Fire on the Mountain
According to this post on the Earth Observatory:
Between January 1 and September 12, 2006, a total of 8,653,883 acres of land had burned in the United States, exceeding the totals for the same period of any other year since 2000.As noted earlier, the fire season this year is showing no signs of quitting. And scientists say the uptick in wildfires is consistent with a heating climate.
4 Comments:
global warming has little to do with forest fires. It always gets hot and dry in the summer. Unfortunately, limiting grazing, closing roads, and notlogging, leads to the conditions we now see in the forest. Lots of tall dry grass to carry fire, no roads to get equipment near fires when they are small, and overgrown forests with lots of dead and dying trees.
I don't think anyone is arguing that global warming is the only factor involved, but to say it always gets hot and dry in the summer is to completely ignore the science, which finds that rather than high temps and a lack of precipitation, per se, it's the early onset and longer duration of the higher temperatures and drought that have increased the intensity and duration of the fire season.
As to your points about increased fuel, it's certainly true that overgrown forests and heavy undergrowth are certainly a factor but that is, as much as anything, the legacy of aggressive logging and fire supression.
anonymous misses some of the point; we had no drought in the area this year, in fact plentiful precipitation increased the amount of grass that used to be grazed but is now allowed to grow up and die becoming fuel for fires. There certainly is less fire supression now than in the past which is another reason we are burning the 70+ year old trees rather than restoring the forests to a healthy condition. The point being that increased fuels means we should reduce the risk of catastrophic fire by increasing grazing, aggressively pursue fire suppression (by leaving roads open for fire fighting equipment) and remove trees. Just because questionable policies of the past have changed the conditions to the present is not a good reason to abandon the forest and utterly destroy watersheds by ignoring the fact that man has forever changed the planet. Get out and look at the unnatural invasions by plants of the areas that are burned and you will realize that the forests will never regenerate into the same forests they were before man arrived on the scene.
I read these comments and I think, "how sad." For a blog on a Sierra Club website, these comments are so anthropocentric. Part of the problem in the last 100 years has been shifting baselines with our perceptions of what is natural and our efforts at fire suppression. Fire has been a naturally occurring means of clearing fuels that would feed large, hot fires from times before we came to this continent. Old growth tends to handle wildfires when they occur on a regular basis. Look at old photos of Yellowstone and Sequoia NPs, compare them to recent ones, and see how we've changed them by fire suppression.
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