Global Warming

Did Global Warming Cause the California Wildfires?

July 2008

By Andrew Peterson
For CoverUps.com

Try Googling "California wildfires" and "global warming" together and you'll get over 62,000 hits. But buried in that avalanche of politicized science is news of a fascinating new study that has turned researchers' expectations upside-down.

Eli Kintisch of ScienceNOW Daily News offers a brief look at the assumptions that have long governed forest management and led to catastrophic losses for an ever-greater number of families living in these affected areas. Take, for instance, the Forest Service's long-standing attitude about small, lightning-caused fires:

Lightning-caused fires serve a natural mechanism within forests. They destroy small trees and underbrush while often allowing large trees to remain standing and flourish. But since roughly 1910, U.S. forest managers have sought to fight as many small forest fires as possible. That policy has allowed more shrubs and small trees to grow than in the past. The increasing quantity of vegetation, scientists calculated recently using tree measurements and other data, sucks 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year – roughly 14% of the total amount of carbon pulled in by U.S. forests. However, historical data on tree sizes weren't available to allow scientists to confirm that the forests had absorbed that much carbon over the past century.

After analyzing previously-overlooked forest inventory records, some interesting things have come to light:

The number of trees per hectare across all plots rose by 4% in 60 years, an increase the scientists attributed to the federal policy on suppressing fires. Yet the total amount of carbon held by trees declined by 34% over the same period...

So what conclusions are scientists drawing, and what are the policy-making implications for the Forest Service moving forward?

...scientists conclude that the large trees in the plots had to compete with the growing population of small trees, making the big trees more susceptible to drought, wind, and insect attack than they would have been without the crowding. Because the large trees died, they didn't absorb as much carbon dioxide.

"I was really tickled by this finding," says ecologist Richard Houghton of Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. "Nobody thought these little trees would have an effect on the larger ones."

It's far from certain, but this study might lead to a change in forest management practices that could give overworked fire-fighters some much needed rest, and homeowners some much-needed peace of mind.

...one way that federal land managers can give large trees space to grow in the wilderness is by thinning out brush and undergrowth with small preemptive fires.

Our Take

Not everything on the face of the earth can be explained by global warming. In fact we're willing to bet that the massive wildfires in California had nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with huge accumulations of brush (great fuel for wildfires!) and, while we're at it, big housing developments that put homeowners into harm's way. Don't mean to rain on your parade, Al.

Read the article online.