Colorado: Global warming a factor in severe wildfires - Summit County Citizens Voice

Wildfire season getting longer, experts say

Firefighters in Summit County, Colorado, battle a small fire in late March, 2012, while standing on a berm of snow, a testament to unusually early wildfire conditions. Photo by Bob Berwyn.

By Bob Berwyn

SUMMIT COUNTY â€" A rapidly intensifying fire season across the West is a warning of what to expect in a world that’s heating up, according to a panel of climate scientists and environmental advocates who this week held a teleconference to point out links between global warming and wildfires.

“We know that climate is already warming. The disastrous fires we’ve seen fit into a pattern of increased fire risk … it’s a vivid image of what we can expect more of as the world warms more, said Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a long-time member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“We’re seeing a window into what global warming really looks like. It looks like heat, it looks like fires,” Oppenheimer said.

He said most climate models agree that the American Southwest is particularly prone to increased dryness, along with warmer temperatures.

This year’s extremely early disappearance of the Rocky Mountain snowpack also meshes with forecasts that wildfire seasons will get longer. Already, snowpack across the West is melting on average about two week earlier than just a few decades ago.

Most climate models also predict more extremes, like the wild pendulum swing of the last two winters in Colorado, going from near all-time record snow to record drought in a span of just 12 months.

“As I sit here in Missoula, for once, we aren’t the ones who have smoke plumes rising in the distance,” said Steven Running, an Earth scientist at the University of Montana.

“It’s a weird situation. West of the Continental Divide, around Glacier, we had the wettest June on record. To the east, it’s dry … I’ve never seen that kind of proximity of extreme events in my life,” Running said. When we talk about extremes and climate change, we’re seeing this situations that are really quite unprecedented,” he added.

Speaking to an audience that included Easterners, Running explained that summer showers doesn’t make up for a dry winter.

“Summer rainfall does not really do much for our ecosystems here … it evaporates away that day … the story of fires starts with snowpack. Our ecoystems are carried by winter snowpack,” he said.

“When it melts earlier, it sets us up for a long, dry summer. If you have the winds, the ignition … there’s nothing humans can do to stop this kind of holocaust,” he said. “We have a situation where very early in the summer seeing conditions and fire behavior that we usually wouldn’t see until August.”

Running went on to explain how warmer average temperatures, and the absence of extreme winter lows, have enabled bark beetles to start breeding earlier, killing more trees and exacerbating the fire danger.

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Filed under: climate and weather, Drought, Environment, forest fires, global warming, wildfires Tagged: | climate change, global warming, pine beetles, Wildfires