Dear HCN,
I’ve just read Ed
Marston’s column about the Los Alamos fire (HCN, 5/22/00: Yelling
fire in a crowded West). I was disappointed to see no discussion of
the impact of climate change on fire regimes and the occurrence of
catastrophic crown fires in recent decades, despite the severe
drought under which the New Mexico fires have arisen. Although fire
suppression, grazing, and other land-use changes have clearly been
significant in changing fire behavior in some environments over the
last century, catastrophic fires are not simply the result of past
management.
In the case of Yellowstone, various
paleorecords have shown that large catastrophic fires recurring at
intervals of 300-500 years are characteristic of Yellowstone over
the last 3,000 years. The longer records also clearly show that
climate changes are very important in controlling the magnitude and
frequency of fires.
In addition, there is little
scientific evidence of unnatural fuel buildup due to suppression in
Yellowstone; after all, effective fire suppression only occurred
after 1945, with the advent of aircraft support, and before the
start of the natural fire policy in 1972. What is clear in the
instrumental climate record since 1895 is a strong trend toward
increasing summer temperatures and drought that culminated (for the
time being) in the most severe drought of record during the 1988
fires.
Obviously, ponderosa pine forests feature
different climatic and fire regimes than do the lodgepole
pine-dominated forests of Yellowstone, but the role of climate
change in recent catastrophic fires there has received scant
attention from the U.S. Forest Service and the
media.
Recent compilations of instrumental and
tree-ring climate information from over the globe show that in the
20th century the climate is warming more dramatically than it has
in at least 1,500 years. Evidence is mounting that anthropogenic
greenhouse gases are involved in this warming, but it has occurred
regardless of cause. To ignore such large-scale environmental
change and focus simply on management issues alone is also to
ignore realities of nature, as your column decries, and our
potential influence on climate through atmospheric
pollution.
I certainly agree that we could be a
lot more wise in where and how we develop in fire-prone ecosystems,
and how we manage fire, but unfortunately the problem is likely
much bigger than that.
Grant
Meyer
Albuquerque, New
Mexico
The author is an assistant professor of geomorphology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Don’t ignore role of climate change.
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