Fire Scientists Are Really Sure Of Only One Thing: It's Going To Get Worse - Wired

[hatrack]

Subtract out the conspiracists and the willfully ignorant and the argument marshaled by skeptics against global warming, roughly restated, assumes that scientists vastly overstate the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Uncertainties in their calculations, the skeptics say, make it impossible to determine with confidence how bad the future was going to be. The sour irony of that muttonheaded resistance to data is that, after four decades of being wrong, those people are almost right.

As of July 31, more than 25,000 firefighters are committed to 140 wildfires across the United States—over a million acres aflame. Eight people are dead in California, tens of thousands evacuated, smoke and pyroclastic clouds are visible from space. And all any fire scientist knows for sure is, it only gets worse from here. How much worse? Where? For whom? Experience can’t tell them. The scientists actually are uncertain.

Scientists who help policymakers plan for the future used to make an assumption. They called it stationarity, and the idea was that the extremes of environmental systems—rainfall, river levels, hurricane strength, wildfire damage—obeyed prior constraints. The past was prologue. Climate change has turned that assumption to ash. The fires burning across the western United States (and in Europe) prove that “stationarity is dead,” as a team of researchers (controversially) wrote in the journal Science a decade ago. They were talking about water; now it’s true for fire.

“We can no longer use the observed past as a guide. There’s no stable system that generates a measurable probability of events to use the past record to plan for the future,” says LeRoy Westerling, a management professor who studies wildfires at UC Merced. “Now we have to use physics and complex interactions to project how things could change.”

EDIT

https://www.wired.com/story/the-only-thing-fire-scientists-are-sure-of-this-will-get-worse/

[NickB79]

1. The entire Southwest/Western US ecosystem is changing rapidly

Before white settlers came to the area, it was a more savanna-like ecosystem, with large trees more widely distributed due to regular, low-intensity burns either naturally set or set by Native Americans, as well as grazing by forest bison and elk.

With the advent of the Smokey the Bear/no fires allowed era, fuel loads built up to staggering levels as the savanna transitioned to thick forest.

Then, with the rising temps and falling rainfall of the 21st century, the trees started to die en-mass from drought and beetle infestations and the dead brush burned as mega-fires, killing even the largest, most resilient trees and sterilizing the soil as it went.

By the end of the century, most of the area will be largely denuded of trees, replaced by brush and grasses in wetter areas, and desert in drier ones.

[The_jackalope]

2. And we're off! Enjoy the ride, everyone.

Or not...

GliderGuider's most dire predictions (about everything including human obstinacy) are about to be shown to have been too optimistic.