Earth Watch Report – Friday August 24th, 2012
by desertrose
Extreme Temperatures/ Weather
Climate vs. weather: Extreme events narrow the doubts
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| An aerial view of New Yorkers taking in the sun on a beach at Coney Island on August 4, 2012 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP) |
PARIS: Heat waves, drought and floods that have struck the northern hemisphere for the third summer running are narrowing doubts that man-made warming is disrupting Earth’s climate system, say some scientists.
Climate experts as a group are reluctant to ascribe a single extreme event or season to global warming.
Weather, they argue, has to be assessed over far longer periods to confirm a shift in the climate and whether natural factors or fossil-fuel emissions are the cause.
But for some, such caution is easing.
A lengthening string of brutal weather events is going hand in hand with record-breaking rises in temperatures and greenhouse-gas levels, an association so stark that it can no longer be dismissed as statistical coincidence, they say.
“We prefer to look at average annual temperatures on a global scale, rather than extreme temperatures,” said Jean Jouzel, vice chairman of the U.N.’s Nobel-winning scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Even so, according to computer models, “over the medium and long term, one of the clearest signs of climate change is a rise in the frequency of heat waves”, he said.
“Over the last 50 years, we have seen that as warming progresses, heat waves are becoming more and more frequent,” Jouzel said.
“If we don’t do anything, the risk of a heat wave occurring will be 10 times higher by 2100 compared with the start of the century.”
The past three months have seen some extraordinary weather in the United States, Europe and East and Southeast Asia.
The worst drought in more than 50 years hit the U.S. Midwest breadbasket while forest fires stoked by fierce heat and dry undergrowth erupted in California, France, Greece, Italy, Croatia and Spain.
Heavy rains flooded Manila and Beijing and China’s eastern coast was hit by three typhoons in a week.
Last month was the warmest ever recorded for land in the northern hemisphere and a record high for the contiguous United States, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Globally, the temperature in July was the fourth highest since records began in 1880, it said.
James Hansen, arguably the world’s most famous climate scientist (and a bogeyman to climate skeptics), contends the link between extreme heat events and global warming is now all but irrefutable.
The evidence, he says, comes not from computer simulations but from weather observations themselves.
In a study published this month in the peer-reviewed U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen and colleagues compared temperatures over the past three decades to a baseline of 1951-80, a period of relative stability.
Over the last 30 years, there was 0.5-0.6 C (0.9-1.0 F) of warming, a rise that seems small but “is already having important effects”, said Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
During the baseline period, cold summers occurred about a third of the time, but this fell to about 10 percent in the 30-year period that followed.
Hot summers, which during the baseline period occurred 33 percent of the time, rose to about 75 percent in the three decades that followed.
Even more remarkable, though, was the geographical expansion of heat waves. During the baseline period, an unusually hot summer would yield a heat wave that would cover just a few tenths of 1 percent of the world’s land area.
Today, though, an above average summer causes heat waves that in total affect about 10 percent of the land surface.
“The extreme summer climate anomalies in Texas in 2011, in Moscow in 2010 and in France in 2003 almost certainly would not have occurred in the absence of global warming with its resulting shift of the anomaly situation,” says the paper.
In March, an IPCC special report said there was mounting evidence of a shift in patterns of extreme events in some regions, including more intense and longer droughts and rainfall.
But it saw no increases in the frequency, length or severity of tropical storms.
Costs of big wildfire season hurting some states
Budgets leave governments in tough spot to get people, planes, bulldozers to beat back flames
Jeff Barnard / AP
By Jeff Barnard and Nicholas K. Geranios
MANTON, Calif. — Twisted sheets of metal, the hulks of pickup trucks and brick walls were all that was left of homes once sheltered by green pine and cedar trees.
In a rural Northern California subdivision that was the latest to feel the wrath of massive western wildfires, long pine needles bent back on themselves, unburned but dried to a brittle dusty gray by the intensive heat of the Ponderosa fire.
Thousands of residents of tiny rural communities just outside Lassen Volcanic National Park who had been forced to flee soon after the fire was ignited by lighting on Saturday were allowed to return home on Wednesday. But hundreds of other homes were threatened as the fire burned a new front on the southern flank.
Bob Folsom, who works at a nearby hydroelectric facility, tended the gasoline generator that is keeping his refrigerator running while utility crews worked to replace power lines destroyed by the blaze when it roared through the area last weekend.
“I was ready for this day,” he said. “I try to be self-sufficient.”
Folsom and his son never left their home as the fire burned within a half mile of them last weekend, close enough that they heard trees exploding and the flames roaring like a freight train. Over the past 10 years, they had thinned hundreds of trees, dug a pond to store water, and installed hydrants to fill fire hoses.
“When it comes through, it’s gonna come fast,” he said. “You don’t have time to cut down trees.”
Fires across the West have left some states with thin budgets to scramble to get people, planes, bulldozers and other tools on fire lines to beat back the flames.
And that’s with about a third of the annual wildfire season remaining.
Video: Ponderosa blaze prompts state of emergency (on this page)According to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, the nation as of Wednesday had seen 42,927 wildfires this year, which burned just over 7 million acres.
While the number of fires is down from the 10-year average of 54,209 as of Aug. 22, the acreage was well above the average of 5.4 million acres, said Don Smurthwaite, a NIFC spokesman.
“The fires are bigger,” he said.
In Colorado Springs, Colo., this summer, about 350 homes were burned in the most destructive wildfire in state history. Another fire in northern Colorado just before it scorched 257 homes.
The costs have mounted, not just in the damage to houses and other buildings.
In Utah, for example, officials have spent $50 million as of mid-August to fight more than 1,000 wildfires, far surpassing the $3 million a year the Legislature budgeted for fighting wildfires.
The state’s share is estimated at $16 million, said Roger Lewis of the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands. He said lawmakers will need to figure out how to come up with $13 million.
That’s the largest-ever supplemental appropriation request needed for firefighting in the state, agency spokesman Jason Curry said. He said, “It’s obviously been a big year.”
Washington state fire officials project that they will spend about $19.8 million on emergency fire suppression activities in the current fiscal year that ends next June.
That is expected to far surpass the $11.2 million the agency was allotted for such work, meaning the Department of Natural Resources will have to ask the Legislature for supplemental funds.
Not all Western states are seeing their budgets busted because of fires.
In Oregon, the state estimated it had spent $3.4 million through last Saturday to fight wildfires, with more than two months of the season left. Last year, it spent $6.6 million.
In Montana, forest managers told Gov. Brian Schweitzer that long-term forecasts call for fire conditions through the end of September, which is longer than normal.
The Northern Rockies Coordination Center put the total cost of fighting large wildfires in Montana, including costs to federal and state agencies, at $64 million so far this season. The state’s share is about $25 million to fight fires that have burned about 1,100 square miles.
Schweitzer said the state has already burned through cash reserves set aside for such natural disasters, but that plenty of money is available from surplus general funds.
While parts of the Southwest, particularly Southern California, still have three months of fire season left, Smurthwaite said, shorter days, declining temperatures and higher humidity will help curtail fires.
“That’s almost like putting a little wet blanket over a fire,” he said.
Firefighters in Northern California on Thursday made progress in containing a huge wildfire that has burned 80 homes and other buildings and is threatening 900 more. It was 57 percent contained on Thursday.
Fire crews assessing the rural area determined Thursday that 84 buildings had been destroyed since it was sparked by lightning Saturday. It was unclear when the structures burned and how many were homes.
More than 2,500 firefighters were battling the fire near several remote towns about 170 miles north of Sacramento.
Elsewhere in California, a large wildfire in Plumas National Forest continued to expand, helped by gusty winds.
In Washington state, fire crews still hoped to fully contain a week-old wildfire that has destroyed 51 homes and 26 outbuildings and damaged at least six other homes, authorities said.
The fire, about 75 miles east of Seattle, has caused an estimated $8.3 million in property damage.
In south-central Idaho, authorities have spent more than $23 million fighting a fire near the towns of Pine and Featherville and another in a forest near the resort town of Stanley.
Those wildfires have each consumed about 150 square miles, and will not be extinguished for some time, Smurthwaite said.
“We expect to be managing them for weeks to come,” he said.
Associated Press writers Haven Daley in Manton Calif., Jonathan Cooper in Salem, Ore., Brian Skoloff in Salt Lake City, Terry Collins, John S. Marshall and Terence Chea in San Francisco, Shannon Dininny in Yakima, Wash., Mike Baker in Olympia, Wash., and Jessie Bonner in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.
| 23.08.2012 | Forest / Wild Fire | USA | State of California, [Plumas National Forest] |  |
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Forest / Wild Fire in USA on Wednesday, 01 August, 2012 at 02:59 (02:59 AM) UTC.
| Updated: | Thursday, 23 August, 2012 at 05:11 UTC |
| Description | |
| California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in three Northern California counties on Wednesday after officials said wildfires in the region had destroyed at least 50 buildings and were threatening hundreds more. Some 3,000 people have been evacuated as the so-called Ponderosa fire burned through more than 24,000 acres (9,700 hectares) of steep, rugged terrain in the rural counties of Tehama and Shasta, about 125 miles (200 km) north of state capital Sacramento. The blaze is 50-percent contained, fire officials said. Brown also declared a state of emergency in nearby Plumas County, where a fire has burned through 47,000 acres (19,000 hectares). Declaring a state of emergency frees up funds to help battle the fires. Firefighters on Wednesday were expected to start inspecting the damage from the Ponderosa fire, which they surveyed by air on Tuesday. Efforts to prevent the fire from overrunning the rural towns of Manton and Shingletown have succeeded so far despite high winds and heat, fire officials said. | |
| 23.08.2012 | Forest / Wild Fire | USA | State of Washington, [Ahtanum Forest, Yakima County] |  |
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Forest / Wild Fire in USA on Thursday, 23 August, 2012 at 09:54 (09:54 AM) UTC.
| Description | |
| State officials have closed part of Ahtanum State Forest to help fight a wildfire burning in a closed section of the Yakama reservation about 15 miles northwest of White Swan. Steep terrain is hampering firefighters efforts to contain the blaze, said Sarah Foster, a spokeswoman for the state fire management team that took over the 331-acre fire early Wednesday. The team’s staging camp is in the closed state forest land, which covers Ahtanum Meadows, Ahtanum Campground, Whites Ridge Trailhead and Middle Fork Road. The closures, which were enacted by the state Department of Natural Resources, are expected to last through the weekend, Foster said. Other parts of the state forest, including South Fork Road, Nasty Creek Road, North Fork Road and Jackass Road, are still open to the public. Lightning sparked the fire Sunday. About 200 firefighters and support people are working to contain the flames, which are burning in lodge pole pine trees in the Diamond Butte area. There are no structures in the area. The fire’s commanders want to keep the flames from reaching forested land with heavy infestation of mountain pine beetles. The insects’ activity kill trees, which creates ready fuel for wildfire, Foster said. “Those dead trees burn really rapidly.” Calm weather conditions are expected until Friday, when a cool front will bring lower temperatures and higher winds, she said. Helicopters and nine hand crews worked Wednesday to make progress on the fire. The helicopters are flying out of an area a couple miles outside Tampico. As many as 350 firefigthers could be called in to corral the fire, she said. Some of them could come from the Taylor Bridge Fire, where the incident commanders are starting to reduce the number of crews. In Washington, firefighters can work 14 days on a fire, then have to take 24 hours off before going back out. |
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