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Yosemite's Rim Fire, Yellowstone's Summer Of '88, And Climate Change

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As the Rim Fire continues to advance across the northern reaches of Yosemite National Park, challenging firefighters, alarming onlookers and billowing clouds of smoke, it's hard not to recall perhaps the worst fire season ever to strike a national park, that of the dry, hot, and fiery summer of 1988 in Yellowstone National Park.

For months fires nicknamed Clover, Mist, Mink, Northfork, and Hellroaring raged, skipping through Yelllowstone's forest canopies and galloping across meadows, spitting embers more than a mile ahead of the flames to push the blazes forward with incredible speed.

While media attention is being showered on Yosemite due to the Rim Fire, so far it has burned a fraction of the landscape that the '88 fires did in sweeping across Yellowstone. Whereas the acreage of the Rim Fire on Sunday morning stood at 222,777 acres, in just one day during Yellowstone's 1988 fire season -- "Black Saturday," August 20 -- more than 150,000 acres burned. By the end of that fire season, nearly 800,000 acres of the park had been swept by flames.

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The Rim Fire in California is drawing national attention, in large part due to its arrival in Yosemite National Park. USFS photo by Mike McMillan.

Touching Media Nerves

What the Rim Fire has done, though, is touch a media nerve sensitized by recent fires in Arizona and Colorado that not only burned thousands of acres, but destroyed homes and, in the case of the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, killed 19 firefighters.

“I’ve been surprised by the amount of attention given the Yosemite fire. In fact, it’s a big fire, but we’ve had much bigger in the last 10 years. And why does it matter? It matters because it’s in a celebrity landscape, or at least part of it is, as Yellowstone was," says Stephen Pyne, an Arizona State University professor who specializes in both enviromental history as well as the history of wildfires.

“I mean, Yellowstone was a huge event, but it also was in a place that had a special interest to the American public. And because, I think, if you want to get public or political attention on fire, you have to burn a bunch of houses, kill people, or involve a celebrity," he continued during a telephone conversation last week. “And in this case (the Rim Fire), a celebrity landscape. I think part of the interest in the Yosemite fire is that the other two stimulants have already occurred this year: the Black Forest Fire started off (in June) burning a lot of houses in Colorado a year after the Waldo Canyon Fire (near Colorado Springs) and then the Yarnell Hill Fire wiped out a hotshot crew, and now we have this. So you have all three (elements)."

Yellowstone, which saw approximately 36 percent of its landscape burned by the 1988 fires, has endured wildfires of its own this summer, but not to the degree of the Rim Fire. The park's largest, the Alum Fire, has grown to cover just more than 7,000 acres since it was ignited by a lightning strike on August 13.

The comparitive lack of attention it has garnered, when placed next to the Rim Fire, can be attributed to both its smaller size and its current location away from park hotels and stores. With drier weather moving into Yellowstone's forecast Sunday, fire bosses were predicting a more active burning period for the Alum Fire and the prospect that a section of the Grand Loop Road might either be closed or require pilot vehicles between Canyon and Fishing Bridge.

If that fire balloons upwards in size, it could bring more media attention to Yellowstone; not because of the fire itself, but simply due to where it is burning, suggests Professor Pyne, who was a wildlands firefighter on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park for 15 seasons, from 1967 to 1981.

"As I’m looking at the statistics, it’s a sub-par year for numbers of fires and acres burned. Over the last decade, I think it’s the lowest number of fires and second-lowest for burned area," he said. “That may change, the season is still going, (but) it hasn’t been an off-the-scale year. What it has is it’s hitting all the sweet spots for media and public interest. I’m not dismissing that, I’m just saying I think that’s what accounts for it.

“There’s interest in Hetch Hetchy and the water supply and the power supply for San Francisco, so, OK, that’s a big event," Professor Pyne said. "But I think it’s just the public is bent on the edge of its seats. Each of these fires (Black Forest, Yarnell Hill, and the Rim Fire) have come right after another, and suddenly it's become relentless. And there are big fires burning in the Northern Rockies, and nobody was paying a great deal of attention. But when they go to Yosemite, they do."

According to statistics compiled by the National Interagency Fire Cache in Boise, Idaho, last year 67,774 wildfires touched 9.3 million acres. This year, 3.8 million acres have been burned so far by wildfires, the agency's statistics note.

Is Climate Change Fueling Fires?

While some media stories have invoked "climate change" as a key ingredient for the Rim Fire, something National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis did Saturday, telling the Los Angeles Times that the fire is "demonstrating the challenges that we in the land-management business are facing with climate change," Professor Pyne isn't so quick to agree.

“No, and I have to walk very carefully around the climate-change issue," he replied when asked if, ecologically, the conditions surrounding the Rim Fire were vastly different than those that existed in Yellowstone a quarter century ago. "I am not a climate change denier. It makes sense to me. I’m a long-time historian of fire. The fact that people change their combustion habits, and this is affecting the climate, makes a lot of sense to me.

"But these big fires that we’re seeing, very few of them are off the scale in terms of climate," he explained. "This is what conditions are always like in the Southwest at this time of year. There was enough drought that it was perfectly timed, but we’ve had similar events in my lifetime. So, climate change might be a part of it, but I don’t think it’s an adequate explanation.

“You would still have a fire problem if climate weren’t changing.”

At the University of California Berkeley, Dr. Scott Stephens agreed, but added that the Rim Fire likely would not have been as explosive if "fuels treatments" -- forest thinning and prescribed burns, for example -- had been applied to the forests.

"I believe that climate is drying out forests earlier and temps are up. However, if fuels treatments had been used in this area we would not have had the tree mortality that has occurred," Dr. Stephens, a professor of fire science at the school's Stephens Lab, wrote in an email. "I talked to the Groveland District about two months ago and they had two completed fuels projects ready to go in the Rim Fire area but no funds to implement them.

"My view is unless we get ahead of the fuels/restoration problem in forests that once experienced frequent fire, wildfires influenced by climate change will burn them at severities and spatial scales that will not conserve forests into the future," he added. "The Rim Fire is now burning into areas of Yosemite National Park that have had several past managed wildfires. I believe these past fires will have a big influence on the Rim Fire, and if the previous area has been burned in 10 or less years, the fire will go out on its own. I expect this will be the case in the northwest section of Yosemite that is impacted by the Rim Fire."

With September having arrived, the fire season is nearing its end. In some cases, as was the situation with Yellowstone back in 1988, it will be fall's coming rains and snows, not firefighters, that will douse many of the flames. In the months ahead, debate no doubt will continue over the role of climate change in Western fires, as well as what can be done to blunt wildfire, and even the role of wildfire.

“In some ways I’m happy for the attention, because fire needs a lot more serious attention. The trick is to segue from the, 'Oh my gosh, wow, another big fire,' to ‘OK, what can we do about this?’" said Professor Pyne. "None of the issues raised in these fires is new. They’ve been around for decades.

"... “I worry that the fire story is going to be hijacked by the climate change story. It looks like it is. And I don’t accept that," he said. "It’s certainly a contributor, but we would still have a serious fire problem under the old climatic system with everything else that’s going on.”

Comments

EC, did those predictions come with a 12-month time frame?

AGW alarmists have been making predictions for decades. Their models have been wrong- near term and longer term. If it were science, they would be able to predict with repeatable accuracy.

BTW Sandy was not a particularly powerful - barely more than a Tropical Storm. It was only the conincidence of high tide, a full moon and the particular geography and infrastructure where it hit that led to a high level of damage.


AGW alarmists have been making predictions for decades. Their models have been wrong- near term and longer term. If it were science, they would be able to predict with repeatable accuracy.

Anyone with at least a nodding acquaintance with science should be able to spot at least three things remarkable wrong with this statement.


No, ec. The only questions I'm ignoring are those you type on the page. I live in Alaska and live with the effects of climate change every day. Go troll somewhere else.


For you Rick -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10294082/Glob...

Now - tell us - if the science is settled, why are the models so wrong?


More for you Rick

http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Neeley-Lack-of-hurricanes-h...

From the article:

As Thomas Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted recently, "the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (less than 2-day) storms alone [which were] particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic." As such, "the historical Atlantic hurricane record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming induced long-term increase."

When University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke looked at the numbers, he found that correcting for these factors completely eliminated the supposed increase in hurricane damage.

Unsurprisingly, then, a leaked draft of the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (due to be released later this month) downgraded the likelihood of a connection between past temperature rises and extreme weather events. According to the report, there is "low confidence" in any association between climate change and hurricane frequency or intensity.

How could settled "science" be so wrong?



Thank you Kurt for posting an excellent and educational article. I was assigned to the Rim Fire for 16 days, certainly does not make me an expert on anything however. Dr. Steven Pyne and Dr. Scott Stephens are experts, and along with Dr. Jan Van Wagetendonk, also an expert in the field (and who is assisting Yosemite and its excellent leadership team in the fire effort), well I think the article has it right. From my limited knowledge the natural wilderness fire management program conducted by the park has had positive results once the Rim fire crossed the parks boundaries. From what I have seen, and my cursory discussions with fire management personnel, Yosemite is doing much better than the Stanislaus National Forest, as far as fire effects are concerned. The issue of funding for fuel treatments and managed fire are real, its a shame this cannot be accomplished. Funding and smoke issues are a problem, the Rim fire is partially a result of overly protected forest practices.


Fire History - Olympic National Park

Prehistoric Fires

Evidence from tree rings indicates that much of the north, east and south sides of the Olympic Peninsula burned during episodes of drought about 300‑500 years ago. Analysis of fire scarred trees indicates that another cycle of prehistoric fires burned many east side watersheds about 250 years ago. The relatively dry east side of the peninsula shows evidence of more frequent and larger fires than the wet west side.

Currently, the extent to which Native Americans used fire on the Olympic Peninsula is largely unknown. Government Lands Office maps of the late 1800's show locations of many burned areas along the coastal strip, and it has been hypothesized that coastal Native Americans burned to clear land, improve game habitat, expose root crops and maintain cranberry and bracken fern in selected sites. It is possible that the small "prairies" near the coast were created or improved by such burning, but no conclusive evidence has been found to date.

It is an argument gaining wider appeal, and scientific legitimacy, that disease spreading from the early Spanish presence in Mexico, swept through the completely naive North American populations, essentially removing them.

Coastal areas, with seafaring cultures, would logically be affected first.

In about that time-frame, a pattern of conspicuous fire-evidence begins in the physical record .... lasting until about the time populations are recovered, or replaced.

This time-frame, with evidently the most dramatic fire-evidence of the Holocene, also coincides with the Little Ice Age, and the Maunder Minimum.


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