Not a “Perfect Storm” But the New Norm in the American West
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.
Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s “perfect storm.”
They are only half right.
This summer's conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of it as a “storm,” perfect or otherwise -- that is, sudden, violent, and temporary -- then you don’t understand what’s happening in this country or on this planet. Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West.
For some time, climatologists have been warning us that much of the West is on the verge of downshifting to a new, perilous level of aridity. Droughts like those that shaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the even drier 1950s will soon be “the new climatology” of the region -- not passing phenomena but terrifying business-as-usual weather. Western forests already show the effects of this transformation.
If you surf the blogosphere looking for fire information, pretty quickly you’ll notice a dust devil of “facts” blowing back and forth: big fires are four times more common than they used to be; the biggest fires are six-and-a-half times larger than the monster fires of yesteryear; and owing to a warmer climate, fires are erupting earlier in the spring and subsiding later in the fall. Nowadays, the fire season is two and a half months longer than it was 30 years ago.
All of this is hair-raisingly true. Or at least it was, until things got worse. After all, those figures don’t come from this summer’s fire disasters but from a study published in 2006 that compared then-recent fires, including the record-setting blazes of the early 2000s, with what now seem the good old days of 1970 to 1986. The data-gathering in the report, however, only ran through 2003. Since then, the western drought has intensified, and virtually every one of those recent records -- for fire size, damage, and cost of suppression -- has since been surpassed.
New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains are a case in point. Over the course of two weeks in 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned 43,000 acres, destroying 400 homes in the nuclear research city of Los Alamos. At the time, to most of us living in New Mexico, Cerro Grande seemed a vision of the Apocalypse. Then, the Las Conchas fire erupted in 2011 on land adjacent to Cerro Grande’s scar and gave a master class in what the oxygen planet can do when it really struts its stuff.
The Las Conchas fire burned 43,000 acres, equaling Cerro Grande’s achievement, in its first fourteen hours. Its smoke plume rose to the stratosphere, and if the light was right, you could see within it rose-red columns of fire -- combusting gases -- flashing like lightning a mile or more above the land. Eventually the Las Conchas fire spread to 156,593 acres, setting a record as New Mexico’s largest fire in historic times.
It was a stunning event. Its heat was so intense that, in some of the canyons it torched, every living plant died, even to the last sprigs of grass on isolated cliff ledges. In one instance, the needles of the ponderosa pines were not consumed, but bent horizontally as though by a ferocious wind. No one really knows how those trees died, but one explanation holds that they were flash-blazed by a superheated wind, perhaps a collapsing column of fire, and that the wind, having already burned up its supply of oxygen, welded the trees by heat alone into their final posture of death.
It seemed likely that the Las Conchas record would last years, if not decades. It didn’t. This year the Whitewater Baldy fire in the southwest of the state burned an area almost twice as large.
Half Now, Half Later?
In 2007, Tom Swetnam, a fire expert and director of the laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, gave an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes. Asked to peer into his crystal ball, he said he thought the Southwest might lose half its existing forests to fire and insects over the several decades to come. He immediately regretted the statement. It wasn’t scientific; he couldn’t back it up; it was a shot from the hip, a WAG, a wild-ass guess.
Swetnam’s subsequent work, however, buttressed that WAG. In 2010, he and several colleagues quantified the loss of southwestern forestland from 1984 to 2008. It was a hefty 18 percent. They concluded that “only two more recurrences of droughts and die-offs similar or worse than the recent events” might cause total forest loss to exceed 50 percent. With the colossal fires of 2011 and 2012, including Arizona’s Wallow fire, which consumed more than half-a-million acres, the region is on track to reach that mark by mid-century, or sooner.
But that doesn’t mean we get to keep the other half.
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast a temperature increase of 4ºC for the Southwest over the present century. Given a faster than expected build-up of greenhouse gases (and no effective mitigation), that number looks optimistic today. Estimates vary, but let’s say our progress into the sweltering future is an increase of slightly less than 1ºC so far. That means we still have an awful long way to go. If the fires we’re seeing now are a taste of what the century will bring, imagine what the heat stress of a 4ºC increase will produce. And these numbers reflect mean temperatures. The ones to worry about are the extremes, the record highs of future heat waves. In the amped-up climate of the future, it is fair to think that the extremes will increase faster than the means.
At some point, every pine, fir, and spruce will be imperiled. If, in 2007, Swetnam was out on a limb, these days it’s likely that the limb has burned off and it’s getting ever easier to imagine the destruction of forests on a region-wide scale, however disturbing that may be.
More than scenery is at stake, more even than the stability of soils, ecosystems, and watersheds: the forests of the western United States account for 20 percent to 40 percent of total U.S. carbon sequestration. At some point, as western forests succumb to the ills of climate change, they will become a net releaser of atmospheric carbon, rather than one of the planet’s principle means of storing it.
Contrary to the claims of climate deniers, the prevailing models scientists use to predict change are conservative. They fail to capture many of the feedback loops that are likely to intensify the dynamics of change. The release of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost, an especially gloomy prospect, is one of those feedbacks. The release of carbon from burning or decaying forests is another. You used to hear scientists say, “If those things happen, the consequences will be severe.” Now they more often skip that “if” and say “when” instead, but we don’t yet have good estimates of what those consequences will be.
Ways of Going
There have always been droughts, but the droughts of recent years are different from their predecessors in one significant way: they are hotter. And the droughts of the future will be hotter still.
June temperatures produced 2,284 new daily highs nationwide and tied 998 existing records. In most places, the shoe-melting heat translated into drought, and the Department of Agriculture set a record of its own recently by declaring 1,297 dried-out counties in 29 states to be “natural disaster areas.” June also closed out the warmest first half of a year and the warmest 12-month period since U.S. record keeping began in 1895. At present, 56 percent of the continental U.S. is experiencing drought, a figure briefly exceeded only in the 1950s.
Higher temperatures have a big impact on plants, be they a forest of trees or fields of corn and wheat. More heat means intensified evaporation and so greater water stress. In New Mexico, researchers compared the drought of the early 2000s with that of the 1950s. They found that the 1950s drought was longer and drier, but that the more recent drought caused the death of many more trees, millions of acres of them. The reason for this virulence: it was 1ºC to 1.5ºC hotter.
The researchers avoided the issue of causality by not claiming that climate change caused the higher temperatures, but in effect stating: “If climate change is occurring, these are the impacts we would expect to see.” With this in mind, they christened the dry spell of the early 2000s a “global-change-type drought” -- not a phrase that sings but one that lingers forebodingly in the mind.
No such equivocation attends a Goddard Institute for Space Studies appraisal of the heat wave that assaulted Texas, Oklahoma, and northeastern Mexico last summer. Their report represents a sea change in high-level climate studies in that they boldly assert a causal link between specific weather events and global warming. The Texas heat wave, like a similar one in Russia the previous year, was so hot that its probability of occurring under “normal” conditions (defined as those prevailing from 1951 to 1980) was approximately 0.13 percent. It wasn’t a 100-year heat wave or even a 500-year one; it was so colossally improbable that only changes in the underlying climate could explain it.
The decline of heat-afflicted forests is not unique to the United States. Global research suggests that in ecosystems around the world, big old trees -- the giants of tropical jungles, of temperate rainforests, of systems arid and wet, hot and cold -- are dying off.
More generally, when forest ecologists compare notes across continents and biomes, they find accelerating tree mortality from Zimbabwe to Alaska, Australia to Spain. The most common cause appears to be heat stress arising from climate change, along with its sidekick, drought, which often results when evaporation gets a boost.
Fire is only one cause of forest death. Heat alone can also do in a stand of trees. According to the Texas Forest Service, between 2 percent and 10 percent of all the trees in Texas, perhaps half-a-billion or so, died in last year’s heat wave, primarily from heat and desiccation. Whether you know it or not, those are staggering figures.
Insects, too, stand ready to play an ever-greater role in this onrushing disaster. Warm temperatures lengthen the growing season, and with extra weeks to reproduce, a population of bark beetles may spawn additional generations over the course of a hot summer, boosting the number of their kin that that make it to winter. Then, if the winter is warm, more larvae survive to spring, releasing ever-larger swarms to reproduce again. For as long as winters remain mild, summers long, and trees vulnerable, the beetles’ numbers will continue to grow, ultimately overwhelming the defenses of even healthy trees.
We now see this throughout the Rockies. A mountain pine beetle epidemic has decimated lodgepole pine stands from Colorado to Canada. About five million acres of Colorado’s best scenery has turned red with dead needles, a blow to tourism as well as the environment. The losses are far greater in British Columbia, where beetles have laid waste to more than 33 million forest acres, killing a volume of trees three times greater than Canada’s annual timber harvest.
Foresters there call the beetle irruption “the largest known insect infestation in North American history,” and they point to even more chilling possibilities. Until recently, the frigid climate of the Canadian Rockies prevented beetles from crossing the Continental Divide to the interior where they were, until recently, unknown. Unfortunately, warming temperatures have enabled the beetles to top the passes of the Peace River country and penetrate northern Alberta. Now a continent of jack pines lies before them, a boreal smorgasbord 3,000 miles long. If the beetles adapt effectively to their new hosts, the path is clear for them to chew their way eastward virtually to the Atlantic and to generate transformative ecological effects on a gigantic scale.
The mainstream media, prodded by recent drought declarations and other news, seem finally to be awakening to the severity of these prospects. Certainly, we should be grateful. Nevertheless, it seems a tad anticlimactic when Sam Champion, ABC News weather editor, says with this-just-in urgency to anchor Diane Sawyer, “If you want my opinion, Diane, now’s the time we start limiting manmade greenhouse gases.”
One might ask, “Why now, Sam?” Why not last year, or a decade ago, or several decades back? The news now overwhelming the West is, in truth, old news. We saw the changes coming. There should be no surprise that they have arrived.
It’s never too late to take action, but now, even if all greenhouse gas emissions were halted immediately, Earth’s climate would continue warming for at least another generation. Even if we surprise ourselves and do all the right things, the forest fires, the insect outbreaks, the heat-driven die-offs, and other sweeping transformations of the American West and the planet will continue.
One upshot will be the emergence of whole new ecologies. The landscape changes brought on by climate change are affecting areas so vast that many previous tenants of the land -- ponderosa pines, for instance -- cannot be expected to recolonize their former territory. Their seeds don’t normally spread far from the parent tree, and their seedlings require conditions that big, hot, open spaces don’t provide.
What will develop in their absence? What will the mountains and mesa tops of the New West look like? Already it is plain to see that scrub oak, locust, and other plants that reproduce by root suckers are prospering in places where the big pines used to stand. These plants can be burned to the ground and yet resprout vigorously a season later. One ecologist friend offers this advice, “If you have to be reincarnated as a plant in the West, try not to come back as a tree. Choose a clonal shrub, instead. The future looks good for them.”
In the meantime, forget about any sylvan dreams you might have had: this is no time to build your house in the trees.
William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of seven books, most recently A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford, 2011). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses where heat, fire, and climate change are taking us, click here or download it to your iPod here.
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Even then, we would have to learn to respect Mother Nature as the population re-grows.
It would be nice to think we could evolve enough to be the solution instead of the problem (without the above catastrophe), but history and a frank look at ourselves today makes it seem extremely unlikely.
Never mind that they will be burning tons of fracked gas, sucking billions of gallons of water out of fragile desert aquifers, most of which are already overdrawn, and never mind that the built environment could produce more than 100% of the solar energy we need, right where that power is needed, without killing a single acre of wilderness. No, never mind all that because the Feds want their leasing money and Big Enviros want their Big Energy bribes and mitigation money, and the greenwash is thick, smelly and slimy.
When urging climate action, please consider that one form saves our open spaces (distributed generation) and one form kills them (Big Solar, Big Wind), and advocate accordingly. The ongoing survival of the planet depends on this distinction.
I just saw the 2007 Werner Herzog documentary "Encounters at the End of the World". It is full of fabulous photography and images of nature.
Herzog visits Antarctica and interviews the scientists doing research there. All of them see climate change every day. All of them believe humans will go the way of the dinosaurs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounters_at_the_End_of_the_World
Nature will continue. It will not look the way we know and knew it, but it will continue. Man just won't be around to record or describe it.
I am trying to see as much of this wondrous planet as I can while it is still here. While I am still here.
With every ecosystem plundered, bulldozed, concreted and chain sawed, we lose more and more natural resources but also, less and less of life supporting services, including the nitrogen cycle, seed dispersal, decomposition, the creation and renewal of a life rendering soil and the creation of the biosphere or ecosphere, the life zone of the Earth.
Humans are the only specie on the Earth killing ecosystems for all his ever growing demands. We don't want to hear about population control because this would deprive us of all our freedoms and rights, which apparently include, the right, the freedom, to destroy our only life giving home, Earth! The other problem is, Christians want the Earth destroyed because Jesus will rescue us and take us to the promised land. They want us to gobble up Earth.
We don't need Zero Population Growth, we need Rapid Population Decline.
Cattle devour the plant biodiversity within an ecosystem, and once the soil is exposed [vacated], opportunistic European weeds quickly take over in the vacated soil. Many were brought to America in the bellies of the cattle. These weeds, unlike most native plant biodiversity, die, just in time for fire season. Essentially, they are straw, the straw Europeans used on their roofs long ago. If you look at a hill, and it is straw-colored or brown, dried, dead weeds have replaced the native plant biodiversity and are perfect kindling for fire! What's more inflammable than dead, dried straw!
For many years, we have not experienced historic, traditional fires in the west. These wild fires began in the spring and burned until the first rains in autumn. They burned so slowly, they left mosaics of ecosystem intact, unlike today's firestorms. We have also transported trees from other continents that are highly inflammable like the eucalyptus.
We are also having not only faster and hotter fires, we're experiencing more frequent fires, but botanists have known this long before CW was even discussed.
Would love to hear what old Cactus Ed would be saying now.
Of course it's a newspaper-length article with a narrow focus, which in this case is what we can expect.
For some reason it's a lot more interesting to talk about how bad it's going to be rather than actually doing something about it. There are so many people who "know" all the facts about climate change but who continue to live with huge carbon footprints.
We need to be really honest about what life in the 4 degrees warmer future looks like.The future is really sweaty. There's no Hawaii vacation. You don't drive, or fly anywhere, ever. AC is something kids read about in books, and their teachers talk about how fat and lazy humans of the past were.
If you read that and can't picture yourself living that way, then we won't make it.
The human of the future, if there is one, is a lot tougher than we are today - physically and ethically.
The incongruency between knowing climate change is real and not changing your own way of life RIGHT NOW is one of the first things that needs to change.
We have a tendency to think there's nothing we can do about this ourselves. I mean, what, you think the government is going to rescue us on this one?
Leaner, tougher humans, more in touch with the sacredness of older lifestyles. Absolutely. The sooner we ALL get used to it, the better chance we have of keeping that car in the garage for the very special outing. If we don't choose to radically simplify, radical simplification of a coercive and oppressive nature will be forced upon us.
The natural and wild forests he is discussing in this article are ecosystems, every and all reasons mankind is alive and breathing. I believe in GW; however, I think, if we reduced our carbon footprint significantly, we would still be experiencing global deterioration in all its forms, like lack of fresh water, because we are destroying the Earth's natural, life giving body or ecosystems and the plant and animal biodiversity that create and sustain them.
If a landscape is wild and natural, it's an ecosystem. All ecosystems are all interconnected, and they all have loops and feedbacks to both the climate and the atmosphere. So, if we are destroying ecosystems globally, and putting up dead parking lots and cities, how can we not expect dramatic changes occurring globally? Terrestrial ecosystems also transpire cooling water vapor, contribute to clouds and rain, i.e., the water cycling.
How can we not expect an Earth that each day becomes more like Mars?