Pervasive drought and record temperatures have turned forests across California into tinderboxes. And it’s only getting worse
n May this year, the nearly unthinkable happened in the Pacific Northwest: The rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula, one of the wettest places on the continent, caught fire. By August, an inferno was stirring in the forests east of the Cascades. A wind-whipped blaze near the mountain town of Twisp, Washington — a “hell storm,” to quote a local sheriff — claimed the lives of three Forest Service fire scouts.
The human imprint on the bone-dry conditions that lead to fire is real — and now measurable. According to a major new study by scientists at Columbia and NASA, man-made warming is increasing atmospheric evaporation — drawing water out of Western soil, shrubs and trees. In California alone, the epic drought is up to 25 percent more severe than it would have been, absent climate change. And this impact doesn’t respect state borders.
The tragedy of climate-driven megafire is that the fires themselves worsen global warming by pumping megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is especially true north of the Arctic Circle. For the past 5,000 years, the Arctic Alaskan tundra was too frigid and too wet to support significant wildfire. That changed in 2007, when a massive blaze ripped through Alaska’s North Slope.
“This drought is unlike any we’ve ever experienced,” Maia Bellon, the director of Washington state’s Department of Ecology, said in May. It has primed the region to burn. Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington, says the sudden drying of overgrown forests created a “perfect storm” for big fires in eastern Oregon and Washington. “It leads us,” she says, “to a tinderbox situation.
By 2080, according to the National Climate Assessment, the median acreage burned in Pacific Northwest wildfires is likely to quadruple. So what does that mean on the ground? Instead of a once-in-20-years event, the type of megafires now ravaging Oregon and Washington could be expected to occur one year out of every two.f fire is inevitable, there’s a glint of good news: America can get much smarter about how it fights wildfire, by making simple changes to the funding of the Forest Service.
With the Northwest ablaze, Congress is responding. The reform effort is championed by Western lawmakers, including, ironically, Republicans who have either denied climate change exists, like Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, or fought controls on greenhouse gases, like Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho.
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