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Fire, Ice and Burning Tundra

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

When the poet Robert Frost wrote about the world ending in fire or ice, he probably didn’t have global warming in mind. However, given the geophysical circumstances, fire is eroding ice, as the tundra burns.

As climate warms, the area of forest burned by wildfires in the United States may increase more than 50 percent by 2050, with the most impact in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains, where burned areas may rise by 78 and 175 per cent respectively. “Wildfires, such as those in California earlier this year, are a serious problem in the United States and this research shows that climate change is going to make things significantly worse,” said Dr. Dominick Spracklen, from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom. “Our research shows that wildfires are strongly influenced by temperature. Hotter temperatures lead to drier forests resulting in larger and more serious fires,” said Spracklen.

Wildfires add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as effectively as SUVs — and they can be just as anthropogenic. More fires and more carbon dioxide retain more heat in the air, reinforcing the warming cycle. In 1991, 13 percent of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget was spent on firefighting; by 2006, however, that figure was 43 percent.

In the meantime, Antarctica’s Pine Island glacier has been moving toward the sea at four times the speed of ten years ago, according to NASA satellite surveys. This glacier is key (like a cork in a bottle) to the stability of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Much of the glacial ice melt there (as in Greenland, which is melting at the edges) is provoked by slowly warming ocean waters.

Tundra on Fire

In 2007 fires north of Alaska’s Brooks Range singed 1000 square kilometers, a larger area than all recorded fires on Alaska's North Slope during the previous half-century. The number of tundra fires is accelerating, according to Adrian Rocha of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, because “projected changes in climate over the next century — increased aridity, thunderstorms and warming in the Arctic — will increase the likelihood that these thresholds will be crossed and thus result in more larger and frequent fires.”

A year after such a fire, the most severely burned tundra emitted twice as much carbon as undamaged tundra normally stores away. William Bowden, a wetland ecologist of the University of Vermont, said that fire-blackened surfaces increase the amount of water in soil. "Both factors should promote soil warming [and] permafrost thaw," as well as thermokast formation, he said. Thermokasts are areas of collapsed terrain where structurally important permafrost has thawed, often damaging foundations of homes, roads and pipelines.

During the summer of 2009, fires burned across the tundra of Siberia and Alaska. This is a worldwide trend. Peat fires have raced through tropical Indonesia in recent years, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. As I write, California is burning again in what now seems like a year-round cycle caused in part by heat and devastating drought. Fires in Australia have been chasing hungry kangaroos from the Outback to cities such as the capital, Canberra.

Southern California Burning

Reports from fires in Southern California during October of 2007 were apocalyptic — more than a million people routed from their homes, many huddled in stadiums and fairgrounds, highways choked with the fleeing multitude, hundreds of homes burned to the ground, firefighters completely overwhelmed as a hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, heating as they descended from the mountains, drove flames through brush dried by a record drought, burning 500,000 acres within a week in 100-degree afternoon temperatures and air nearly devoid of humidity. The phrase “environmental refugees” is being used more often, and the fires and late-October highs in the 80s along the East Coast are being tied into global warming on the NBC Evening News. In some cases, the fires moved so quickly that firefighters found themselves trapped as they wrapped themselves in fireproof aluminum fabric to survive.

Even before the fires of 2007, scientists had warned that they were coming. Fires that charred nearly three-quarters of a million acres in California during the fall of 2003 could presage increasingly severe fire danger as global warming weakens more forests through disease and drought. Warmer, windier weather and longer, drier summers could result in higher firefighting costs and greater loss of lives and property, according to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Forest Service. Both the number of out-of-control fires and the acreage burned are likely to increase, more than doubling losses in some regions, according to a study published in the scientific journal Climatic Change. While the study examined Northern California, "the concern for Southern California would be much higher," because that region is drier for longer periods, said researcher Evan Mills of the Lawrence Berkeley lab.

According to this study, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will provoke fires that “burn more intensely and spread faster in most locations.” The models developed by Mills and his colleagues, Jeremy S. Fried, Margaret S. Torn, show the number of “escapes” (fires that exceed initial containment efforts) doubling over present frequencies. Contained fires also burn 50 percent more land under the warmer and windier conditions anticipated with a doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

The researchers stressed that their projections “represent a minimum expected change, or best-case forecast. In addition to the increased suppression costs and economic damages, changes in fire severity of this magnitude would have widespread impacts on vegetation distribution, forest condition and carbon storage, and greatly increase the risk to property, natural resources and human life.” The researchers projected at least a 50 percent increase in out-of-control fires in the south San Francisco Bay area and a 125 percent increase in the Sierra Nevada foothills, with a more than 40 percent increase in the area burned.

Bruce E. Johansen is a professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and author, in 2009, of Hot Air and Hard Science: Dissecting the Global Warming Debate and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Global Warming Science and Technology.