Sunday, November 22, 2009

ONGOING COVERAGE: WSU REPORTING PROJECT: WARMING

Researchers foresee more fires as climate changes

Jimmy Blue
Special to The Spokesman-Review
December 13, 2008

From a hill overlooking his North Idaho home, Ron Mahoney watched a wildfire consume the house he had built by hand.

"It’s one of those horrible things you can’t stop looking at,” said Mahoney, who lost his home to a 2003 fire that burned five houses near Moscow, Idaho.

The threat of another wildfire did not scare Mahoney and his family from the property. By the following April they had rebuilt on the site where their former house had been burned to its foundation.

Last year nearly 2 million acres of Idaho forests went up in flames — more than in California and Alaska combined. In the last decade alone, the average number of acres nationally burned has doubled, according to federal data. The cost to fight those fires: Nearly $2 billion a year.

ADVERTISEMENT

If the predictions of many leading climatologists and forestry researchers are correct, fires are only going to get worse as a result of changing climate.

The western United States can expect the area burned each year to double or triple by the year 2060, according to leading scientists. In 2007 fires in four northwest states — Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana — burned more than three and a half million acres, according to National Interagency Fire Center data.

“In our part of the world we can say conclusively that climate change is accelerating wildfire trends,” said Steven Running, a University of Montana forestry professor and Nobel laureate for his work as member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We have to be ready for more active fire seasons more often.”

Fire and climate change

Some researchers say they can pinpoint climate trends as the cause of increased fires.

“Most people with expertise within the wildfire community would say the number of acres burned and the intensity of wildfires is directly related to climate change,” said Don Smurthwaite, communications manager for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.

Since 1975, the region has seen a warming trend due to a 25- to 30-year cycle called the pacific decadal oscillation, said David Peterson, a biological scientist at the U.S. Forest Service and a professor of forest ecology at the University of Washington. This cycle moves between warm and cool periods of weather on a multi-decade scale, which is not related to what most people think of as climate change or global warming. During this most recent period of warmer, drier weather the country has experienced increased forest fires. The majority of acres burned have been in the West and the most severe years for wildfire have come in the last decade.

Some researchers predict climate change will overcome this cycle, leading to warmer weather even in periods that would historically be cooler. Running said the most critical effects of climate change on wildfire come from long, dry summers and earlier snowmelt, which allows mountain ecosystems to dry earlier in the spring.

Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the CATO Institute who studies public landsaid before the year 2000 there were only two years where wildfires burned more than six million acres of protected lands. Since 2000 more than six million acres have burned in the U.S. in six out of nine years.

Still, experts say there’s not a great deal of hard evidence to link increased wildfire to human-induced climate change. Scientists know that fires are increasing and that climate is changing, but they do not know how much of the climate change is part of a natural cycle and how much might be due to human-induced climate change or “global warming.”

Some evidence comes from studies like those being done by Penelope Morgan, a professor of forest resources at the University of Idaho. She and her team have mapped fires as far back as the 17th century in a specific area, and she has seen clear connections between weather and fire.

“The years with widespread fire were years with a warm dry summer after a warm dry spring,” Morgan said. “There is no doubt we will continue to have years with lots of fire. Climate change since 1980 in Idaho and Montana has led to a warmer and earlier spring season more often.”

In the Inland Northwest, climate models predict gradually warming temperatures with no additional summer rainfall, Running said.

Increased fire is a result of both a warmer and drier climate as well as a build-up of fuels like dry brush and dead trees, Morgan said. Those fuels have accumulated since mid-century when the government began aggressively suppressing fires.

Peterson said models predict the biggest increases in wildfire throughout forested regions of the West, including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

The financial side

For its part, the federal government is spending unprecedented amounts of money to suppress Mother Nature.

In the past three years, about $2 billion has been spent annually to fight wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Smurthwaite said the actual amounts could be even higher as financial information is sometimes slow to reach the NIFC from those in the field.

In addition, Smurthwaite said the amounts included in fire suppression do not include treating forests or preemptive measures to curb wildfires. Last year was the most expensive year on record for fighting fires, and the budget is still being tallied, Smurthwaite said.

With a nation in financial crisis some have begun to ask questions about what O’Toole calls a “blank check” the government has written for fire suppression costs.

O’Toole believes the burden of fire prevention should fall more on private landowners and less on the federal government. He suggests homeowners play a more active role in protecting their homes from wildfire.

When humans and fire meet

As the population grows in the Northwest, more people move into areas where wildfires regularly burn.

“There is an expansion of the urban interface," Morgan said. That means more people, like the Mahoney family, could be affected by wildfire. While the Mahoneys chose to rebuild at the location where their house burned in 2003, their neighbors Tom Moore and Karen DenBraven moved after losing their house in the fire.

“The loss of the house was pretty devastating to my wife and I,” Moore said.

Their new house, however, is also in a forested area. Because they know the danger they took precautions; their house is built of steel and concrete to better resist fire. But Moore said he knows there is no such thing a fire-proof house.

“When wildfires get big, humans can’t stop them, no more than we can stop hurricanes,” Running said. “We are at the mercy of nature.”