Megafires not perfect storms, just the new normal
A Skycrane helicopter surveys the Chimney Fire to drop water as flames erupt in Juniper Trees July 23, 2012, near the Lee Reservation about 14 miles south of Spring Creek, Nev. / AP Photo/Elko Daily Free Press
(TomDispatch) Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire's "perfect storm."
They are only half right.
This summer's conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of it as a "storm," perfect or otherwise -- that is, sudden, violent, and temporary -- then you don't understand what's happening in this country or on this planet. Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West.
For some time, climatologists have been warning us that much of the West is on the verge of downshifting to a new, perilous level of aridity. Droughts like those that shaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the even drier 1950s will soon be "the new climatology" of the region -- not passing phenomena but terrifying business-as-usual weather. Western forests already show the effects of this transformation.
If you surf the blogosphere looking for fire information, pretty quickly you'll notice a dust devil of "facts" blowing back and forth: big fires are four times more common than they used to be; the biggest fires are six-and-a-half times larger than the monster fires of yesteryear; and owing to a warmer climate, fires are erupting earlier in the spring and subsiding later in the fall. Nowadays, the fire season is two and a half months longer than it was 30 years ago.
All of this is hair-raisingly true. Or at least it was, until things got worse. After all, those figures don't come from this summer's fire disasters but from a study published in 2006 that compared then-recent fires, including the record-setting blazes of the early 2000s, with what now seem the good old days of 1970 to 1986. The data-gathering in the report, however, only ran through 2003. Since then, the western drought has intensified, and virtually every one of those recent records -- for fire size, damage, and cost of suppression -- has since been surpassed.
New Mexico's Jemez Mountains are a case in point. Over the course of two weeks in 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned 43,000 acres, destroying 400 homes in the nuclear research city of Los Alamos. At the time, to most of us living in New Mexico, Cerro Grande seemed a vision of the Apocalypse. Then, the Las Conchas fire erupted in 2011 on land adjacent to Cerro Grande's scar and gave a master class in what the oxygen planet can do when it really struts its stuff.
The Las Conchas fire burned 43,000 acres, equaling Cerro Grande's achievement, in its first fourteen hours. Its smoke plume rose to the stratosphere, and if the light was right, you could see within it rose-red columns of fire -- combusting gases -- flashing like lightning a mile or more above the land. Eventually the Las Conchas fire spread to 156,593 acres, setting a record as New Mexico's largest fire in historic times.
It was a stunning event. Its heat was so intense that, in some of the canyons it torched, every living plant died, even to the last sprigs of grass on isolated cliff ledges. In one instance, the needles of the ponderosa pines were not consumed, but bent horizontally as though by a ferocious wind. No one really knows how those trees died, but one explanation holds that they were flash-blazed by a superheated wind, perhaps a collapsing column of fire, and that the wind, having already burned up its supply of oxygen, welded the trees by heat alone into their final posture of death.
It seemed likely that the Las Conchas record would last years, if not decades. It didn't. This year the Whitewater Baldy fire in the southwest of the state burned an area almost twice as large.
Half Now, Half Later?
In 2007, Tom Swetnam, a fire expert and director of the laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, gave an interview to CBS's "60 Minutes." Asked to peer into his crystal ball, he said he thought the Southwest might lose half its existing forests to fire and insects over the several decades to come. He immediately regretted the statement. It wasn't scientific; he couldn't back it up; it was a shot from the hip, a WAG, a wild-ass guess.(Above, watch a 2009 re-broadcast of that "60 Minutes" piece)
Swetnam's subsequent work, however, buttressed that WAG. In 2010, he and several colleagues quantified the loss of southwestern forestland from 1984 to 2008. It was a hefty 18%. They concluded that "only two more recurrences of droughts and die-offs similar or worse than the recent events" might cause total forest loss to exceed 50%. With the colossal fires of 2011 and 2012, including Arizona's Wallow fire, which consumed more than half-a-million acres, the region is on track to reach that mark by mid-century, or sooner.
William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of seven books, most recently "A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest" (Oxford, 2011). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses where heat, fire, and climate change are taking us, click here or download it to your iPod here. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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"CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to 'come roaring back'. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998."
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz22OZUH0xD
Thanks raptor-022, for proving that louie doesn't bother to read HIS LINKS that HE PROVIDES, past one sentence that agrees with his ultra-conservative ideology and religious denialist B.S. LOL!
He will continue to post crap from anthony's WUWT denier BLOG site, as well as tell us all that CO2 is a plant food, and that no level is too high because warming is good, and that drought, flooding and MegaFIRES are not "that bad".
"I guess the MET office of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit must be 'divorced from reality'"?
***************
From your MET link, something you missed in your haste:
Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible -- because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun's output is likely to decrease until 2100, 'This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.' Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: 'Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.'"
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz22OVr8P6o
So while this MET paper suggests that findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years, they "would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases."
And why?
"because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide."
Next time, try reading your ENTIRE LINK, instead of cherry-picking the parts that agree with your ideological and political views!
"CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to 'come roaring back'. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998."
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz22OZUH0xD
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYup_vNcoEs
LOL! Roger Pielke, Jr. has a doctorate in political science -- not climatology or anything close to even weather -- and much of his comments and work have proven to be controversial, and frequently cited by global warming denialists. Dr. Pielke has published hundreds of articles in a variety of publications, and some of his statements and arguments have attracted significant controversy.
-------------------------------------------------------
In debate we discuss the points made since you didn't do that I guess you found nothing to fault his point which he is very qualified to make.
The point the WMO made a baseless claim that the IPCC predicted weird weather when no such predictions were ever made, in other words they (WMO) lied. The reason they lied is obvious they want the money to keep flowing and their actual predictions they have made in the past have all failed because they don't know what they are doing.
Unless you can point to an actual prediction issued by the IPCC years ago we are done here, your phony personnal attack to muddy the water a massive fail.
Why are those so interested in muddying the waters with politics, the same ones that use that ridiculous argument, when there is plenty of consensus among real scientists -- especially climatologists?
loserville2: "And the CO2 temp link has been effectively broken since global temps have not risen in 15 years"
LOL! Only those divorced from reality miss the fact of rising global temperatures!
Of the three surface temperature records (HadCRUT3, NASA GISS, and NCDC), only HadCRUT3 actually shows 1998 as the hottest year on record. For NASA GISS and NCDC, the hottest year on record is 2010, tied with 2005. What's more, globally, the hottest 12-month period ever recorded was from June 2009 to May 2010.
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I guess the "MET" office of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit must be "divorced from reality"?
Oh and ANYTHING coming out of GISS is garbage run by astronomer activist James Hanson....
"The supposed 'consensus' on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz22Cj1MEBN
Your whole movement is full of liars and frauds.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/02/05/global-warming-has-stopped-how-to-fool-people-using-cherry-picked-climate-data/
"According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the 'Dalton minimum' of 1790 to 1830."
This suggests like many believe that the sun's output is declining.
But, on the other hand, you link also says:
"Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible -- because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun's output is likely to decrease until 2100, 'This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.' Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: 'Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.'"
Maybe you missed that part of your linked-story, in your haste to frame it in your ideological terms just like political scientist, Roger Pielke, Jr.
But the facts certainly speak for themselves.
LOL! Only those divorced from reality miss the fact of rising global temperatures!
Of the three surface temperature records (HadCRUT3, NASA GISS, and NCDC), only HadCRUT3 actually shows 1998 as the hottest year on record. For NASA GISS and NCDC, the hottest year on record is 2010, tied with 2005. What's more, globally, the hottest 12-month period ever recorded was from June 2009 to May 2010.
The implication, or outright statement, that global warming stopped (or reversed itself) after 1998, is one of the all-time favorites of denialists.
WAITING FOR GLOBAL COOLING
April 2008
There is very little justification for asserting that global warming has gone away over the past ten years, not least because the linear trend in globally-averaged annual mean temperatures (the standard yardstick) over the period 1998-2007 remains upward.
http://www.aussmc.org/documents/waiting-for-global-cooling.pdf
"Several regions of the world are currently coping with severe weather-related events: flash floods and widespread flooding in large parts of Asia and parts of Central Europe while other regions are also affected: by heatwave and drought in Russian Federation, mudslides in China and severe droughts in sub-Saharan Africa. While a longer time range is required to establish whether an individual event is attributable to climate change, the sequence of current events matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
Even though the IPCC report can be parsed in many ways, I await the textual exegesis that supports the claim that the "sequence of current events matches IPCC predictions." This will be difficult given that the IPCC didn't even make projections for 2010. I welcome in the comments efforts to justify the claim by the WMO.
I am coming to the conclusion that there is something about the climate issue that makes people -- especially but not limited to academics and scientists -- completely and utterly lose their senses. The WMO statement is (yet) another example of scientifically unsupportable nonsense in the climate debate. Such nonsense is of course not going away anytime soon .
But because various unsupportable and just wrong claims are being advanced by leading scientists and scientific organizations, it would be easy to get the impression that on the issues of extreme events and climate change, IPCC science has a status similar to interpretations of Nostradamus and the Mayan calenders."-Roger Pielke, Jr.
Pielke earned a B.A. in mathematics (1990), a M.A. in public policy (1992), and a Ph.D. in political science, all from the University of Colorado at Boulder -- making his opinion on climatology or even on the issues of hurricanes and climate change, of little value!
Roger A. Pielke, Sr. is an expert in the fields of Meteorology, Climatology, and Earth System Science -- whereas junior is nothing but a poli-sci mouthpiece for the deniers of climate change! LOL!
"PRESS RELEASE - July 29th, 2012 12PM PDT - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France's Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.
The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network."
From the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
"Summertime, and the twisters are missin'
July heads for a record-low tornado count
Bob Henson | July 24, 2012 • Heat and drought are punishing much of the United States right now, but there's actually some good weather news to report. This month is on track to produce fewer tornadoes than any July on record, and by a long shot.
As of July 23, this month has produced a paltry total of 14 tornado reports, according to preliminary data from NOAA's Storm Prediction Center (SPC). While there could be more twisters before month's end, a major outbreak doesn't appear likely at all.
The chart below shows just how unusual this month has been, compared to past Julys. Graphed in blue are the final July tornado counts from the 1950s (when modern records began) to 2011. The next-most-quiet July after 2012 is 1960, which saw a total of 42 tornadoes—three times what we've seen thus far this month. Many Julys have produced more than 100 twisters.
Chart showing actual and inflation-adjusted U.S. tornado reports for July, 1954-2011
The number of U.S. tornadoes reported each July (blue line) has gradually risen since the 1950s, with more observers and cameras watching the skies. The red line shows an estimate of how many tornadoes might have been observed if modern observing technologies and practices were in place throughout the entire period. The blue diamond at lower right shows this year's July total: a mere 14 tornadoes, as of the 23rd of the month. (Data courtesy Harold Brooks, NOAA Storm Prediction Center; illustration by Wes Shifrin, © UCAR.)
The results get even more interesting when you adjust the numbers for "report inflation." Tornado reports have gradually increased since the 1950s, especially for weak twisters. This appears to be a byproduct of the steady growth of interest in storm spotting and tornado chasing, along with the advent of inexpensive, high-quality digital photo and video tools. The attention and technology have combined to boost the reported numbers of weak tornadoes, whereas the strongest ones are being observed about as often as they were 50 or 60 years ago—a clue that it's observing practice rather than climate change behind the trend.