Collide-a-scape

Joe Romm never misses a disaster to beat the global warming drum. You name it– floods, fires, hurricanes–if they’re in the headlines, then he finds a way to connect them to climate change. It’s tricky stuff because he’s smart enough to know that no single climatic event or catastrophe can be pinned exclusively on greenhouse gases. Yet he always suggests that climate change is at least a contributing factor and that disaster X should be viewed like the proverbial “canary in the coalmine”–a warning of what’s to come if carbon emissions are not stabilized.

So it’s no surprise that Romm seizes on the latest California wildlfires in a recent post. He did the same with Australia’s tragic conflagrations last winter. Both times Romm also chastised the mainstream media for not playing up the supposed climate change link. That’s why I’ve taken to calling him a propagandist. To Romm, disasters are convenient “messaging” vehicles.

But it’s highly irresponsible to use wildfires in naturally fire-prone lands that also sit in the urban/wildland interface to dramatize concerns about global warming. Steven Pyne warned against this kind of “misdirection” after the Australia wildfires. So it is with the latest torching in California.

Here is Pyne again, over at Island Press’s blog, trying to educate us about fire:

In fire-prone public lands, where the setting will not convert to shopping malls and sports arenas, some fire is inevitable and some necessary. From time to time a few fires will go feral. Without fire some biotas will only build up combustibles capable of stoking still-more savage outbreaks, and equally, some will cease to function. Fire is a force of “creative destruction” in nature’s economy. Without it, particularly in drier landscapes, nutrients no longer circulate freely but get hoarded. It’s as though organisms hid their valuables in secret caches dug in the backyard or in socks under the bed. The choice is not whether or not to have fire but what kind of fire we wish.

You can listen to Romm or Pyne when it comes to wildfire. That’s also a choice.

This brilliant post by environmental historian Steve Pyne might be the first time that anyone has compared wildfire to Wall Street:

Like economic transactions, fire is not a substance but a reaction – an exchange. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. Its power derives from the power to propagate. To control fire, you control its setting, and you control wild fire by substituting tame fire.

H/T: Resilience Science

There is a simplistic way to talk about the link between climate change and catastrophic wildfires and other natural disasters:

The science makes clear that many extreme weather events have increased in recent years — and that there is a link to climate change.

You can  shout from the rooftops:

CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story–never mention climate change

NBC News ignores climate change, blows bark beetle story

The NY Times Blows the Wildfire Story

The NY Times Blows the Drought Story, too

USA Today ignores the Link Between Extreme Weather and Climate Change

AP Blows the Extreme Weather Story

Or, you can be grounded firmly in science and still be declarative, as demonstrated by RealClimate in this post on the recent Australian wildfires:

So, did climate change cause these fires? The simple answer is “No!”

And you can still be nuanced and mature at the same time, in the same post:

While it is difficult to separate the influences of climate variability, climate change, and changes in fire management strategies on the observed increases in fire activity, it is clear that climate change is increasing the likelihood of environmental conditions associated with extreme fire danger in south-east Australia and a number of other parts of the world.

It’s your choice. In the next post I’ll talk about why the environmental community is going to have to decide on which which approach to take.

Residents in Boulder, Colorado got spanked by their sheriff this weekend, for their chuckle-headed behavior during a January 7 fire that forced the evacuation of 25,000 people. At a community meeting, the lawman chastised homeowners

who filled pickup trucks with numerous personal items and left them parked in front of their driveways until they had to evacuate. That delayed rescue and notification attempts by firefighers.

Touching on a problem all too common in the West, the sheriff also was concerned that Boulderites

aren’t taking preventive measures around their property to keep fires at bay, such as clearing brush and stacking firewood away from decks.

Boulder residents better wise up or they’ll be on their own next time around. “If you don’t want to help yourself, we’ll just walk away. I’m serious about it,” the sheriff warned, according to the Denver Post.

Yeah, right.

But the message may well have gotten through, if anyone is paying attention to the news out of Australia.

Journalists love it when scientists cut right to the chase in a journal paper. It means we don’t have to read the abstract. Just kidding.

But we will pounce when your title is, Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions.”

Predictably, we will “go all doomsday” in our interpretation, as the good scientists at Real Climate have discovered. Fortunately, the experts there are trained to talk us off the ledge:

“…let’s not confuse Irreversible with Unstoppable. One means no turning back, while the other means no slowing down. They are very different words. Despair not!”

It’s worth reading their entire post to beat back that despair.

But for my money, this other paper, published the same week, in the same journal, should be getting as much play. It’s title, “Wildfire responses to abrupt climate change in North America,” may not be a throat-grabber, but its findings–of an apparent link between increased wildlfires and abrupt climate change–are worth contemplating for their present-day implications. The West is already expected to burn more in the decades ahead, due to global warming and longer dry spells.

If I’m reading this study correctly, then there’s a dangerous feedback loop we need to watch out for, translated as: increased temperatures from global warming trigger more frequent fires, which then could trigger even more abrupt climate change.

Interestingly, though, the big news generated from this paper is its refutation of the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis–which is that a large comet wiped out the saber-toothed tiger and the rest of his mega fauna gang that roamed North America 13 centuries ago. That evidence was marshaled in this 2007 publication.

The authors of the new, comet-busting study base their findings on ancient charcoal and pollen records, which they say don’t show evidence of continent-wide conflagrations. This fireball scenario–triggered by shock-waves from a supposed extrraterrestrial impact–is at the core of the the pro-comet argument.

So if ET didn’t kill off the mastodon, who or what did? The anti-comet folks speculate that

“Paleoindians may have increased fire activity directly by setting more fires or indirectly by reducing megafaunal populations. The decline in megafaunal populations, in turn, could have increased fuel loads and changed soil moisture regimes, both of which could have promoted fire.”

It always seems to come back to us, don’t it?