Wildfires and Climate Change (AAAS)

 

 

Wildfires and Climate Change

 

Fighting fires with a helicopter is one of the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding things I have done in my life. It is also one of the most depressing. As a pilot you are constantly searching for a water source in drier and drier conditions.  When you find one you hurry to it for the dip. You pivot with your full bucket and go to max power and speed to the fire-line. There you sling your bucket of water on the relentlessly approaching flames. The trees, our best ally in the fight against runaway climate change, are dying a searing death below you as you attempt to save them. Today, more often than not, the fire is winning. Below, contributing scientists from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) give us the terrifying facts.

 

“Human-caused climate change is a significant contributor to the increasing size and intensity of, and damage from, western U.S. wildfires.

 

In the western United States human-caused climate change caused more than half the increase in forest fuel aridity (how dry and flammable vegetation is) since the 1970s and has approximately doubled the cumulative area burned in forest fires since 1984.

 

Climate-change-related declines in western spring snowpack, and increased evaporation from higher temperatures in spring, summer, and fall, have in the decades since the early 1980s reduced moisture and contributed to a marked increase in the frequency of large fires and the total area burned by western wildfires.

 

From 1972 to 2018, there was an eight-fold increase in the annual area burned in California’s summertime forest fires. Evidence suggests that this dramatic increase was caused primarily by unusually dry air linked to human-caused climate change.

 

Earlier spring snowmelt and other factors related to human-caused climate change have contributed to a substantial increase in fire seasonii length in forests throughout the western United States. Western U.S. fire seasons in 2003–2012 averaged more than 84 days longer than in 1973–1982. The average burn time of the largest wildfires also increased during this period, from nearly six days to more than 50 days.

 

Nights have warmed significantly—even more than days—during the U.S. fire season. That added heat has lowered the overnight relative humidity that once gave firefighters some of their best opportunities to gain control over wildfires.

Warming has been especially dramatic at higher latitudes.5 In Alaska, a state that already suffered severe wildfires early in 2019, the average overnight low temperature in July 2019 was the hottest since record-keeping began in 1925.

 

The frequency and intensity of wildfires in Alaska have been greater in the past few decades than for any period in the past 10,000 years.

 

A study of Rocky Mountain wildfire-prone areas found that moisture levels were lower in the 15 years after 2000 than in the 15 years before 2000—a “moisture deficit” that correlates with a post-2000 decline in tree seedling densities and forest regeneration. A study of western U.S. ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests concluded that climate-change-related moisture deficits are undermining post-wildfire forest regeneration and recovery there.

 

Wildfire “smoke waves” impose a significant health burden on millions of people in western U.S. states. During the 2004 to 2009 fire seasons, in the western U.S. counties where wildfires are frequent, wildfires were responsible for more than 70 percent of the air pollution on days when fine particulate matter in the air surpassed regulatory limits.

 

Despite widespread improvements in air quality across the United States in recent decades, air quality during the summer has declined across much of the Northwest as a consequence of increased wildfire activity.”

 

Questions? The AAAS has given me access to a hot-line of climate scientists willing to answer our questions. E-mail me with your questions at climatelynx@earthlink.net

Warm regards, Cool planet, Vote Climate

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The American Association of Science (AAAS) was founded in 1848 and is the largest general science organization in the world. It promotes science and, in the recent anti-science years, has focused on defending scientists. Its world-renowned “Science” magazine is published by the AAAS and distributed to its 120,000 members, of which, I am a proud member.

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