Climate Outside: Wet and Dry

photo: NY Daily News


Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground on Tuesday:

"Nature's fury reached new extremes in the U.S. during the spring of 2011, as a punishing series of billion-dollar disasters brought the greatest flood in recorded history to the Lower Mississippi River, an astonishingly deadly tornado season, the worst drought in Texas history, and the worst fire season in recorded history. There's never been a spring this extreme for combined wet and dry extremes in the U.S. since record keeping began over a century ago, statistics released last week by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reveal."

Also on Tuesday, the head of the Forest Service testified before a Senate committee:

"As fires like the voracious Wallow Fire spread throughout the Southwest, the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Interior are being pressed to offer solutions. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, one of the witnesses present at the hearing, cited research from within the service to link fires and climate change.

"Throughout the country, we're seeing longer fire seasons, and we're seeing snowpacks that, on average, are disappearing a little earlier every spring," he said, as well as devastating droughts. As a result, fire seasons have lengthened by more than 30 days, on average.

"Our scientists believe this is due to a change in climate," said Tidwell....

According to the daily fire site report released by the National Interagency Fire Center, 1.2 million acres is burning in the United States, nearly two-thirds of it in the Southwest.

Committee Chairman Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) introduced discussion on several funding and management initiatives from U.S. public lands agencies... Bingaman tied many of this year's natural disasters to climate change in his opening address, citing the recent "America's Climate Choices" report from the National Academy of Sciences.  "Since climate change will continue into the future, we can expect the incidences of severe weather and the further drying out of the already arid regions of the West to continue," he said.

Also taking on the connection between wildfires and climate change, this New Republic article:

"The Wallow wildfire is still raging after more than two weeks, today becoming the largest wildfire in Arizona history. The Wallow wildfire has already burned over 733 square miles, but as of yesterday, only 18 percent had been contained, with more than 4,000 firefighters working to put it out. The monster fire has some people wondering—does climate change mean there will be more fires like this in the future?

Probably, scientists say. A study by A.L. Westerling and H.G. Hidalgo called “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Fire Activity” found that wildfire frequency in the western United State “increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s.” The authors argue that climate change is a better explanation for the increase in wildfires than land-use change alone, although land-use changes have also had an effect. As temperatures rose, the average number of wildfires quadrupled between 1987 and 2003, compared to the average number from 1970 to 1986. The total area burned also increased by six and a half times. The average season length (time between first wildfire and last) increased 64 percent. Additionally, the authors found a correlation between wildfire frequency and the timing of the first snow melt.

Westerling and Hidalgo note that climate change will likely exacerbate these trends. “Virtually all climate-model projections indicate that warmer springs and summers will occur over the region in coming decades,” they note. “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.” They also fear a feedback loop. Citing studies that estimate that western forests capture 20-40 percent of CO2 in the United States, Westerling and Hidalgo note that sparser forests cannot absorb as much carbon, further increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and exacerbating the greenhouse effect. If current temperature trends continue, we could be putting out a lot more fires."

But maybe if they just arrest some hikers who may or may not have neglected to put out their camp fire, everything will be okay.  And so it's fine for GOPers in the House to cut disaster preparedness funding by $1.5 billion, and for Mittless Romney to advocate for the privatization of FEMA and disaster relief, which is sure to be a profit center for the future.