Yelling
“fire” in a crowded room is the iconic example used to distinguish free speech
from license. Falsely claiming there was a fire in a crowded room would be
punishable license because it could cause a panicked stampede resulting in
injury. Episode 2 of Years of Living Dangerously treads dangerously close to
license, as the producers present a completely one-sided biased view of forest
fires purposely trying to incite climate panic. Those of us who have studied
forest ecology for the past few decades have understood that bigger more
destructive fires have been the result of fire suppression and a growing
population. As the USA added 100 million people since 1970, more and more
people moved into more forested areas and changes in fire frequency are skewed
by the number of fires ignited by humans.
For
example the Arbor Day Foundation reports that more
than 83% of forest fires in 2006 were started by human activities, accounting
for the burning of nearly 4.4 million acres. In 2004, wildfires in Alaska
burned more than 5 million acres, the worst year for Alaskan fires. However
426 fires were started by humans and only 275 were natural fires ignited by
lightning. In 2003 California’s “Fire Siege” the first of several
fires was set during military artillery practice. The biggest fire, the Cedar
Fire, happened when a signal fire got out of control.
While
using movie stars to bludgeon us with the idea that all bad things must be due
CO2 climate change, “Years of Living Dangerously” committed huge sins of
omission. There
is a wealth of scientific research regards the effects of fire suppression and
natural cycles. Instead Arnold Schwarzenegger yuks it up with firefighters on
the frontline.
The
episode then exploits human tragedy by highlighting the recent death of a “hot
shot” crew. And Arnold (scientist?) then marries the tragedies by telling us
CO2 climate change is making fires bigger, more frequent, and more dangerous. But
Arnold never tells us forests that naturally experienced fires every 5 to 40
years, had built up dangerously high fuel loads.
During the 20th century
era of fire suppression the US Forest Service’s “10 AM rule” dominated, and
every attempt was made to extinguish all small fires by 10 AM the next day.
Normally those small fires would burn longer and spread further and create a
mosaic of forest patches. The remaining forest patches were then buffered from
any new fires that started in a neighboring patch and large catastrophic fires
are very rare in mosaic habitats. A patchy forest also prevents widespread
beetle infestations.1 Until the media’s recent attempts to
promote climate fear, forest ecologists had always complained fire suppression
was promoting larger beetle infestations. A list of research on the effects of
logging, fire suppression and natural cycles on beetle infestations can be
found here. Yet “Years of Living Dangerously” simply
blames climate change.
In
1996 one of the fire experts interviewed in “Years of Living Dangerously”,
Thomas Swetnam wrote:
“The
paradox of fire management in conifer forests is that, if in the short term we
are effective at reducing fire occurrence below a certain level,then sooner or
later catastrophically destructive wildfires will occur. Even the most
efficient and technologically advanced fire fighting efforts can only forestall
this inevitable result. It is clear from many years of study and published works that
the thinning action of pre-settlement surface fires maintained open stand
conditions and thereby prevented the historically anomalous occurrence of
catastrophic crown fires that we are experiencing in today’s Southwestern
forests”2 [emphasis
added]
However
there are other forests at higher elevation that naturally burn every 100 to
300 years. Over that time fuel loads naturally build to dangerous levels. When
those forests burn it is usually catastrophic. So Swetnam also co-authored a
paper with Westerling, suggesting the increase in fires since 1970s is likely
do climate change and that paper became the “scientific basis” for this episode
of “Years of Living Dangerously”. They cited warm temperatures and dry weather
associated with those large catastrophic fires but they confused weather for
climate and their paper only diagnosed 3 decades of trends and only the largest
fires (see graph below). However the authors did admit, “Whether the changes
observed in western hydroclimate and wildfire are the result of greenhouse
gas–induced global warming or only an unusual natural fluctuation is
beyond the scope of this work.” [emphasis added]
Nonetheless instead of
providing a greater historical framework to critique natural cycles that last
60 to 200 years, they promoted untested speculation and simply reported that
all the models predict more fires due to CO2 warming in the future.
Figure
from Westerling 2006
But
all catastrophic fires for the past several centuries have been associated with
warm dry conditions. Months of dry weather accelerated the biggest fires in
written history. Swetnam himself had published papers showing southwest forest
fires were far larger and far more frequent between 1700 and 1900 as seen in
his published graph (Fig.5 below)

Other authors echoed the same findings.
Estimated from early journalists’ accounts of fire throughout the Rocky
Mountain region, modern fires burn less than one-fourth of the land
that had burned historically. Fire ecologists debating how great an area
needs to be burned to restore the natural fire regimes reported a
“comprehensive assessment of burning in the contiguous United States and estimated
that approximately 3 to 6 times more area must be
burned to restore historical fire regimes.”1 The Westerling
paper shows a peak in 1988, driven largely by the Yellowstone fires that burnt
about 800,000 acres. In comparison The
Great Fire of 1910 was a wildfire that
burned about three million acres (approximately the size of Connecticut) in
northeast Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana. From a historical
point of view, the Yellowstone fire was modest.
The Peshtigo
Fire of 1871 (in and around Peshtigo, Wisconsin) caused an
estimated 1,500 deaths possibly as many as 2,500. It consumed about 1.5
million acres, an area approximately twice the size of Rhode
Island. The combination of wind, topography and fire that created
the firestorm that is now known as the Peshtigo Paradigm. Those elements that created
the fire were studied and recreated by the American and British military during
World War II for the fire bombings of German and Japanese cities. Nonetheless
the Peshtigo fire happened the same time as the Great Chicago Fire, so it did
not get a lot of media attention. However the combination of those catastrophic
fires prompted a fearful public to speculate that comets, meteorites or aliens
were behind those firestorms, and one must wonder if blaming CO2 for recent
fires is driven by the same lack of scientific understanding.
The
USA embarked on an era of fire suppression as early as 1886 when the U.S. Army
began to patrol the newly created National Parks. But fire suppression to
preserve natural resources had unintended consequences. The consensus among
fire experts is “Fires generally become less frequent and more severe with
active suppression on the landscape” “Modern wildfires on late seral landscapes
tend to be larger, more intense, and more severe because of high biomass
loadings, multilayer stand structures, and the high connectivity of the biomass
at the stand and landscape level.” “The end result of fire exclusion in
fire-prone forests is increasingly synchronous landscapes dominated by large,
catastrophic disturbance regimes.”1
The
Westerling paper argued that the greatest absolute increase in large wildfires
occurred in Northern Rockies forests where fire exclusion has had little impact
on natural fire regimes because those forest had only burned every 100 to 300
years and the era of fire suppression was too short to play a significant role.
So they suggested that earlier springs due to climate change had caused the
increase in catastrophic fires in that region.
However a study by the US Forest
service concluded fire suppression has played a major role in the Rocky
Mountains.1 The picture below near the Yellowstone River from 1871
shows a landscape dominated by grasslands and a mosaic of forest patches
(Figure 1C below). After a century of suppression, a photograph of the same area
from 1981 (Figure 1D below) shows a vast expanse of interconnected forest with
a high fuel load now dominating landscape and primed for a huge fire. Until
that landscape recovered from the 1800s fires, large catastrophic fires would
impossible.

Large fires
have always been a natural occurrence in these regions. What is unprecedented in
recent decades are the tremendous swathes of dense forest. (Also notice contrary to
global warming theory, trees confined to the higher elevations had migrated to
lower elevations.) Furthermore the sudden uptick in recent forest fires
beginning in the 1970s correlates with a change in forest management. Land
managers now recognized the importance of small natural fires and that the resulting habitat mosaic prevented devastating fires as well as promoted biodiversity. The “10 AM” rule was
dropped and small fires were allowed to burn. The 3 decades of fire suppression
simply delayed the inevitable as forests recovered. Catastrophic fires in
Yellowstone were the result of small fires that were now allowed to burn.6
The
American West also experiences decades of drought driven by natural ocean
cycles. Most extreme climate events occur when a La Niña and a cold Pacific
Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phase coincide, or when an EL Niño and a warm PDO
phase coincide. When a La Niña and a cold PDO coincide, the southwestern United
States experiences its severest droughts and heightened fire danger. For
example, each phase of the PDO persists for about 20-30 years, but cycles of El
Niño and La Niña alternate every two to seven years. Thus the coincidence of
both a La Niña and the cool phase of the PDO has only occurred about 29% of the
time. However since the 1700s that 29% coincided with 70% of all major fires in
Rocky Mountain National Park. Colorado’s 2012 wildfire season was no exception.5 Snow
fall and the timing of Spring’s arrival is als0 largely driven the Pacific
Decadal Oscillation.6 Informing the public about those natural
cycles would help them prepare better for the weather it brings, but this
episode prefer fear mongering.
“Years
of Living Dangerously” justifies yelling fire and promoting climate fear based
on Westerling paper that reports all the models show rising CO2 will cause
warmer and drier weather in some places (but wetter elsewhere). However those
models have failed horribly in replicating natural ocean cycles. Several
researchers have shown that the warmth and drought predicted by CO2 driven
models may have mistakenly modeled the climate effects of ocean cycles but
blamed the results on CO2. One study from climate experts at Los Alamos
National Laboratories explored the climate impacts of the PDO and Atlantic
Multidecadal Oscillation on the American Southwest.
They
concluded,
“The
late twentieth century warming was about equally influenced by increasing concentration
of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and a positive phase of the AMO
[Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation].” “A strong warming and severe drought
predicted on the basis of the ensemble mean of the CMIP climate models
simulations is supported by our regression analysis only in a very unlikely case of
the continually increasing AMO at a rate similar to its 1970–2010 increase”7
The 17
year hiatus in global warming is likewise being attributed to those same ocean
cycles, and ardent advocates of CO2 climate change like Kevin Trenberth now
admit, “The IPCC has not paid enough attention to natural variability, on
several time scales, especially El Niños and La Niñas, the Pacific Ocean
phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models, and the longer term
Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)
which have cycle lengths of about 60 years.”
“Years
of Living Dangerously” takes great liberties with the truth about forest fires.
Such a one-sided presentation attempting to incite climate fear borders on
license. It is also the second episode in which they discuss lost rainforests
that were burned for Palm Oil. Yet despite Harrison Ford’s expose on corrupt
government officials, the episode has still failed to mention the European Union alone has provided $11 billion dollars in
biofuel subsidies and the bulk of that has subsidized palm oil for the
biodiesel industry .
Is
such distorted truth liberty or license? I suppose if no one is listening the question is moot.
Literature Cited
1. Keane, et al (2002) Cascading
Effects of Fire Exclusion in Rocky Mountain Ecosystems:A Literature
Review. USDA Forest Service RMRS GTR-91.
2. Swetnam, T. W.; Baisan, C. H.
1996. Historical fire regime patterns in the Southwestern United States
since AD 1700
3. Westerling et al (2006) Warming
and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity Science, vol.
313
4. Schoennagel, T., (2005) ENSO
and PDO Variability Affect Drought?induced Fire Occurrence in Rocky Mountain
Subalpine Forests. Ecological Applications, vol. 15, pp. 2000-2014
5. McCabe, G., et al., (2011)
Influences of the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal
Oscillation on the timing of the North American spring. International Journal
of Climatology, doi:10.1002/joc.3400
6. Romme (1989) Historical
Perspective on the Yellowstone Fires of 1988 Bioscienc, vol. 39
7. Chylek et al (2013) Imprint of
the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation and Pacific decadal oscillation on
southwestern US climate: past, present, and future Climate Dynamics DOI
10.1007/s00382-013-1933-3
First posted
April 24, 2014 to Watts Up With That