Studies are showing that an increase in wildfires is both a product of and a cause of climate change. According to reports in Science Magazine in 2006 and 2009 the trend toward a warmer, dryer climate is leading to more, and larger, wildfires. The increased release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the burning biomass (plant life) is further contributing to a warmer climate. As the environment warms, the average seasonal temperatures increase, leading to earlier spring snow melts and warmer summers. As snow melts away and residual moisture evaporates, the biomass is more prone to burning. Not only are the wildfire seasons starting earlier, they are running later in the year. This scenario allows for the possibility of more wildfires, which leads to further damage and increased expenditure for state and federal firefighting agencies. Scientists are finding this to be the case in the western U.S., especially in the northern Rocky Mountains.
I found five articles related to these studies. On July 6, 2006,
Science Magazine released a report titled “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Wildfire Activity.” On the same day,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps News) published an article about Science Magazine’s article. It is mostly a summary of the Science Magazine article. On April 23, 2009,
Scientific American published a short article about a report which
Science Magazine would post the following day. At present, Science Magazine is only offering an abstract of their full article to non-subscribers. A more recent article (July 27, 2011), published in
The Huffington Post, quotes one of the researchers from the 2006 study and relates the issue to Yellowstone National Park.
The two articles published online on July 6, 2006 reported the same study. The Science Magazine article was longer and more technical in nature than the article published by Scripps News. The Scripps News article gave a good overview of the study without delving too deeply into the technical aspects of the study. This study was based on 1,166 wildfires of 1,000 acres and larger in the western U.S. between 1970 and 2003. By comparing the wildfires with climate data the scientists found a correlation between increasing temperatures and frequency and severity of wildfires. Additionally, they discovered that wildfires were increasing in areas unaffected by humans, just as much as in areas that were altered by humans. Since wildfires often encroach on developed areas, we tend to put great effort into fighting them. In recent years the cost of fighting wildfires has risen to at least $1 billion annually.
The two articles from April 2009 make the point that fire has existed since the first land-based plants appeared. Since plants take in carbon dioxide while they grow, the carbon dioxide gets released back into the atmosphere when they burn. Wildfires play a key role in ecosystems by helping to determine plant distribution and type. Even though humans have been familiar with fire for tens of thousands of years, we are not all that good at managing it. On a local level, wildfires can be devastating to both property and natural landscapes, but collectively, they can play a role in climate change.
The Huffington Post restated some of the points brought up in the above articles, such as, the record-size wildfires in recent years and how wildfires can change landscapes from forests to shrub lands. The article used Yellowstone National Park, a place most Americans have at least heard of, to illustrate the issue. According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Merced, Yellowstone’s entire ecosystem could change due to increased wildfire activity by 2050. Of course this scenario would not be exclusive to Yellowstone. The same effect would be realized in many other areas throughout the western U.S.
