More than 700 square kilometres have burned already (Image: AP Photo/PA/Jae C. Hong)
20:42 27 August 2013 by Peter Aldhous
San Francisco is in a declared state of emergency, its power and water supplies threatened by one of the largest fires on record in California. The blaze is 250 kilometres to the east of the city, on the fringes of Yosemite National Park [ http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/rimfire.htm ]. It is a grim warning of profound changes that may lie ahead, as the western US comes to terms with a new ecology of fire, wrought by climate change.
The state of emergency for San Francisco reflects the fire's close proximity to the Hetch Hetchy reservoir [ http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22459-yosemites-longlost-twin-could-be-resurrected.html ], which provides San Francisco with most of its water and generates hydroelectric power for the city's General Hospital, transit system and airport. The emergency declaration will free funds to secure alternative supplies in the event of major disruption.
Tinderbox conditions
Wildfires have always been a part of life in the US west, but they are on the rise as climate change takes hold. In California's Sierra Nevada mountains, the main problem is the earlier onset of spring. "The snow melts earlier, especially at lower elevations," says Michael Wehner [ http://crd.lbl.gov/about/staff/amsc/scientific-computing-group-scg/michael-wehner/ ] of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a lead author for the US National Climate Assessment [ http://www.globalchange.gov/what-we-do/assessment ]. That gives forests longer to dry out, producing tinderbox conditions by late August.
By threatening San Francisco's power and water, the Rim Fire serves a warning that wildfires can have effects far beyond the area they burn. These will include a surge in air pollution as wildfire activity increases, a new study suggests.
Both are important contributors to PM2.5, a class of microscopic particles that trigger cardiovascular and respiratory problems. Still, it is hard to predict exactly what the health effects of this increased pollution would be, as that depends on whether smoke plumes from major fires engulf major population centres. "Any detriment in air quality is worrisome," says Sarah Henderson [ http://www.bccdc.ca/util/about/UBCCDC/People/Faculty/DrSarahHenderson.htm ] of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, Canada, who studies pollution from forest fire smoke.
Another concern is that scorched forest may not recover – at least not to its former state. Mixed conifer forest, like the area now ablaze, is slowly being replaced at lower elevations by shrub land, which is better adapted to drier conditions. Events like the Rim Fire will accelerate this process, suggests Matthew Brooks [ http://www.werc.usgs.gov/person.aspx?personID=54 ] of the US Geological Survey's Yosemite Field Station in Oakhurst, who is studying fire ecology in the Sierra Nevada.
This, in turn, will reduce the ability of wild lands to mitigate global warming by pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "You've replaced a big sponge with a smaller sponge," Brooks notes.
Time-lapse photography shows various perspectives of the 2013 Rim Fire, as viewed from Yosemite National Park. The first part of this video is from the Crane Flat Helibase. The fire is currently burning in wilderness and is not immediately threatening visitors or employees. The second half of the video is from Glacier Point, showing Yosemite Valley, and how little the smoke from the fire has impacted the Valley.
Colorado is currently experiencing some of the largest wildfires in the state's history. In July, I visited the Bruce Spruce Ranch a little ways outside of Pagosa Springs and watched as the Windy Pass, West Fork, and Papoose wildfires burned thousands of acres of forest. I have never seen such a powerful event up close like this before, it was truly humbling.
Please visit http://whoismatt.com/pagosatimelapse and download this film in high definition. The video itself is 3 Gigabytes in size and looks amazing.
Fascinating NASA Earth Observatory animation shows the annual pulsing of fires (number, not size!) around the world. The space agency's description:
On Earth, something is always burning. Wildfires are started by lightning or accidentally by people, and people use controlled fires to manage farmland and pasture and clear natural vegetation for farmland. Fires can generate large amounts of smoke pollution, release greenhouse gases, and unintentionally degrade ecosystems. But fires can also clear away dead and dying underbrush, which can help restore an ecosystem to good health. In many ecosystems, including boreal forests and grasslands, plants have co-evolved with fire and require periodic burning to reproduce.
The fire maps show the locations of actively burning fires around the world on a monthly basis, based on observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite. The colors are based on a count of the number (not size) of fires observed within a 1,000-square-kilometer area. White pixels show the high end of the count —as many as 100 fires in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day. Yellow pixels show as many as 10 fires, orange shows as many as 5 fires, and red areas as few as 1 fire per day.
Some of the global patterns that appear in the fire maps over time are the result of natural cycles of rainfall, dryness, and lightning. For example, naturally occurring fires are common in the boreal forests of Canada in the summer. In other parts of the world, the patterns are the result of human activity. For example, the intense burning in the heart of South America from August-October is a result of human-triggered fires, both intentional and accidental, in the Amazon Rainforest and the Cerrado (a grassland/savanna ecosystem) to the south. Across Africa, a band of widespread agricultural burning sweeps north to south over the continent as the dry season progresses each year. Agricultural burning occurs in late winter and early spring each year across Southeast Asia.
Monterey firefighters hold the line at the Rim Fire near Yosemite in this undated handout photo released Friday.
AP 6 hr ago Associated Press
Firefighting aircraft are grounded because of low visibility caused by the smoke from the wildfire around Yosemite National Park.
FRESNO, Calif. — Smoke from a wildfire in and around Yosemite National Park is hampering both suppression efforts and the views sought by holiday weekend tourists.
Park spokeswoman Kari Cobb said smoke from the 2-week-old blaze obscured Yosemite Valley for the first time Saturday. The valley is home to the park's most popular landmarks.
A tanker drops retardant on the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park in California in this undated handout photo released on Friday.
Weather forecasts indicate that the dense blanket could stick around until Monday.
Meanwhile, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Mark Healey says firefighting aircraft remained grounded Saturday morning because of low visibility caused by the smoke.
Healey says officials are concerned about a 150-acre spot fire that crossed a road and prompted an evacuation order for homes near the west entrance of Yosemite.
As of Saturday, the entire wildfire has burned 343 square miles, up from 333 square miles a day earlier.
Congress' Logging Bills Face Opposition From Hundreds Of Scientists
House Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., holds a news conference on Friday, May 18, 2012. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
By SCOTT SONNER 11/02/13 01:08 PM ET EDT
RENO, Nev. (AP) — More than 200 biologists, ecologists and other scientists are urging Congress to defeat legislation they say would destroy critical wildlife habitat by setting aside U.S. environmental laws to speed logging of burned trees at Yosemite National Park and other national forests and wilderness areas across the West.
The experts say two measures pushed by pro-logging interests ignore a growing scientific consensus that the burned landscape plays a critical role in forest regeneration and is home to many birds, bats and other species found nowhere else.
"We urge you to consider what the science is telling us: that post-fire habitat created by fire, including patches of severe fire, are ecological treasures rather than ecological catastrophes, and that post-fire logging does far more harm than good to the nation's public lands," they wrote in a letter mailed to members of Congress Friday.
One bill, authored by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., would make logging a requirement on some public forestland, speed timber sales and discourage legal challenges.
The House approved the legislation 244-173 in September and sent it to the Senate, where it awaits consideration by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The White House has threatened a veto, saying it would jeopardize endangered species, increase lawsuits and block creation of national monuments.
Hastings, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said wildfires burned 9.3 million acres in the U.S. last year, while the Forest Service only harvested timber from about 200,000 acres.
Hastings' bill includes an amendment by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., which he also introduced as separate legislation specific to lands burned by this year's Rim Fire at Yosemite National Park, neighboring wilderness and national forests in the Sierra Nevada.
"We have no time to waste in the aftermath of the Yosemite Rim Fire," McClintock said at a subcommittee hearing in October. "By the time the formal environmental review of salvage operations has been completed in a year, what was once forestland will have already begun converting to brushland, and by the following year, reforestation will become infinitely more difficult and expensive."
The Rim Fire started in August and grew to become one of the largest wildfires in California history. It burned 400 square miles and destroyed 11 residences, three commercial properties and 98 outbuildings. It cost $127 million to fight.
Members of the House Natural Resources Committee remain optimistic the Senate will take up Hastings' bill before the end of the year, said Mallory Micetich, the committee's deputy press secretary.
"We have a lot of hazardous fuel buildup, and it will help alleviate some of the threat of catastrophic wildfires," she said.
The scientists see it differently.
"Just about the worst thing you can do to these forests after a fire is salvage-log them," said Dominick DellaSala, the lead author of the letter. "It's worse than the fire itself because it sets back the recovery that begins the minute the fire is out."
DellaSala, chief scientist at the conservation group Geos Institute in Ashland, Ore., was on a team of scientists that produced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's final recovery plan for the spotted owl in 2008.
Many who signed the opposition letter have done research in the field and several played roles with the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service in developing logging policies for the threatened northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest.
"Though it may seem at first glance that a post-fire landscape is a catastrophe ecologically," they wrote, "numerous scientific studies tell us that even in patches where forest fires burned most intensely, the resulting post-fire community is one of the most ecologically important and biodiverse habitat types in western conifer forests.
"Moreover, it is the least protected of all forest types and is often as rare, or rarer, than old-growth forest due to damaging forest practices encouraged by post-fire logging policies."
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
