Global Warming and the California Wildfires

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:

The weather we've seen this fall may or may not be due to the global warming trend, but it's certainly a clear picture of what the future is going to look like if we don't act quickly to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases.

Thomas Swetnam, University of Arizona climate scientist, who coauthored a major study on the subject (see below) said in 2006:

We're showing warming and earlier springs tying in with large forest fire frequencies. Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But it's not 50 to 100 years away--it's happening now in forest ecosystems through fire.

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.

Related Posts:

• The NY Times Blows the Wildfire Story
• Wildfire Season Smashes Records -- and the Media Keeps Blowing the Story
• Megafires are a Megaworry
• Global Warming = Bush gets Fired

Comments

[RTIII]

This Story INCORRECTLY connects fires like the ones in S. California as contributing to global warming. In truth, little of the carbon released into the atmosphere can be said to be making the problem of global climate change worse.

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!

[Horst]

Wake up people. Climate change is real and nothing short of culling the human population by a few billion is going to make an difference in the next few decades. This would be a good time to stop living in deserts covered with dry chaparall.

[andyhoff]

Uuugh. I give up, even Bush the nutter acknowledges global warming. Thank you HuffPo, you were once great, but have been taken over by the flat earth society and the rest of the scientific illiterates. You even posted a global waring denial article tonight. I bid you farewell, this is my last post on your site, ever. See you in Common Dreams.

[Ilvfredum]

Forest fires cause global warming? Maybe we should clean out the underbrush and fuel that makes these fires spread?

[GH]

There is a lot in this little news flash:
----
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."
---
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?

[ihavenobias]

Actually, I find *this* to be a much more compelling story.

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

[GH]

oph, come on. Everybody is editing everybody out there - always have been. Perhaps it the editing of science at the IPCC by the politicans that is the larger story. Perhaps it is the likes of Laurie David who takes the long CO2 vs Temp chart and switches the labels in her recently published book for children. Temperature rise leads the the increase in CO2 - not the other way around.

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

[rwe]

Not to worry though . If by chance a Dem gets into the White House man made global worming(along with homelessness and poverty) will cease to exist. So will hurricanes, hey wait, CNN said this will be the century of hurricanes, and now it will be the century of wildfires.

[ihavenobias]

Who do you think actually believes in this magical president you describe? No one of course, because it's a straw-man.

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

[SplatticusFinch]

Out of curiosity, is there anything that could potentially happen in the environment that COULDN'T be somehow attributed to global climate change? The words "global," "climate" and "change" would seem to indicate that there isn't.

[DavidE]

Unfortunately, you have to do a bit more than just read the name "global climate change" to understand the effect. Try reading Al Gore's book, An Inconvenient Truth for an overview of the predicted environmental changes.

[Ilvfredum]

These Santa Anna winds never happened before. It's all a result of global warming.

[dandjus]

i lived in California during the global cooling of the 1970's. We had wildfires then. we didn't have a smany houses built in the brush, and George Bush wasn't president, but we had wildfires. And they had wildfires 100 years ago and 1000 years ago and 50,000 years ago. Blaming it on global warming is childish anbd designed to draw attention to yourself with no justification.

[John]

Another perfect example of the rightwinger's innability to grapple with issues that involve complexity or nuance.

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.

[1will]

Sell you SUV, take your house off of the power grid and stop eating meat. None of this matters since China is eclipsing us as the world's greatest emitter of CO2. There is nothing you can do to offset their record building of dirty coal fired power plants.

[dgscol]

Two groups are behind global warming ... the Communists­/Socialist­s, and those that want to build nuclear power plants. Imagine how much money would be involved in building many plants in the US and China?

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.

[DavidE]

Giving up won't help either. Exponentially growing population and the power of technology has put us at a turning point in history where we have to demostrate that we responsible enough to manage our world. I hope others exert more of an effort than you.

[ChiMan1]

Blah! Blah! Blah! Yeah and remember Algore telling us how BAD all the Huriccanes were going to be? guess what, WRONG AGAIN !!!

[buddycor]

My winter grass won't grow anymore in my back yard in Rancho Mirage. It is too cold. Is that caused by global warming because I am getting annoyed.

[FearlessFreep]

ChiMan1, you don't live in New Orleans, do you?

[GH]

"a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest."
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.

[buddycor]

Of course we are headed to a water disaster in Calfirnia and the Southwest. It is not caused by global warming but by 20-30 million illegals.

[Tator]

More Junk Science. I challenge anyone, anyone out there to tell us at what point in Earth's NATURAL cycle is it currently in. Subtracting man's influence, tell us please is the Earth in a Natural cooling period or warming? No one knows what the Earth is doing on its own, much less how man interaction is helping (for all anyone knows the Earth could be naturally cooling and man's heating effect is helping) or hurting. No one knows and REAL Scientist say so but your MSM only tells you what you want to hear.

You have been snookered by Junk Science.

[DavidE]

It surprises me that so many prefer to believe that the global warming is a natural cycle. You do realize that the ill effects, rising oceans, increased hurricanes, more extreme fires, all will occur either way. The only difference is that we are powerless to stop it if it's "natural." We should all be hoping that its caused by us, so we can fix it.

[andyhoff]

wldnswmmr has it dead right about many of the comments on this post; Wilson33 you didn't understand the sarcasm. Obvioulsy most of you didn't read the article. It's not arguing that there were no wild fires in the past, it's arguing that wild fires may be getting worse. Here's another example: if the arctic icecap completely melts are you going to argue that it's not global warming because it partialy melted every summer in the past?

[Yukon Jack]

If arctic icecaps melt completely, there will be enough water to either make all the currently dry areas wet or use the water to extinguish the fires.

[Judd16]

In regards to the wild fires getting worse, we heard the same thing about the strength of hurricanes. Didn't happen.

[TWOSHORT]

Is this one of those time when we say shit happen's?Or is there another reason for this warming trend that has given us Indian summers for year's now! We are all seeing with our eyes the way Weather is changing around the world!It was never like this when i was a child or teenager or young adult!Why in so short of a time are thing changing right in front of my eyes!born in the 50's and when are we going to stop these bad habit's of us all.