More Wildfires, More Beetle Kills

   

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded with "very high confidence" that in North America "disturbances such as wildfire and insect outbreaks are increasing."

With respect to wildfire, the IPCC based this conclusion on a recent study that, in the words of the IPCC, "established a sudden and dramatic increase in large wildfire activity in the western USA in the mid-1980s closely associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snow melt." The study, by Anthony Westerling at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other researchers, found that in the western United States in the 17 years after 1987, compared with the 17 years before then, there has been:

  • A 78-day increase in the length of the fire season.
  • A four-fold increase in the number of fires.
  • A five-fold increase in the time needed to put out the average wildfire.
  • A 670% increase in the area being burned.

With respect to bark beetles, as a result of an "unprecedented combination of drought and warm winters" that have enabled tree-killing mountain pine beetles to explode in population, the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado State Forest Service recently predicted that the beetles "will likely kill the majority of Colorado's large diameter lodgepole pine forests within the next 3 to 5 years."

 

          
             
 

"Fire has emerged as more and more a mega-catastrophic risk like we saw with Katrina. The financial exposure is huge, well into the billions."

Carole Walker, Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association (2007)

"Another example of the ecological consequences of climate change involving insects and affecting adaptability is the devastation of millions of acres of western U.S. and Canadian pines by bark beetles during the warmth and drought of 2000 to 2004."

National Science and Technology Council, Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States (2008)

             

For more information, see chapter 4 of the RMCO/Natural Resources Defense Council report, Hotter and Drier: The West's Changed Climate.

   
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