With California’s deadliest fire on record finally contained, CNN ran an op-ed yesterday from Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke that set out to explain “What it will take to prevent deadly wildfires.”
“California is a tinderbox”, Zinke writes in one paragraph (he must be particularly proud of this wording, because he also tweeted it). “ The ongoing drought, warm temperatures, insect infestations, poor forest management, continued residential and commercial expansion into the wildland-urban interface and other factors have made the western United States more prone to fire.”
This is absolutely true. And absolutely undercuts Zinke’s focus on forest management. The drought, warmth, and insects he mentions are all factors that are driven by climate change.
Obviously, global warming makes things warmer, so the “warm temperatures” part of the equation is pretty straightforward. The Forests chapter of the NCA points out that higher temperatures and an earlier snowmelt have lengthened wildfire season in the West. If that trend continues, the NCA says, annual area burned could increase by as much as 6 times.
Similarly, those warmer temperatures make drought worse, so climate change’s one-two punch of hotter, drier weather is certainly part of what makes California a tinderbox. The Southwest regional chapter of the NCA says that the area burned by wildfires in the West between 1984 and 2015 was twice the size as it would have been without warming.
Then there’s the insect infestation--a reference to the pine beetle, which has led to widespread tree death across the West. They, too, are helped along by climate change: warmer winters keep the bugs from freezing, allowing them to continue eating trees through the winter and expand their range further. All of this contributes to the fact that insects are now killing more trees than has ever been documented since Europeans landed on the continent.
In fact, insects are killing even more trees than wildfires, so while fires may be more dramatic, a pestilence is already upon us.
Drought also weakens trees’ defenses (yes, they have defenses) and makes them more susceptible to beetle outbreaks. Specifically, the NCA’s Forests chapter notes that the drought in California between 2011 and 2017 triggered a pine beetle outbreak that contributed to the death of nearly 130 million trees. And once those trees are dead, they’re prime fuel for future fires.
All together, climate change is warming temperatures, making droughts more frequent and severe, and making forests more vulnerable to insect infestations. These are the first three factors Zinke listed, yet he suggests no solutions to address them nor explains their connection to climate change. Instead, he focuses on fire management.
But this conclusion contradicts what the Trump administration's own report says--that the area that burned between 1916 and 2003 was “more closely related” to climate change factors than it was to forest management factors.
Not that Zinke and Trump will accept the report’s conclusions. That just makes it harder to take their fire concern seriously, since they’re so intent on adding more fossil fuel emissions to the flames.
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