Warning For Western US & Canada: "Wildfires Are Increasing Beyond Our Capacity To Control"

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“Neither suppression nor current approaches to fuels management adequately reduce vulnerability of communities to increasing wildfire,” said the study’s lead author, Tania Schoennagel, a research scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “We’ve been very effective with fire suppression for many years, but wildfires are increasing beyond our capacity to control, especially with more people in fire’s way.”

Park Williams, a bioclimatologist the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said the paper makes a valuable point: Forest density and climate change have converged to vastly increase catastrophic wildfire frequency and size in a way a that is entirely out of human control. “We now know that continued increases in fire activity are inevitable, but we’ve been able to come up with no other way forward other than to fight fires as hard as we can,” said Williams, who is unaffiliated with the study. “All we’re doing is paying huge amounts of money to deliver an even worse problem onto the next generation.”

The West’s increasing vulnerability to catastrophic wildfire was on display in 2016 as much of Fort McMurray, Alberta, was consumed in a firestorm that incinerated 2,400 buildings. The blaze quickly became the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history. Later in the year, the Blue Cut Fire burned 105 homes near San Bernardino, Calif., and forced the evacuation of 82,000. All the homes destroyed in those blazes were in the wildland-urban interface zone, an area that includes millions of homes in the West. In California alone, 4.5 million homes have been built in the zone, according to the study.

About 40 percent of the zone is expected to see an increased chance of burning by 2040. Today about 900,000 homes in the zone are at high risk of fire damage across the West, Schoennagel said. The reason is that climate change is making wildfire seasons longer and more intense. The trend bends toward bigger, more destructive and drought-driven blazes in the West. On average, wildfires burn six times the acreage they did 45 years ago, Climate Central research shows.

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http://www.climatecentral.org/news/scientists-wildfires-warming-world-21360