Wildfire close to home

Looking out my home office window, Mt. Tamalpais can be seen through the haze of smoke that has drifted north from San Diego. Appropriately, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story today about how the homes on the slopes of Mt. Tam are one of the most at-risk homes in the Bay Area.

We've had a few days of heavy rain and it's tempting to think that the fire season is over for us. We haven't had anywhere near the heat and extended drought of San Diego. Yet a fire department engineer stationed on the slopes of the mountain told the reporter, "We regularly take the fuel moisture reading here, and the fuel load right now is at 64 percent. Sixty-six percent is what we consider critical, so I'd say we have to be pretty careful right now."

Not your father's wildfire

Yeah, Southern California is a natural desert area and yes, it gets especially dry every year in early fall. And yes, the Santa Ana winds blow every year creating a heightened risk of fast-moving fire. But this year the conditions were different. It had been hotter and drier through this past summer. The winds blew harder. And housing development further into the brush was just tempting disaster.

My friend, Paul, who lives in San Diego, tells me that San Diego County used to have a 40 acre minimum lot size in the backcountry and there was intense debate on changing the zoning. In what is called GP 2020, the general plan is to make room for a million more residents by 2020. Here's a Sierra Club call for action sent to its members in 2003. It calls for lower density development, lower population and (as a result) less commute traffic in what was were the rural boundaries of eastern San Diego. It could be argued that development alone did not cause the current firestorm, but obviously the exposure of more housing to the potential of wildfires stretches the ability of fire departments to respond and protect. In other words, you move into one of those developments and YOU'RE ASKING FOR IT. Impacts on insurance, taxes, lives and our collective emotions are unavoidable.

The Chief of the U.S. Forestry Service, Gail Kimbell, says, "Fires are burning hotter and bigger, becoming more damaging and dangerous to people and to property. Each year the fire season comes earlier and lasts longer." And as the same S.F. Chronicle article points out:

The 16 wind-blown fires that forced the largest mass evacuation in California history may or may not be the result of climate change, but studies have shown that the hot drought conditions that fed the flames are becoming more common.

The flames stretching from Malibu to the Mexican border struck during the driest year in Southern California history. Measurements taken by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection detected less than 10 percent moisture in the region's vegetation. The moisture level in kiln-dried lumber is generally 12 percent.

"They got less rain than they've ever gotten," said Hugh Safford, a Forest Service ecologist. "Any time you have a dry year like this one, you are going to get fires."

It is so dry that state forestry officials said a newly shod horse started a fire earlier in the year from the sparks it created running on the pavement.

Chronically drier than normal conditions promotes the growth of invasive plant and insect species that may add to flammable material. We all know about the bark beatles that are killing off conifers and leaving forests of firewood. And sources of ignition - specifically lightning - are predicted to increase with the increase of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Other experts quoted in the Chronicle article pointed out that the Santa Ana winds had sustained longer than usual in fanning the San Diego flames. And though none could say for sure that the fire was a result of climate change, it was undeniable that the smoke from the fires is contributing to global warming.

One link that can be made, according to Tom Bonnicksen, a California forest and wildfire expert, is how the fires are contributing to global warming. Almost 20 million tons of greenhouse gases - the equivalent of what is emitted in one year by 3.6 million cars - have been spewed into the atmosphere, he said.

"The problem isn't global warming causing fires," he said. "The real problem is these fires contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming."

All of which could be a foreshadowing of worse problems in the future. Kimbell said the fire threat in California and other states is more severe because cities are now pushing up against the wilderness.

Things NOT To Do: Move to a Fire Trap

If the story of California is the story of its water resources, the story of its alpine forests is the story of human mismanagement, natural conflagration and rising fire risk. Unfortunately, we humans are taking what you might call a "counter-adaptive path" to living with that risk.

I admit, I love the Sierra Nevada, the mountains that John Muir called "the range of light." And I've often entertained the thought of us one day moving to the foothills just to be closer driving distance to that magical place. But every time I pass an expanse of burnt-over forest, the black charcoal-encrusted snags and the baked ground between them, and every time I picture the video of a raging foothill forest fire, I wack myself upside the head. What am I thinking????

So, fear has squelched my dream of living in the foothills but there's more than enough people to replace folks like me. In terms of risk management, California is not doing a very good job of it since the number of people moving into these drying, dying forest areas on the Western slopes of the Sierra increased by 16% during the Nineties. And 94% of planned new home development is also within high fire danger areas. What are they thinking????

"There is a tremendous amount of population growth going on in these extreme fire danger areas," said Autumn Bernstein, the [Sierra Nevada] alliance's land use coordinator and the author of the 45-page study, entitled "Dangerous Development: Wildfire and Rural Sprawl in the Sierra Nevada."

"Unless Sierra counties can start to change the way they are growing, we are going to have a much bigger fire problem on our hands," she said.

Like all forested lands, the Sierra is subject to the weakening of its forests by changing climate and the infestations that prey on vulnerable trees. The forests will only become more flammable with time.

Europe - fires, flood planning and policy making

Never underestimate how fast a fire can move through vegetation in a state of drought. In Greece, following weeks of extreme heat, wildfires have roared through rugged terrain, killing at least 49 people.

Hot, dry seasonal winds drove the flames across a landscape parched by successive heat waves. Reduced winds and a slight dip in temperatures were forecast for Sunday.

The fires were so severe that authorities said they could not yet provide an estimate of how much damage they had caused, nor what expanse of land had been burned.

Meanwhile, in England, where towns are still reeling from this summer's flooding, a report by the Hull City Council called for a national program to improve defenses against more extreme flooding that will come with climate change. The defenses suggested would mainly be improved drainage systems, able to handle a once-every-30-years flood.

Over 7,200 homes and 1,300 businesses were damaged in Hull during its wettest June since 1882.

The low-lying city relies on a system of pumps to keep flooding at bay, and the report questioned whether the existing capacity was capable of handling a 1 in 30 year storm.

Finally, from Germany comes word that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is currently enjoying her highest popularity since taking office, pledged to fight climate change in the second half of her term. Yes, it may just be policitics, but let's hope not.

The centrepiece of the cabinet's plans is a list of energy saving measures to fight climate change which will help reduce CO2 emissions by 36 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.

"For the first time in the history of modern Germany, we have moved beyond defining goals towards agreeing on concrete steps on climate change," Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told German television.

Although it will take up to a year to pass the new laws, Germany wants to set the tone for the global climate debate ahead of a U.N. meeting in Bali in December which will try to launch new talks for the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

An Insider's Account of Arizona's Plight

Tonight on the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown narrated a tour of the many serious wildfires currently burning up the drought stricken West, from the Black Hills to Utah to Nevada and both northern and southern California. Hot and wind conditions with protracted dryness set up forests, shrublands and grasslands for instant ignition by lightning.

Arizona has also had wildfires burning across its northern region and Jeffrey Brown interviewed Lisa Graumlich, director of the School of Natural Resources at the University of Arizona about the situation (hint: it's not a happy one).

Here are some sobering quotes from Dr. Graumlich:

Well, this is actually starting to become a bit of a norm. The drought that we're currently in actually started in 1999 and has persisted. And it's been a drought that's not only been severe, but it's been very pervasive.
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So as the entire climate system warms, the movement of the jet stream that brings, you know, moisture to us here in the West from the Pacific Ocean has started to migrate north. And arguably it's sort of going to sort of continue to move north and create a permanent dust bowl-type situation here in the Southwest.
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...the fires that you were talking about now are almost becoming a way of life for us. In the last five years, almost 20 percent of the forested land in Arizona has burned. We're also seeing massive mortality of the pinion pine, the sort of beautiful pine forest that cover much of the northern part of New Mexico and Arizona.
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In the legal terms, we have junior water rights compared to California. So if the drought deepens and if Colorado River water needs to be divided, we're going to find ourselves in a pretty sticky situation, in terms of negotiating our way into some sort of sustainable system here.

Pot Warming, King Frog Settling

As the extended drought conditions continue to fuel the 200,000-acre burn in Florida and Georgia, self-styled king, George W. Bush, is responding to the Supreme Court's rebuke of his administration's de-clawed EPA.

President Bush responded Monday to the Supreme Court's rebuke of his administration for refusing to regulate greenhouse gases by rehashing a plan from his State of the Union speech to boost ethanol and tinker with fuel efficiency standards.

In essence, though, the Prez is stalling for time and could end up doing nothing through the remaining 18 months of his term.

"In effect, the president asked his agency heads to share ideas and come up with a plan that is due three weeks before he leaves office," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming

So the remarkable granite-hard denial at the top of the most well-endowed government in the world continues. For the rest of those 18 months, at least, it appears that we won't have much - if any - leadership in realistic action from the White House.

As to the wildfires in the Southeast, they're another example of how our human settlement patterns fail to accomodate the realities of the natural world and the probable effects of climate change.

Florida in particular has undergone an explosion in population – a growth of about 13 percent between 2000 and 2006. This has meant that more and more people are pushing into rural areas. In dry weather conditions, such regions can be rife with dry, crackling brush – ideal kindling for a wildfire sparked by a bolt of lightning, discarded cigarette butt, or another trigger.

In years past, foresters worked hard to clear this brush with controlled burns. Now, however, with more homes in these areas, the options for intentional burns are more limited.