Alaska’s wildfire season of 2015 may be the state’s worst ever – ‘What happens in the summer of 2015 has the potential to change the whole trajectory for the next 100 years or more’
By Chris Mooney
26 July 2015 FAIRBANKS, Alaska (Washington Post) – Hundreds of wildfires are continually whipping across this state this summer, leaving in their wake millions of acres of charred trees and blackened earth. At the Fairbanks compound of the state’s Division of Forestry recently, workers were busy washing a mountain of soot-covered fire hoses, which stood in piles roughly six feet high and 100 feet long. About 3,500 smokejumpers, hotshot crews, helicopter teams and other workers have traveled to Alaska this year from across the country and Canada. And they have collectively deployed about 830 miles of hose this year to fight fires. An hour north of the state’s second-biggest city, firefighters were attacking flames stretching across more than 31,000 acres, including an area close to the Trans-Alaska pipeline system, which stretches from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. And that’s just one of about 300 fires at any given time. “People don’t fathom how big Alaska is. You can have a 300,000-acre fire, and nobody knows anything about it, because nothing’s been done about it, because of where it is,” says Tim Mowry, spokesman for the Alaska Division of Forestry. The staggering 2015 Alaska wildfire season may soon be the state’s worst ever, with almost 5 million acres already burned — an area larger than Connecticut. The pace of the burn has moderated in the last week, but scientists say the fires are just the latest indicator of a climatic transformation that is remaking this state — its forests, its coasts, its glaciers, and perhaps most of all, the frozen ground beneath — more than any other in America. Alaska has already warmed by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past half-century, much more than the continental United States. The consequences have included an annual loss of 75 billion metric tons of ice from its iconic glaciers — including those covering the slopes of Denali, the highest peak in North America — and the destabilization of permafrost, the frozen ground that underlies 80 percent of the state and whose thaw can undermine buildings, roads and infrastructure. Also pummeled are the state’s Arctic coastlines, which are facing intense erosion as seas rise and declining sea ice exposes shores and barrier islands to punishing waves. The situation has grown so bad that some native communities, including tiny Kivalina, Alaska, sitting on a barrier island along the Chukchi Sea, may now have to be relocated, given the dangerous loss of land to the sea. Earlier snowmelt transforms the state further. In 2015, the starting place of the Iditarod sled dog race had to be relocated north, to Fairbanks, because there wasn’t enough snow on the ground in some places. But arguably the most dramatic change — threatening to transform the state’s 126 million acres of forests and, perhaps, worsen climate change in the process — is occurring with the state’s wildfires. Alaska’s forests make up 17 percent of the U.S. total, and while they’ve always burned, they may now be entering a major new combustive period. The blazes are so intense and extensive that they could transform an entire ecosystem, even as the fires also hasten the thawing of permafrost — which itself contains vast quantities of ancient carbon, ready to be emitted to the air. “The more severe the fire, the deeper that it burns through the organic layer, the higher the chance it will go through this complete conversion,” says Ted Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University who spends summers in Fairbanks and specializes in studying permafrost. “What happens in the summer of 2015 has the potential to change the whole trajectory of [the burned area] for the next 100 years or more.” [more]
Alaska’s terrifying wildfire season and what it says about climate change
Don’t start making things easy for the do-gooders. Never do anything that might benefit other people. Don’t ever let this become a better world for any future generation; you should only be in this life for yourself.
Don’t ever recycle; fill this world with as much rubbish as you can generate. Do not conserve resources; go ahead and waste reserves for the simple goal of keeping other people from getting their share. Squander the environment – it’s there for your use. Be as petty as turning the thermostat to the max and leaving the water running – or you can be as grandiose as spreading something incurable in the crevices of the social body.
Do not participate in the community. Be hostile, not hospitable. Be intimidating, not intimate. Be arrogant, not affable. Don’t give a shit about anyone else – not just because you are a selfish bastard, but because strong social ties make totalitarianism all that much easier. The more the neighborhood is bonded together, the greater the tyranny.