BETWEEN THE LINES Q&A with Michael Kodas

Between the Lines Q&A

Worsening Forest Fires Tied to Climate Change

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Interview with Michael Kodas,
a Tedd Scripps fellow in environmental journalism,
at the University of Colorado,
conducted by Melinda Tuhus

fire

As California and other Western states cope with larger and more frequent forest fires, such as the Station Fire outside Los Angeles that has consumed hundreds of square miles, experts in the field are paying closer attention to the link between forest fires and global warming. In the last three decades, the wildfire season in the western U.S. has increased by 78 days, and burn durations of large fires have increased five-fold, to 37 days.

This is occurring at the same time that temperatures have increased over one degree Fahrenheit. Since 2000, wildland fires in the United States have burned an average of more than seven million acres a year, about double the average acreage for the previous four decades.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Michael Kodas, a former reporter and photographer with the Hartford Courant who spent the 2003 fire season battling blazes in Colorado and Wyoming in order to write a news article about the experience. He is currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado, looking at the relationship between forest fires and climate change. Kodas discusses various ways in which climate change has increased the danger of forest fires, from drought to the changed behavior of insects, as well as the human element in the equation.

MICHAEL KODAS:There are a number of issues related to climate change. Obviously, there are a lot of people who have differing opinions about how much climate change is caused by people, but particularly in the case of forest fires, and the most recent forest fires, it’s undeniable that intense drought -- in the case of California's forest fires, they’ve been in intense drought for a decade -- and unprecedented hot temperatures have contributed heavily to the fires, and that’s not just the case in the U.S., that was a big part of what contributed to the really horrible fires last winter in Australia -- or at least the winter here, in the northern hemisphere.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You’re saying it’s connected to drought, but how is drought connected to climate change?

MICHAEL KODAS:Well, increased temperatures brought on by global warming. There’s other things that contribute to it as well. With climate change, the snow pack in mountains is reduced quite a bit, which has lengthened the fire season, because the spring runoff is now shorter -- there’s not as much snow to melt. That’s contributed to drought and also increased the length of the fire season pretty much throughout the western U.S. As far as looking deeper at how climate change is influencing forest fires, a lot of foresters and fire experts are concerned that there’s something of a feedback loop that’s been created where forests, when they burn, put out the gases that contribute to climate change, and the changing climate causes drought and also other problems such as encouraging certain forest pests that kill trees and make them more vulnerable to fire.

You have an increase in fire -- that puts out an increase in the global warming gases and makes the whole situation worse. Another contributor to all this is simply fuel. According to a Brookings Institution report last year, forest fires put out more climate warming gases than all of the fuel that passed through the Alaska pipeline that year. So, people don’t often think of forest fires as contributing that much global warming gas, but they can, and by some measures are putting out 20 percent of the global warming gases.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I’ve read that deforestation contributes 20 percent to climate change, and some of that is through burning, but certainly not all. Is that the same data you’re referring to?

MICHAEL KODAS:No, this was 20 percent just from fire, but it is counting fire that contributes to deforestation, manmade fire that is used, say, in slash and burn agriculture.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Michael Kodas, how do you measure an increase in forest fires -- is it in intensity, in acres burned, in the days that the burning goes on?

MICHAEL KODAS:You can measure all of those things, but the biggest measure in the U.S. has been by acreage burned, and if you look back over the last century you’ll see that we had very large fires a century ago, and in fact a very famous fire called the Big Blow-up occurred 100 years ago next year, in 2010. And that was the fire that prompted the U.S. government to really get heavily involved in managing forest fires. And for a period of time after that, the acreage burned was substantially lower than it had been in the years before that. And we’re now seeing that in the past few decades, and particularly in the past six or seven years, a marked increase in the size of fires, that they’re as big as they were 100 years ago, except now we’ve got whole armies of firefighters, and firefighting aircraft and other resources and technology that are trying to suppress them, but not having the level of success that they once did.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Do people in the field talk about the need to address global warming in order to keep this from becoming a bigger and bigger problem, or do they talk about other things -- like maybe people not building houses with shake roofs in the middle of a forest?

MICHAEL KODAS:You bring up a good point. Most fire managers certainly look at climate change and are concerned about it, but it’s not something they have a lot of control over other than trying to fight fires and keep them from contributing what greenhouse gases they do contribute. However, there are other contributing factors that the Forest Service and other land managers are heavily involved in, and you brought up two.

The two biggest concerns are, the first is that during that period of time that the U.S. government has really been fighting forest fires, because they suppressed so many fires, they’ve allowed a huge build-up of fuel in the forest, so that the natural fire cycle was interrupted and forests that would have burned in the natural cycle every decade or two, some of them haven’t burned in almost 100 years, so that’s allowed fuel to build up in those forests, making them far more explosive than they would have been had the natural fire cycle been allowed to just continue.

The second problem is that we’ve also just introduced a huge new type of fuel into the forest, which is development. About half of the development, from the statistics I’ve seen in the past decade in the Pacific states, has been in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface, which is the area where development meets wild lands, which are generally considered flammable.

Visit Michael Kodas' website at www.michaelkodas.com.

Related links:

Climate Progress - An Insider's View of Climate Science, Politics and Solutions
Oct. 24, 2009 International Day Of Climate Action,www.350.org

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Melinda Tuhus is a producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 45 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at http://www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines for the week ending Sept. 18, 2009. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Melinda Tuhus and Anna Manzo.

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