Warnings from 2007: The Age Of Megafires
(CBS) This story was first published on Oct. 21, 2007. It was updated on Sept. 3, 2009. […] 60 Minutes joined up with Tom Boatner, who after 30 years on the fire line, became chief of fire operations for the federal government. “A fire of this size and this intensity in this country would have been extremely rare 15, 20 years they’re commonplace these days,” Boatner says. “Ten years ago, if you had a 100,000 acre fire, you were talking about a huge fire. And if we had one or two of those a year, that was probably unusual. Now we talk about 200,000 acre fires like it’s just another day at the office. It’s been a huge change,” he adds. Asked what the biggest fires now are, Boatner says, “We’ve had, I believe, two fires this summer that have been over 500,000 acres, half a million acres, and one of those was over 600,000 acres.” “You wouldn’t have expected to see this how recently?” Pelley asks. “We got records going back to 1960 of the acres burned in America. So, that’s 47 fire seasons. Seven of the 10 busiest fire seasons have been since 1999,” Boatner says. “You know what? It’s hotter than hell right here,” Pelley remarks. “It’s been pretty damn hot,” Boatner says. “You can imagine the challenge for young men and women with hand tools like this to come up here and put out a fire like this, but there’s thousands of people down there with multimillion dollar homes that are counting on them to do that.” […] The severity of the burning and size of the fires caught the eye of Tom Swetnam, one of the world’s leading fire ecologists. He wanted to know what’s touched off this annual inferno and whether it’s truly a historic change. At the University of Arizona, Swetnam keeps a remarkable woodpile, comprised of the largest collection of tree rings in the world. His rings go back 9,000 years, and each one of those rings captures one year of climate history. Swetnam found recent decades have been the hottest in at least 1,000 years. And recently, he and a team of top climate scientists discovered something else: a dramatic increase in fires high in the mountains, where fires were rare. “As the spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, the snow on these high mountain areas is melting and running off. So the logs and the branches and the tree needles all can dry out more quickly and have a longer time period to be dry. And so there’s a longer time period and opportunity for fires to start,” Swetnam says “The spring comes earlier, so the fire season is just longer,” Pelley remarks. “That’s right. The fire season in the last 15 years or so has increased more than two months over the whole Western U.S. So actually 78 days of average longer fire season in the last 15 years compared to the previous 15 or 20 years,” Swetnam says. Swetnam says that climate change — global warming — has increased temperatures in the West about one degree and that has caused four times more fires. Swetnam and his colleagues published those findings in the journal Science, and the world’s leading researchers on climate change have endorsed their conclusions. But what was news to the scientists is something Tom Boatner has noticed for about ten years now. “This kind of low brush would normally be really moist and actually be a fairly good barrier to fire. But as I look at this I just see wilted leaves everywhere. There’s no moisture left in them. They’re dead,” he points out. […] Professor Swetnam wanted to show 60 Minutes just how much has changed, so he brought Pelley to the top of Arizona’s Mount Lemon. Two megafires there killed everything, even the Ponderosa Pines. “You know, I was always taught that Ponderosas were big, robust trees that were built to withstand fire,” Pelley remarks. “And that when everything else burned off, the Ponderosas were still standing. But look at them.” “The Ponderosas are able to withstand the low severity fires where you get flames of maybe one to two or three feet high. But now the behavior of these fires is off the scale,” Swetnam says. Asked how much things have changed, Swetnam tells Pelley, “Well, we’re seeing century-old forests that had never sustained these kinds of fires before, being razed to the ground.” […] “You know, there are a lot of people who don’t believe in climate change,” Pelley remarks. “You won’t find them on the fire line in the American West anymore,” Tom Boatner says. “‘Cause we’ve had climate change beat into us over the last ten or fifteen years. We know what we’re seeing, and we’re dealing with a period of climate, in terms of temperature and humidity and drought that’s different than anything people have seen in our lifetimes.”
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
2 September 2007 Fires of unprecedented ferocity are sweeping around the world, fuelled by global warming and misguided environmentalism. Dubbed “megafires”, they rage over thousands of miles at 1,000C and create their own weather, even triggering tornadoes. Rapidly increasing in number, they are often unquenchable by any human efforts, burning unchecked until they reach coasts or are put out by heavy rainfall.
The devastating fires that have ravaged Greece killed at least 63 people and charred 482,000 acres of land. This summer, as record heatwaves hit much of southern Europe, more than 1.9 million acres have gone up in smoke. Matters are even worse in the United States, where 20 years ago, fires burning over 5,000 acres were relatively rare. In the past 10 years, however, there have more than 200 conflagrations 10 times the size. Last year, 9.6 million acres of the country were devastated, beating an all-time record set 2005. This is the sixth time in the past decade that a record year has immediately been surpassed in the following 12 months. A year ago the Australian state of Victoria suffered 200 fires in a single day. There have also been megafires in France, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Russia, Mongolia, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil. […] Professor Stephen J Pyne, an expert at Arizona State University called the fires “climatic tsunamis”, and Kevin O’Loughlin, the head of Melbourne’s Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre added: “They cannot be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world.”
