Winter is not normally thought of as wildfire season. We normally think of wildfires occurring in summer or early fall after hot temperatures and lack of rain make many parts of the the western US a tinderbox. Yet, inexplicably, wildfires are raging outside Golden Colorado, the headquarters of Coors Beer, and a city about five miles from where I grew up in a western suburb of Denver. Wildfires. In March.
Three wildfires fueled by tinder-dry vegetation and fanned by high winds forced the evacuation of 320 homes in the foothills west of Denver on Monday, fire officials said.
The largest blaze, the Indian Gulch fire, has blackened 700 acres and his threatening 750 homes, Jacki Kelley, spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, told Reuters.
I lived in Colorado from 1963 until 1988. I remember late Spring snowstorms in the mountains which would extend the ski season. I remember years where snow melted early cutting short ski season. I do not recall winter or spring wildfires growing up. Yet apparently, in the Western United States, winter wildfires are becoming more frequent. Here is some information from NOAA’s website regarding the wildfires in February of this year:
February is not typically considered part of the U.S. wildfire season, with fire activity typically being low during the month. However, dry and warm conditions across the southern and southeastern U.S., particularly the second half of the month, were associated with an early start to the 2011 wildfire season. […] The 8,226 new wildfires that occurred during February 2011, marked the highest February wildfire count on record, and the 187,021 acres (75,685 hectares) was the second most February acreage burned, behind February 2008 when 214,183 acres (86,677 hectares) burned. […]
According to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), at the end of February, the nationwide number of fires year-to-date was 9,752, which burned 204,373 acres (82,707 hectares), with an average of 21.0 acres (8.5 hectares) per fire. This marks the largest number of fires for the year-to-date period and the fourth largest acreage burned since records began in 2000.
Unfortunately, official national statistics on wildfires only go back to the year 2000, unlike official temperature data, for which we have records going back over a hundred years. We do know the earth and North America has warmed significantly since 1850, with each decade since the 70’s being the hottest on record. Since our data on wildfires is so limited it is is difficult to say whether this trend of winter and early spring wildfires is related to climate change.
However, increased risk of wildfires is consistent with climate change models that predict increased drought, water shortages, and desertification in the Western United States. We know that less ice in the Arctic is a contributing factor to droughts in the Western United States as the Arctic ice cap has shrunk much faster than predicted in earlier climate models. From a San Diego news report in 2007, I found this information:
Three years ago, computer forecast models predicted that in 2050, the reduced ice mass would cause climate shifts that would result in a drought in the western United States.
But the ice is melting far faster than climatologists thought it would.
So much ice has disappeared that the Arctic today looks much like what scientists thought it would in 2050. It’s as if the atmosphere hit the fast-forward button.
The predicted climate changes also may have arrived, with much of the West in the midst of the kind of severe drought that geoscientist Jacob Sewall had envisioned for 2050.
Since 2007, arctic ice coverage and the volume of Arctic ice has decreased even further in both the summer and winter months
Sea ice extent averaged over the month of February 2011 was 14.36 million square kilometers (5.54 million square miles). This was a tie with the previous record low for the month, set in 2005. February ice extent remained below normal in both the Atlantic and Pacific sectors, particularly in the Labrador Sea and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. […]
February 2011 tied February 2005 for the lowest ice extent for the month in the satellite record. Including 2011, the February trend is now at -3.0 percent per decade.
Here’s a graph that shows the decline in Arctic ice volume from 1980 to 2010:
Here’s a link to a graph that shows the decline in Arctic ice coverage in the winter months from 1979-2011, and the summary by NSIDC scientists of what they have observed.
While ice extent has declined less in winter months than in summer, the downward winter trend is clear. The 1979 to 2000 average is 15.64 million square kilometers (6.04 million square miles). From 1979 through 2003, the February extent averaged 15.60 million square kilometers (6.02 million square miles). Every year since 2004 has had a mean February extent below 15 million square kilometers (5.79 million square miles).
The decline in summer ice volumes and extent has been well documented, also, so I wont bore you with a repetition of the data that supports those findings.
Are the Colorado wildfires, and the increase in winter wildfires in the United States in 2011, directly linked to climate change, particularly the decline of sea ice in the Arctic as a result of warming temperatures there over the last several decades? I cannot say that the decline is Arctic sea ice is directly causing the increase in wildfires this year.
What I can say is that the increased drought conditions we are seeing now in the Western United States as a result of a decrease in Arctic ice were originally predicted by climate models to occur in 2050. We now know that loss of summer and winter sea ice is occurring much more rapidly than those models predicted. The earlier climate models, in short, were too conservative regarding their predictions.
However, those models did predict a decline in sea ice, and also predicted that sea ice decline would lead to increased drought conditions and desertification in the American West. We also know that drought conditions lead to an increased risk of wildfires, even in winter months. And we know that this year there have been a record number of winter wildfires, tying 2005.
Dick Cheney famously stated that when it came to the threats to our country the 1% doctrine should apply:
Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: “Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty.
I think we can safely say global climate change on a scale that was unimaginable only a few short decades ago has a much more likely probability of occurring than one percent, don’t you? We have already seen the occurrence many of the extreme events that climate scientists predicted: severe storms, severe floods, severe droughts, increased wildfires, dramatic declines in sea ice in the Arctic, hotter summers, the loss of species, the effects on agriculture worldwide (e.g., the decline of the Columbian coffee harvest due changing climactic conditions), and so on and so forth.
Yet our governments do not act, and our media does not inform the public of the very real risk we are taking by not addressing the climate change crisis. Governments (especially in the US of A) refuse to take the advice of their own scientists. They ignore the very events to which we have all borne witness, or they simply (in the case of Republicans) simply flat out deny climate change is occurring, even those, such as John McCain, who once acknowledged that global warming was real and was primarily caused by human activity.
We are bombing Libya today to “preserve human life.” Our military forces occupy Iraq and continue to fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan because of the “unimaginable risks” they allegedly posed, risks we now know were confabulated, exaggerated or outright lies.
Yet, we in America do nothing with respect to an “unimaginable risk” for which we have reams of data and evidence. Republicans propose to cut funding for the EPA and for the promotion of alternative, carbon free alternative clean sources of energy. Meanwhile our world is burning, both figuratively and literally.
If a 1% risk of terrorist attacks justifies trillions of dollars of wasted defense spending (spending our Congress will not cut) why do we ignore a threat to our nation and our world that has been shown to be significantly higher. Insurance companies take global climate change seriously as a threat to their business. The Pentagon planners take climate change seriously as a national security risk. Yet our media and our politicians do not, whether out of ignorance or cowardice or greed. They squabble and fight and deny and act like fools in a lifeboat that is sinking.
There is a famous line in the film Lawrence of Arabia in which Peter O’Toole as Lawrence states that:
[S]o long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel …
Today, I think he would say that line about Americans. Meanwhile, in the Colorado mountains just outside Denver, mountains I no doubt once climbed and where I no doubt once hiked as a child, wild fires burn in March.
Back in the 1970s, I worked as a quality control statistician. Among the displays of data I worked with were control charts for the output of machines.
The chart in your diary is very interesting. What will grab most people is the overall downward 30-year slope of the time series.
What is more interesting has to do with those blue bands. They represent one and two standard deviations from the trend line, a measure of the variability under conditions of randomness. Beginning in 2006, there is a downward trend that exceeds two standard deviations away from the trend line in 2007 and 2010. Routine quality control control-charters would say that the process is “out of control”, meaning that the data after 2006 cannot be totally attributed to random variation. In a manufacturing environment, the engineers would be called in at this point to try to establish what is going on with the machines and to make corrections.
This is among the data that puts a lie to the assertion that global climate change is just normal variation.
Here in Colorado we’ve been under fire alerts for weeks now, due to high winds, dry ground, and much warmer than average temps. Check out the current weather alert map:
http://weather.weatherbug.com/CO/Colorado%20Springs-weather/severe-weather/local-alerts.html?zcode=Z
5467&alert_state=CO&alert_fips=08035
Everything in yellow is a fire alert. In addition to Golden, there is a fire in the south near Rocky Ford. The Rocky Ford one is actually bigger, but getting less attention due to its relative remoteness.
http://www.gazette.com/articles/golden-114959-acres-fire.html
But don’t mention global warming to a local around here in Wingnut Central.
It is true hat oil is very much in the Libya equation. But I don’t believe it explains why we (and our allies) have gotten involved, in the way we have gotten involved. Why? Because if our concern was solely for the oil, we might just as readily have supported Qadafi as the rebels. In fact. more readily. I am not aware that Qadafi had been playing games with oil supply before the rebellion. And if he was indeed certain to win against the rebels, as many more or less official US spokespersons asserted, the logical thing would have been to stay out of it and pretty soon we’d be back with the oil, compliments of Qadafi. (That’s called “Realpolitik”: doing the nasty thing just because it’s nasty: for as we know, “nice guys finish last”.)
It is true that prolonging the rebellion gives the oil companies and particularly the speculators the opportunity to jack up the price of oil for the duration. Artificially, because Libya, with all its oil, accounts for only a tiny fraction of the world oil supply. If that is the real reason for getting involved, it is bad and would also seem to be a trap for Obama (long-term high oil prices). However, the way he has positioned the US in the effort suggests that he is well aware of this.
I think the goal of the allies is to stymie Qadafi and his forces to the point where the rebels can finish this themselves.
The One Percent Doctrine only applies to situations where we bomb stuff. I mean, like, obviously.
Of course I agree with your basic point. but this is purely rhetorical way to frame the issue, and not a good one. It has the form: if a bogus, extreme approach to risk assessment is taken in foreign affairs, why isn’t that same bogus, extreme approach taken with environmental problems?
Paul Rosenberg at Open Left:
” The normal way of calculating potential losses is to multiply the potential loss by the probability. A 1% probability of even a terrible loss is still enormously different from a 100% probability. What’s more, treating it as a certainty would entail acting in a manner that ignores any costs involved in the potential over-reaction. We may not know what those costs might be. They could be quite high, or they could be relatively trvial. But if we do not even stop to consider them, then we are not even attempting to engage in a rational process. This can be especially disastrous if we actually increase the probabily of what we fear by assuming it to already be certain. There is also, of course, the chance that concentrating on one improbably threat may distract us from attended to other, more imminant and credible threats.
“Thus, whatever the reasons for Cheney’s approach embodied in the “one percent doctrine”, it is perfectly clear that it is not a normal procedure for those accustomed to dealing with threats, it does not accurately assess the threat involved, nor does it consider the existence of additional threats that it may actually enhance or even create where they do not presently exist.”
This is an absolutely valid criticism of Cheney’s bogus doctrine but it would also apply to climate-change fears IF the Cheney doctrine were used to support them. It is not a good argument for anything.
I agree we shouldn’t apply the one percent solution. That point was used to contrast the insanity with which we assess terror threats like an Al Qaeda style event (rare) to the refusal to acknowledge threats from climate change for which the evidence is overwhelming and the damage extremely likely to be far greater (at least according to the CIA and Pentagon).
We certainly ought to apply the 97% solution (i.e., 97% of climate scientists who have published in the field agree that climate change is occur and that human activity is the primary driver of that change) and the fact that we are not makes us a civilization headed for catastrophe.
Unfortunately the climate has warmed enough for the beetles to ravage the once healthy forests and we seem to be getting more wind than I remember as a kid so we end up with conditions which allow for the fires to start and then the sickened trees are a perfect fuel.
That is absolutely true about the mountain pine beetles (known as “MPB” to foresters), and similar species. I haven’t heard any evidence for wind getting worse. In fact, I remember as a kid on the western slope in Colorado absolutely cursing the wind many times. We had some particularly interesting high school tennis matches due to extreme winds. And on the front range warm high winds are a wintertime tradition.
But as to MPB, in the central front range last year was the best year in decades due to a combination of one really nasty cold spell (which tends to kill off the larvae) and a much wetter than normal spring which strengthened the trees. This past winter we did have two nasty cold spells, so that is hopeful, but it has been the driest winter in many year so no one knows what the MPB season will be like. This part of Colorado is known for big snows in April, often bookended by 70F days, so we’re hoping for some of those to help with the dryness. Otherwise we might see another bloodbath (or should I say “barkbath”?) of dead pine trees.