Wildfires burn twice as much land as they did 40 years ago and the fire season is two months longer than in the 1970s because of climate change, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service told a Senate committee hearing today.
The Forest Service has nearly doubled spending on combating wildfires since 2000, going from $540 million to $1 billion last year and despite predictions that hotter, drier conditions in 2013 will increase the likelihood of fires in the West and Southwest, sequestration budget cuts mean the forest service will hire about 5 percent fewer fire fighters this season and the money spent by the forest service on fire prevention has been cut in half.
In his prepared remarks before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Thomas Tidwell, Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said:
Florida, Georgia, Utah, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, have all experienced the largest and/or the most destructive fires in their history just in the last six years. On average wildfires burn twice as many acres each year as compared to 40 years ago, and there are on average seven times as many fires over 10,000 acres per year.
In 2012 over 9.3 million acres burned in the United States. The fires of 2012 were massive in size, with 51 fires exceeding 40,000 acres. Of these large fires, 14 exceeded 100,000 acres. The increase in large fires in the west coincides with an increase in temperatures and early snow melt in recent years. This means longer fire seasons. The length of the fire season has increased by over two months since the 1970s.
This is not a prediction how ignoring greenhouse gas emissions now will impact the United States in 2040 or by the end of the century. No, this our new reality: a fire season two months longer, wildfires burning twice as much acreage than 4O years ago, and firefighting costs doubling in little more than a decade. This is climate
changed.
"The largest issue is how we adapt our management to anticipate climate change impacts and begin to mitigate their potential effects," Tidwell told the committee.
"It's hard for the average member of the public to understand how things have changed," Tidwell told The Guardian after the hearing.
Across the West, fires are burning. North of Los Angeles, the Powerhouse fire has already burnt 32,000 acres in five days. Fire crews are struggling to battle the blaze, which was 60 percent contained Monday night.
"That stuff is so dry it just breaks in your hands," said Chuck Tobias, spokesman for the Fresno Fire Department as he snapped a gray-white twig and crumbled it between his fingers at the fire base camp Monday. "It lights off like a Roman candle."
[...]
The brush has been desiccated by a near-record lack of rain this year, and officials expect even worse fires when the traditional Santa Ana wind season begins in the fall.
In New Mexico, firefighters are battling two forest fires fueled by high winds and a
historic drought where 82 percent of the state is having 'severe' or 'exceptional' drought conditions.
"We are going to continue to have large wildfires," Tidwell told The Guardian.
Early fires, such as Powerhouse, or monster-fires, which consume tens of thousands of acres in record time, were now the new normal, Tidwell said.
"Ten years ago in New Mexico outside Los Alamos we had a fire get started. Over seven days, it burned 40,000 acres. In 2011, we had another fire. Las Conchas. It also burned 40,000 acres. It did it in 12 hours," he went on.
Thanks to our unwillingness to address the causes of climate change, this is the
new normal, reports the
CS Monitor.
Given that as a global society we are not seriously addressing climate change, says Dominik Kulakowski, adjunct professor of biology at Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Worcester, Mass., one good question is, “Is this the new normal?” The public, he says, should conclude not merely that this fire season is predicted to be longer, but that such longer seasons will continue for the foreseeable future.
“A lot of the public seems to be saying, ‘oh, well, we’ll just have to keep planting forests [to replace burned areas] in more northern climes,’ that it will play out gradually and we’ll have time to adapt,” says Professor Kulakowski, who in April testified before Congress on the impact climate and weather have on fires. “But the overwhelming conclusion of research is that the [climate] change will be more dramatic and abrupt,” he says.
But, moving to northern climes isn't going to let Americans escape monster wildfires. Researchers in Canada are predicting that wildfires in the north will be of greater intensity, because they will be fueled in part, by
boreal peatlands. "Severe fire activity in peatlands results in the combustion of deep peat layers and can last for several months, sometimes overwintering underneath snowpacks."
Susan Cagle, a writer for Grist was on NPR today, and described what it is like to watch a wildfire approach your house and what it means to adapt to our new climate in the American west:
You do see the flames. You do see the smoke, until you can see nothing but the smoke, and then you do flee. In our case, we, you know, there is a kind of disaster fatigue that sets in with fire. It's so frequent, and you get a little complacent. You stay a little longer than maybe they suggest that you should, until you get run out. But in terms of moving, I think that people who live in these places don't want to be run out by something like a disastrous wildfire. They really want to - they have that kind of Western pioneer spirit, and they want to stick it out.
Her house burnt to the foundation one night in 1977 in a rapid firestorm. Since then, it nearly burnt down in 2008 and there was another nearby fire in 2009. In Cagle's case, she sticks it out because of her "Western pioneer spirit". She has a choice.
Climate change will force others to migrate to more hospitable regions. But, we only have one planet. We cannot keep abusing the earth and expect the climate to be favorable to human life. We've already bought 40 years of climate change. The time is now to see the flames and smell the smoke and not stay complacent.