are seeing record droughts around the country -- and around the world. Some scientists fear we are at risk of shifting the climate to "a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest."
Second, we aren't just seeing bad wildfires, we are seeing record-shattering wildfires. The 2005 wildfire season, which ravaged 8.7 million acres, was record-breaking, and the record it broke was from 2000, when wildfires consumed 8.4 million acres. The 2006 wildfire season easily surpassed 2005, with a stunning 9.9 million acres burned. The 2007 wildfire season is also on a pace to beat 2005.
The August 2006 Science cover story, "Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity" (subs. req'd) that Swetnam coathored with three Scripps researchers explicitly examined and then rejected the theory that land-use and fire-supression practices were the cause of the surge in wildfires since the mid-1980s.
Some global warming deniers may cross their fingers and call it all a coincidence and criticize the (few) journalists that even raise the wildfire-climate connection. But in fact, a major 2004 study warned that things will get much, much worse if we don't take action soon to reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends. 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 work suggests that "the area burned by wildfires in 11 Western states could double ... if summer climate warms by slightly more than a degree and a half" centigrade. On our current emissions path, this is likely to happen by mid-century. By century's end, states like Montana, New Mexico, Washington, Utah, and Wyoming could see burn areas increase five times.
The third 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 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.
My thoughts are with my San Diego relatives and the stunning half-million evacuees -- a Katrina-like exodus. 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.
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Let Me Help Clear The Air:
The Problem: Incorrect information posted seemingly everwhere labling all kinds of things as contributing to global warming.
The Science: Carbon has a cycle, just like water. Water evaporates, condenses into clouds, falls as rain or snow and the cycle repeats.
Similarly, carbon is captured from the environment primarily by plants and collects in the biosphere because carbon is necessary for life as we know it. The planet itself harbors a great deal of carbon in the interior, but only a limited amount of the total carbon is available at the surface (atmosphere, surface soils, biota, etc). Some of this carbon cycles quickly, as with shrubs and annual grasses, while some is deposited on the ocean floor, peat bogs, etc, and are the foundation of our "fossil fuels".
The Big Problem is that we humans are collecting up carbon sequestered in the earth and releasing it faster than plants can collect and store it and that's why atmospheric levels are rising. Carbon that's already "in play" in a short cycle, such as that in presently growing plants or materials man has harvested recently, such as in lumber, isn't much of a problem. That's why, for example, people are trying to turn crops into fuel; it's a short-cycle strategy where plants capture carbon already in the atmosphere, humans create fuel from it and then re-emit it back to the atmosphere. Doing this is reasonably sustainable so long as we can re-sequester the huge volumes of carbon we've already released from fossil fuels...
Got it now?
Great!
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CNN MEMO: USE FIRES TO 'PUSH' 'PLANET IN PERIL' SERIES; DON'T 'IRRESPONSIBLY' TIE TO "GLOBAL WARMING
Thu Oct 18 2007 14:11:42 ET (Drudge Report)
According to notes from CNN's Monday news meeting network president Jon Klein tells employees to use the California fire tragedy to "push" their "Planet in Peril" special, but warns reporters not to "irresponsibly link" the fires to "Global Warming."
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Meaning - keep them on the edge of their seats - the gullible masses will come to the belief with the help of most of the reports that this is caused by global warming - but understanding that this is bunk, let's not get CNN caught up a pushing the lie ourselves.
Got it?
That is, the White House heavily editing CDC testimony on the threats of global warming:
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071024-global-warming.html
theyoungturks.com
An August 2007 NASA temperature data error discovery has lead to 1934 -- not the previously hyped 1998 -- being declared the hottest in U.S. history since records began. Revised data now reveals four of the top ten hottest years in the U.S. were in the 1930's while only three of the hottest years occurred in the last decade.
Note: 80% of man-made CO2 emissions occurred after 1940
What we'll *hopefully* get is a democrat who takes climate change seriously and will therefore put in a sane energy policy (now we have "voluntary" caps on emission for example, what a joke).
Will things suddenly be 'cured' overnight? Nope. But no one is realistically expecting them to.
And you can be assured that if a republican is elected, we have pretty much ZERO chance of this issue being taken seriously in any meaningful way.
But I'll concede that if a corporate democrat is elected (you know, the type that rakes in tons of lobbyist/special interest money, cough, cough), the difference is far less than it should be or used to be.
theyoungturks.com
Noone is saying that wildfires are solely caused by global warming. I'll repeat it again, so you can read it loudly to yourself "Noone says that global warming is the sole cause of wildfires" (or hurricanes for that matter). What they're saying is simply that global warming is a contributing factor the conditions that cause wildfires and that GW exascerbates (makes worse) the effects of those fires. This is what is commonly called in the science world a 'positive feedback loop'. There are hundreds of examples of such loops in nature.
I realize that such complex sciency things make Bush worshippers heads hurt, but even your fuhrer will eventually have to grapple with them.
The problem with building them elsewhere is that these countries do not have nuclear weapons (like Iran) and hence do not have availability to nuclear power. That is why the Socialists are for global warming - to proliferate nuclear weapons and stop US/military aggression in regions where weapons do not exist.
By scaring the America public, they hope to gain support for the plants, big money, and political gains for Democrats.
The LA Times wrote about this earlier this year, and warned that tens of millions of folks would have to abandon CA (no water, etc) and migrate Eastward. Of course, with the population in CA explode with another 20 million people, almost all the increase being from immigration, legal and illegal, and thier offspring. The LA Times position on that? Bring 'em in, give them drivers licenses, free medical care, free schooling, and now - financial assistance for the illegals to attend state colleges.
Well, here's hoping that we are not entering another "mega drought" cycle, like the one we had from 1300 AD to 900 AD - before global warming.
You have been snookered by Junk Science.