But Katharine Hayhoe’s unusual mix of credentials makes her a difficult target for deniers of climate change. She holds a PhD in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois, has received scores of fellowships and grants, and was a reviewer for the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But she is also an evangelical Christian and is married to a pastor.
“I’m happy to stand up and say I’m a Christian. I attend a Bible church,” she told a reporter from Mother Jones. “In the past they’ve really tried to paint scientists as godless liberal treehuggers.”5
To counter that impression, Hayhoe and her husband, Andrew Farley, wrote the book A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. Inspiring Christians to care about the climate requires separating faith and politics, she said. “If you control for politics, then most of the religious bias falls away. People have been allowing their political party to inform their statement of faith . . . It’s almost gotten to the point where the church has a Republican statement of faith.”
Christians who vehemently deny climate change aren’t getting that message from the Bible. “Where they’re getting it from is, more frequently than not, conservative media, which has this thin veneer of Christianity on it, but it is not Christian in any way, shape, or form . . . If it was convenient for them to call themselves a Buddhist, they would.”
But, at least in Texas, once a bastion of climate change denial, the fires appear to have burned away some of the skepticism. Two years after the fires, a Yale University survey showed that 7 out of 10 Texans believe the climate is changing.6 That doesn’t mean they accept any responsibility for the droughts, heat waves, and fires, however. Only 4 in 10 respondents said they would ascribe the changing climate to any kind of human activity.
“There’s been a major progression in people’s willingness to admit that there is a problem, but we’ve seen zero progression in the acknowledgment of humans as a cause of the problem,” Hayhoe said. “In 9 out of 10 cases I’d be willing to bet that people object to the cause of climate change because they object to the solution.”
But even among the self-interested, wildfires prove a powerful persuader. After the Bastrop Fire lawyers for the electric utility that owned the power line blamed for starting the blaze contacted Hayhoe. They wanted to know if they could attribute the fire to global, or at least to Texas, warming.
She sees attributing the increase in fires to climate change as more convincing to business and political leaders, and to the public, than attributing it to other impacts that will likely be more damaging to society but are less dramatic. “The problem with climate change is that it’s been a distant, far-off problem. It’s happening in the Arctic, it happens with ocean acidification, it happens with slow sea-level rise,” she said. “Fire, that’s immediate and catastrophic.”
ACCORDING TO THE ECOSPHERE PAPER, even some parts of the planet predicted to experience an increase in rain will see an increase in wildfires, too, as intense “precipitation pulses” feed bursts of vegetation that will burn when drier conditions return. In other areas, the converse will likely prevail, as occasional deep droughts will bring fire to areas that are otherwise consistently moist.
When I spoke to Hayhoe, she’d just finished collaborating on another paper that was published in April 2014.7 It modeled precipitation patterns in North America during the next century. Alaska, she noted, is projected to get wetter while the Southwest gets drier. “But . . . even though it’s getting wetter in Alaska, it’s getting more drought-prone. And even though it’s getting drier in the Southwest, it’s getting more prone toward heavy downpours at the same time as it’s getting drier.”
Both those scenarios could lead to more fire on the ground.
FOREST FIREFIGHTERS LEARN THE “FIRE TRIANGLE”: heat, oxygen, and fuel. The Ecosphere paper cites a different triad driving the increase in wildfires: resources to burn, atmospheric conditions, and ignitions. The changing climate will impact all three sides of that triangle.
In the first category, a warming climate will change the amount and types of plants that grow, and burn, in any given area.
On the second side of the triangle, annual variations in the atmosphere, such as droughts and heat waves, influence how flammable a landscape is, while short-term changes in fire weather—the heat, humidity, and winds of a given day—determine whether a flame will take off or just smolder.
Finally, there are ignition sources, the only natural one of note being lightning. Research led by David Romps, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, predicts that for every degree Fahrenheit the earth’s atmosphere warms, there could be nearly 7 percent more lightning strikes.8 Current predictions of a seven-degree increase in temperature by the end of the century would mean as many as 50 percent more bolts of electricity hitting the ground.
And in a hotter climate, even human ignitions will likely increase. Power lines, for example, are more likely to arc and spark when overtaxed by the increased use of air conditioners in hot weather.
Even areas predicted to see less fire may suffer negative consequences, Hayhoe said. “Increases and decreases can both be bad for the natural ecosystem, because wildfire is part of what makes it healthy.”
Regardless of how meticulous her research is, she knows that her time spent in the public eye and in her church is more likely to bring change. “I don’t think throwing more scientific facts at the problem is going to solve it,” she said. “Facts don’t win the argument. We’ve had enough facts on climate change for decades already.”
NONETHELESS, THE FACTS tying the warming climate to a more fiery planet keep coming. Six months after the Ecosphere paper was published, a study by Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences predicted that the fire season in the western United States could grow nearly three weeks longer by 2050.9 That is on top of the 78 days that the average wildfire season in the West has already increased, according to a study of the years 1970 through 2003. The fires that ignite will produce twice as much smoke, the Harvard study reported, and burn substantially larger areas. In a 2015 paper in the journal Nature Communications, Matt Jolly, an ecologist at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, reported that from 1979 through 2013 wildfire seasons expanded almost 20 percent, and the amount of land vulnerable to fire nearly doubled.10
“It turns out that, for the western United States, the biggest driver for fires in the future is temperature,” said Loretta J. Mickley, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard and coauthor of the study there. “When you get a large temperature increase over time, as we are seeing, and little change in rainfall, fires will increase in size.”11
The Harvard paper predicted that the area burned by wildfires in the Front Range of Colorado will increase by between 70 and 100 percent. The Southwest could see as much as a 150 percent increase in area burned.
In the West warmer temperatures’ impacts on wildfire are most obvious in the snowpack. As temperatures warm, the snowpack dwindles and melts off earlier in the year.
“The snowpack really kept a lid on the fire danger,” Steve Running, one of the Nobel Prize–winning IPCC authors and Regents Professor of Ecology at the University of Montana, told me. The earlier melting of mountain snowcaps is largely responsible for the extended fire season in the mountains of the West. He added that the reduced snowpack has extended not only the length of the fire season but also the range of flammable vegetation. Species that snow used to hold back from the high country are now encroaching into it.
“Especially in the West, the dynamics that are causing increasing fire frequency are lower winter snowpack and an extension of the dry season,” Running said. “When the snowpack melts off . . . combustible fuels move up the mountain.”
The greenhouse effect also make fires like the High Park Fire burn intensely through the night—a phenomenon many of the firefighters reported they hadn’t seen before. Typically, cooler temperatures at night help vegetation
regain some of its moisture. If temperatures fall far enough for dew to cover the ground, that dampness will slow fires. But greenhouse gases trap the daytime heat, keeping nights sultry and dry, so fires keep burning in the dark.
ALASKA HAD ITS HOTTEST MAY in 91 years in 2015. The next month 1.8 million acres burned there in just 12 days, nearly twice the previous record for acres burned over an entire June. Some 320 fires burned across the state, charring nearly half a million acres in a single day.12
In 2015 Climate Central reported that Alaska was warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the nation due to the fact that polar regions were heating faster than the rest of the planet. At the same time, the average annual acreage burned in the state had doubled each decade between 1980 and 2009.13
While the increasing acreage in flames was scary, what was actually burning was just as frightening, if less dramatic. In addition to vast evergreen forests, the fires burned deep into tundra and permafrost, which hold about twice the amount of carbon as is already in the atmosphere, as well as huge stores of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas. One study showed that 60 percent of the climate-warming gases released in a large Alaska fire came not from burning trees and vegetation, but from the combustion of organic material in the soil.14
With the wildfires themselves adding huge amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and thus warming the climate, they’ll likely drive even more fires.
“Fire has a substantial positive feedback on the climate system,” a 2009 paper in the journal Science reported of the phenomenon in which fires heat up the atmosphere.15
WHEN NOLAN DOESKEN AND HIS WIFE returned to their house after their vacation to Michigan, they found ash and cinders from the High Park Fire on top of the dust they were already cursing. To get to his office, on a hill between Fort Collins and the national forest, he had to show his credentials to armed national guardsmen at a checkpoint. He passed the incident command center where Colorado senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet addressed the press. His office window looked out on the massive plume of smoke, and he sometimes saw flames leaping above the Horsetooth Reservoir.
The deepest burn to his psyche, however, came not from the flames, but from the water in his irrigation ditch. Ash had clogged a neighboring family’s pump, which had shorted out and electrocuted their young daughter.
“Our daughter could have been doing the same thing just a few years earlier,” he told me. “We both irrigate out of the same irrigation ditch . . . It just made me ache.”
Nolan knew he’d be seeing impacts trickle down from the fire for years. Fish, farmers, factories, and families all shared the water supply filling with ash, cinders, chemicals, and debris from the fire. “It’s amazing watching the cascading effects,” he told me. “The hydrologic consequences, the agricultural consequences.”
But Nolan was most worried about the changing climate, which would bring even more conflagrations, along with the debris flows and floods that follow. He began thinking about how he could get Colorado to listen when he finally began talking about those threats.
18
Firebugs
Rocky Mountain National Park—June 23, 2012
BY THE THIRD WEEK OF JUNE, the High Park Fire had destroyed 191 homes, making it the most destructive blaze in Colorado history. It would hold that title for two weeks.
I drove steep and winding dirt roads to access neighborhoods tucked deep into the mountains, and stood at roadblocks and outside shelters with residents who wondered when they would be allowed back into their homes—or if they had homes to return to. Some of the thousands of evacuees wouldn’t go back, even if their houses had survived. After one meeting of evacuees, Ellen Bozell told me that she, her husband, and their two children were living in a friend’s barn. “If our home burns, we won’t rebuild up there,” she said.
Some 50 guests were evacuated from the Shambhala Mountain Center, a Buddhist retreat in the mountains southeast of the Cache la Poudre River. When the fire jumped the river, 10 volunteers stayed behind to cut trees and mow grass to protect the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya—one of the largest Buddhist shrines in North America. They left the retreat’s cabins to burn.1
Workers at another sanctuary in Rist Canyon shot tranquilizer darts into the wolf dogs there and then moved 17 of the sedated animals to a kennel away from the fire. But before they could round up the rest of the animals, flames drove the caretakers away. Fire dens dug four feet into the mountainside were the only shelters for the remaining wolves. Bunkers had never been used to shelter wild animals from a wildfire before, caretaker Michelle Proulx said, and she had no idea if the animals would survive.
A worker allowed back into the sanctuary after the fire had passed found charred ground around the dens.2 “You see scorched trees, scorched ground on the left, untouched ground on the right,” he said in a video he shot there.
Then bushy gray fur moved through the burnt trees, “and a wolf, happy and healthy,” appeared.
At Paradise Park a donkey named Ellie, her whiskers singed, walked up to firefighters in a pasture. Behind her were three horses and another donkey, their tails curled from the heat, that she had led to safety.3
Temperature records were falling almost every day. Beginning Friday, June 22, Denver recorded temperatures above 100 degrees for five consecutive days. Two days, at 105 degrees, would break the all-time record temperature for the city.4 On Saturday a friend and I headed to the high country of Rocky Mountain National Park, where the air would be a little cooler, and I could do a bit of rock climbing and take a breather from the smoke.
Just before I started climbing on Lumpy Ridge, I heard a two-way radio a few feet away, then saw the uniforms of two National Park Service climbing rangers, Adam Baxter and Jess Asmussen. It turned out Adam and I were both planning to attend the wedding of a firefighting friend in a few months. We were laughing at how the brotherhood of the rope and the fellowship of fire are tight-knit communities, with occasionally interwoven strands, when their radio interrupted us.
“It’s crowning,” it squawked. “It’s in the trees. Houses threatened.”
Beyond the forested ridgeline to our south, we could see smoke rising from Estes Park. “It sounds like it’s on the ground,” Jess said, “right off the road.”
A few hundred feet from the Beaver Meadows gate to the national park, high winds had rubbed a cabin’s power line against a tree. The wire had frayed and ignited the bark. Gusts had carried the flames into tight stands of pines intermixed with clusters of homes.
Jess’s cellphone rang with a call from his wife. “Her best friend just showed up,” he said after hanging up. “The fire broke out across the street from her house. She grabbed an armload of stuff and got out. She’s moving into our place.”
The Woodland Heights Fire burned 21 homes that afternoon.
Two choppers and an air tanker came from the High Park Fire, but that blaze was also blowing up. Resources were being spread thinner by the hour.
That night Larimer County sheriff Justin Smith choked back tears while addressing the press. Both blazes were under his jurisdiction, and both had destroyed homes.
The High Park Fire’s latest run had started on Thursday, and by Saturday night it had grown from 50,000 acres to 81,000, making it the second-largest fire in Colorado history. It was already the state’s most destructive in terms of property when it roared up the narrows on the Cache la Poudre River to burn at least 10 more homes Friday and force another 1,700 evacuations. Smith said they knew more homes were burning, but firefighters were too busy to count them.
On Friday Colorado governor John Hickenlooper signed an executive order releasing $6.2 million in emergency funds to fight the High Park Fire along with three others across the state.5
Then, on Saturday, eight new fires broke out, including the one I witnessed from Rocky Mountain National Park. There was more terrain burning at one time than ever before in state history. Overwhelmed firefighters could give little atten
tion to fires that normally would have been top priorities. Fire commands were competing for resources, Bill Hahnenberg, the incident commander for the High Park Fire, told reporters.
At 3:45 that afternoon, around the time that firefighters were getting the Woodland Heights Fire under control, the State Line Fire ignited just south of Durango, threatening oil and gas pads, along with homes that were “inaccessible to firefighters.”6 In central Colorado the Treasure Fire ignited near Leadville, raining ash on the resort community of Breckenridge.7 The Weber Fire, an adolescent’s arson on the Western Slope, burned 2,500 acres of scrub oak killed by a frost that followed the early spring. That fire was suspected of igniting seven smoldering coal fires that were discovered the following year in piles of refuse coal, mines, and coal seams.8
But most concerning was the Waldo Canyon Fire, just west of Colorado Springs. Over the previous weeks firefighters there had responded to a series of 25 suspicious blazes. Most of them were clearly “human starts” but were easy to extinguish. Smoke from the Waldo Canyon Fire, the latest in the series, was first reported near a trail in its namesake canyon at 7:50 Friday night. During the next two hours firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies hiked trails near the smoke, but not the Waldo Canyon Trail, which would have led them to the blaze. Early Saturday a jogger encountered a smoldering fire along the trail. He called authorities, but the dispatcher he spoke with failed to record his location, name, or phone number, or to pass his information along to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office fire center. Despite increasing reports of smoke, firefighters didn’t find the blaze until five hours later.9
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