FORESTS IN THE FIRES OF HELL
The residents of Moscow know something of the Fort McMurray fires that have been raging in the tar sand boreal barrens of northern Alberta, Canada since early May. In 2010 and again in 2012, the city was cloaked in chocking smoke as spruce forests dried to tinder in the Great Russian north burned for weeks. Northeastern Brazil has seen more than its share of massive wildfires, Australia, too. Add China to that list, and the American West, where forest-fire fighting is evolving into a near year ‘round occupation.
Climate-change conflagrations have arrived with a vengeance. Climate scientists have been warning since the epic China woodland fires of 1986, fires that charred 2.5 million acres, that warming global temperatures will threaten the world’s forested lands, putting whole ecosystems at risk. Yet the speed at which the fire storm has been approaching has experts astonished and politicians in the path of the flames praying for rain.
A generation ago, the United State sent half the numbers of firefighters out on fire lines than are deployed today. Resource costs have increased four-fold (adjusted for inflation) in that timeframe. Although wildfires are a natural component of the environment, decades of fire suppression management policies, increased human activity and access to woodlands, increasingly hotter fire season temperatures, and tinder dry fuel add up to an explosive cocktail.
A day or two after the Fort McMurray fires were first reported, daytime temperature reached a record 91 degrees Fahrenheit in the northern Alberta, Canada city, where snow usually stays on the ground until the first of May. That temperature reading shattered the old record by nine degrees. When the winds picked up to 40 miles per hour, the fire exploded through the spruce barrens and into the city, doubling in size every 24 hours. Three weeks from the day the burn was first reported it is still consuming Alberta spruce.
Only a month before, in the dry-land Plains of western Oklahoma and Kansas, huge wildfires had raged over thousands of square miles of grass and rangeland. Although El Nino moisture has brought some relief to portions of parched California, much of the state remains in the clutches of severe, even exceptional drought. Trees are dying of thirst and fire. The Rocky Mountain States have fared a bit better than California, but they recently experienced the same withering heat that delivered Fort McMurray to the gates of hell.
Leave the North American continent and the vistas are filled with haze. It is estimated that in Russia through the summer of 2010, 56,000 people died from the effects of smog, smoke, and extreme heat. In 2009, 173 people perished on “black Saturday” when overwhelmed by vicious fires sweeping across Australia’s Victoria province. In October of last year, it has been estimated that 250,000 separate fires burned within the exceptionally dry Brazilian state of Marauheo.
Fire has always been with us and, in the natural state of things, is common. Before humans began trying to suppress fire for economic reasons and because our towns and cities began encroaching on woodlands everywhere, fires routinely swept through woodlands and cleared out underbrush and light accumulations of dead material. But as man intervened, deadwood began to accumulate in the forests, providing more and more fuel for fires.
Today, with temperatures on the rise and whole regions of the globe experiencing drier weather patterns, the stage is set for catastrophe. In the Northern Hemisphere, continent straddling boreal tree stands clothe most of Canada, Alaska, Russia, and the Scandinavian nations. Immense tracts of pristine boreal forest still grow on millions of square miles in the latitudes above the 50th parallel all the way up to timberline near the Arctic Circle. Subjected now to hotter and drier conditions insures that resin rich spruce and fir tree needles and bark in these forests will burn and burn intensely if ignited. Increasingly, a lightning strike in remote terrain is all that’s necessary to stoke the flames of Hades.
What rattles people who study such phenomena is the reality that what were once common fires are now becoming super fires all over the globe. They are burning hotter and over much greater swaths of terrain. A fire research specialist at the University of Alberta recently remarked that fires now tend to grow twice the size of burns just thirty years ago. Where cool low-intensity fires spare trees and can actually trigger regrowth, very hot fires destroy the environment they ravage.
As the problem intensifies and the 21st century reaches middle age, climate change may very well begin to usher in the collapse of entire forest environments and the native species we are familiar with and eventually replace them with southern species or open grasslands that can withstand the hotter temperatures and drier conditions.
In deep time, geological evidence suggests that swings in climate have been common, but most research indicates that the majority of changes occurred over thousands of years, not a few hundred. The pace of the present shift in the climate regimen is, according to the scientific community, breathtaking. At such a brisk pace of change, flora and fauna will have little chance to adapt to new conditions. Extinction of thousands of species is likely to follow.
Only last week, while weeding in the garden 100 miles inland from the Atlantic ocean in the southwest corner of New Hampshire, the blue of a brilliant high pressure sky exhibited a faint white tarnish. The sheen was courtesy the Fort McMurray wildfires burning more than two thousands miles away. Smoke from the burn had crossed the continent at high altitude aboard jet stream currents and was visible as a gossamer lightness against the blue sky vault.
Yesterday I took a hike within five miles of my home. At the trailhead, the woods to the north smelled of fire extinguished. Charred deadwood and leaves burned to ash were the silent signatures of the flames’ passage on the slopes. Just a small fire, surely, started by a cigarette, probably. I pray that cigarette doesn’t fall in the vast boreal expanses of Ontario or Quebec this spring and summer. A reprise of the Fort McMurray fires here in the East can’t be rule out. If a monster fire were to rage in eastern Canada, we’d see and smell the smoke in New England, riding on winds out of the northwest. Maybe the smoke would blow through the windows on The Hill in Washington, D.C., like the choking Dust Bowl dust off the Great Western Plains did in the Dirty 30s.
Maybe then people might take this burning issue seriously.
