Climate change causing more violent wildfires: study

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

Perilous Times and Climate Change

Climate change causing more violent wildfires: study
 
 
By Amy Minsky, Postmedia News December 8, 2010


Climate change is causing wildfires in the North to burn more violently, which could cause global warming to snowball as it feeds off its own byproducts, according to research released Monday led by an assistant professor at the University of Guelph.

The "runaway scenario" hinges on the fact that the fires are pumping significantly more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than previously thought, said Merritt Turetsky, who teaches in the university’s department of integrative biology.

The increased gases result in more warming which, in turn, leads to fiercer fires and, again, more gases, she explained.

The team of researchers published their findings of this damaging and potentially widespread effect of climate change as delegations from nearly 200 countries gather in Cancun, Mexico to draft a legally-binding environmental treaty with a focus on curbing global warming.

"Just a few degrees of warming of the Earth’s surface is going to have really fundamental shifts for Canadians, like increased droughts in the summer, longer snow-free seasons, and changes in agriculture," Turetsky said. "People hear a lot about climate change, but if they take it more seriously, if they understand it can impact their lives directly, I think politicians will get the idea that they need to start reflecting those societal concerns."

The impacts of global warming are felt particularly sternly in the North, she said, explaining that the higher volume of greenhouse gas emitted from fires is a consequence of the thawing of the northern soil, known as permafrost.

Carbon has been accumulating in the northern permafrost and peatland soils for thousands of years. About half of the world’s soil carbon is locked in that ground.

"The ecosystems are burning more severely, initiating the permafrost thaw and making a lot more carbon available for burning in the future," Turetsky said.

This study is another drop in much larger and growing body of proof that climate change is having dire effects in northern regions, the researchers said.

And although it’s not impossible to break the cycle these researchers uncovered, it’s unlikely, Turetsky said.

"Given the current structure of the boreal forest, it’s not likely," she said. "For anything to change the track of this runaway train, the boreal forest would have to act very differently than it does today."

But the cycle won’t go on indefinitely, said Eric Kasischke, a professor of biogeography at the University of Maryland who started this research project in the early 1990s.

The runaway scenario will probably continue for several decades and eventually lead to a complete shift in forest type, which will also lead to fewer fires, he said.

But such a shift will have a cascading effect on all living organisms in the North, he warned.

"The shift can destroy the habitat for the caribou, for example. So those populations are likely to drop, and moose populations are likely to increase, because they like the shrubs that come back after the severe fires," Kasischke said.

"And eventually it will affect people living in the higher northern areas, as they’re forced to shift their resources and refocus their hunting habits."

To collect the data for this study, which will be published in Nature Geosciences, researchers visited almost 200 sites in Alaska shortly after fires had been extinguished, and measured the amount of biomass that had burnt.

The group is undertaking similar studies in the Canadian boreal forests.