Wildfire & Rapid Climate Change
ABOVE NASA EODIS WORLDVIEW IMAGES: Western American Continent as viewed from space showing the dramatic increase in wildfire frequency and severity in recent years compared to past years.
GLOBAL WARMING
“The global climate continues to change rapidly compared to the pace of the natural variations in climate that have occurred throughout Earth’s history.” – globalchange.gov
Climate change & plants
When the climate changes rapidly the plants adapted to the historic temperature and moisture in that area will begin to die. As trees and plants die rapidly they become extremely combustible fuel for wildfires.
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Nature & Wildfire
Most fires wilderness areas are caused by lightening. These naturally caused fires historically have not spread rapidly because the green living plants in the area do not offer highly the combustible fuel that dead trees & plants do.
ONE WILDFIRE
Pole Creek/Bald Mtn Fires, Sept. 2018 Mount Nebo Wilderness Utah.
These fires were started naturally by two lighting strikes. They were not immediately extinguished because of the concept popular in recent years that some fire is natural and healthy for forests. However, because climate change has caused the rapid death of many trees and plants this fire quickly turned into a fire storm. In this case, there were evenly interspersed groups of highly flammable dead trees, causing the fire to burn hotter and grow faster then could be predicted.
CAUSE: Forests and plants in wilderness areas die rapidly as the climate warms due to increased temperature. Increased temperature alone can cause the plants to die because the plants require increased moisture. If the amount of moisture is also decreased the problem is multiplied. Plants weakened by lack of moisture are also are vulnerable to disease.