This post is based on a report produced by Climate Central, a non-profit climate education group.

Climate Central

Screenshot from Climate Central's Interactive Wildfire Tracker. Click on the image to see where wildfires are currently burning.

The 2012 wildfire season isn’t over yet, but already this year is shaping up to be the one of the worst on record in the American West. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, with nearly two months still to go in the fire season, the total area already burned this year is 30% more than in an average year, and fires have consumed more than 8.6 million acres, an area larger than the state of Maryland.

Yet, what defines a “typical” wildfire year in the West is changing. In the past 40 years, rising spring and summer temperatures, along with a shrinking mountain snowpack, have increased the risk of wildfires in most parts of the West.

Studies show that continued climate change is going to make wildfires much more common in the coming decades.

The National Research Council reports that for every degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of temperature increase, the size of the area burned in the Western U.S. could quadruple. According to the 4^thAssessment Report from the U.N.’s climate science panel, summer temperatures in western North America could increase between 3.6 degrees and 9 degrees by the middle of this century.

Key findings

Climate Central’s analysis [PDF] of 42 years of U.S. Forest Service records for 11 Western states shows that:

The number of large and very large fires on Forest Service land is increasing dramatically.  Compared to the average year in the 1970’s, the past decade saw:

• 7 times more fires greater than 10,000 acres each year
• Nearly 5 times more fires larger than 25,000 acres each year
• Twice as many fires over 1,000 acres each year, with an average of more than 100 per year from 2002 through 2011, compared with fewer than 50 during the 1970’s.

In some states the increase in wildfires is even more dramatic. Since the 1970’s the average number of fires of over 1,000 acres each year has nearly quadrupled in Arizona and Idaho, and has doubled in California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.

On average, U.S. wildfires burn twice as much land area each year as they did 40 years ago. In the past decade, the average annual burn area on Forest Service land in the West has exceeded two million acres — more than all of Yellowstone National Park.

Craig Miller/KQED

Continued climate change will likely make wildfires worse in the coming decades.

The burn season is two-and-a-half months longer than 40 years ago. Across the West, the first wildfires of the year are starting earlier and the last fires of the year are starting later, making typical fire years 75 days longer now than they were 40 years ago.

Rising spring and summer temperatures across the West appear to be correlated to the increasing size and numbers of wildfires. Spring and summer temperatures have increased more rapidly across this region than the rest of the country, in recent decades. Since 1970, years with above-average spring and summer temperatures were typically years with the biggest wildfires.

Other factors are believed to be contributing to more severe fires, such as the Forest Service’s 60-year policy of aggressive fire suppression (reversed in the 1990′s) that left more fuel for today’s outbreaks, but as average global temperatures rise, researchers project that the risk of wildfires in America’s West will accelerate.

A version of this post also appears at Climate Central, a content partner of Climate Watch.

This has been a devastating wildfire season. Nationwide, more acres have burned this summer than at this time in any other year on record. In May and June, New Mexico weathered the largest fire in its history. Hundreds of homes and tens of thousands of acres have burned in Colorado. As the summer wears on, fire season has moved west — as it tends to do – and now the Ponderosa Fire is raging near Redding.

Has it always been like this? A new NPR series by Christopher Joyce explores what a century of fire suppression has meant for forests in the Southwest.

By keeping forests from burning, the Forest Service has actually made them more susceptible to very large fires. Instead of more frequent brush fires, which help keep fuel to a minimum, now, when a forest begins burning, fires consume the ample fuel and are able to climb to the tops of trees, sweeping through thousands of acres. (Graphics in the second story in the series illustrate the difference.)

In addition to the video above and five radio pieces (the first two aired today), there’s a fire map that shows current large fires and fire conditions, and a series of photos showing the evolution of a forest where fire is suppressed.

Fire suppression is only a piece — though it’s a big one — of the wildfire puzzle. Beetles, disease, drought and logging are all in the mix, too. And then there’s climate change, which scientists project will bring more fires to the West — not just in the long-term, but within the next few decades.

California Energy Commission

A wood-burning power plant in Northern California. In 2007, "biomass" energy accounted for roughly 2.1 percent of California energy production. A new state bioenergy plan seeks to substantially increase that percentage.

Wood scraps, animal manure, household garbage and other wastes may soon fuel a sweeping “clean energy” initiative in California, if the collective vision of several state agencies comes to pass.

This week, the state announced its 2012 Bioenergy Action Plan [PDF], which promotes an array of organic materials as a large and untapped fuel source for an energy-hungry state.

“Swift action on bioenergy will create jobs, increase local clean energy supplies, and help businesses grow in California,” said resources agency secretary John Laird in a Department of Natural Resources release. Currently, the bioenergy sector employs roughly 5,000 people and contributes $575 million to the state economy; the agency estimates the new plan could create an additional 4,000 jobs statewide.

The 2012 plan, a collaboration among eight agencies including the Natural Resources Agency, the California Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), is the latest in a string of initiatives meant to jumpstart the California bioenergy industry. In 2006, the state released its first bioenergy plan, after then-governor Schwarzenegger signed an executive order requiring the state to establish:

“…targets for the use and production of biofuels and biopower and [direct] state agencies to work together to advance biomass programs in California while providing environmental protection and mitigation.”

A bioenergy source touted in the 2012 plan are so-called anaerobic digestion systems, which harness anaerobic bacteria to break down organic wastes. The California Energy Commission points to a farm in Tulare, which recaptures methane, or natural gas, released as anaerobic bacteria break down vast piles of hog manure. Enough gas is reportedly generated to drive two gas power plants that produce enough electricity for the entire farm.

Cal Fire chief Ken Pimlott sees bioenergy not only as way to diversify California’s energy portfolio but also a means to reduce the likelihood of large forest fires, such as those currently burning in the state’s northern half. “Generating energy from forest waste helps to reduce dangerous fuel loads in our forests while providing jobs and local energy supplies in forest communities,” said Pimlott in the release.

Heaps of wood along with agricultural scraps and municipal garbage can be fed into waste-to-energy or “biomass” plants. One facility highlighted in the plan is the Wheelabrator Shasta Power Plant, near Anderson, which consumes around 750 million tons of “forest residue” and wastes from local mills to generate 49 megawatts of energy. According to the California Energy Commission, at the biomass industry’s peak in the state, there were 66 biomass plants producing 800 megawatts of energy a year — roughly the generating capacity of one large gas-fired plant.

Critics say wood-burning plants may have an adverse effect on the atmosphere in the short term, since burning wood releases carbon more rapidly than under natural conditions of decay. Others assert the plants are really a veiled push for increased logging and, in the long-run, may end up competing for harvested wood used for construction or paper manufacturing.

But biomass boosters, such as  Plumas County supervisor Robert Meacher, say proof of the need to tap the state’s vast stores of “woody renewables” is lingering in the air over Northern California.

“You can cut the smoke with a knife in the northern Sierra right now,” Meacher told me as he drove from the front lines of one of the large fires burning in his county. “I would submit that by the time these fires burning in northern California are out, it will negate all that we are trying to do under AB 32 for the calendar year.”

California Emergency Management Agency

The towering flames of the Robbers fire, which burned 2,600 acres and destroyed five buildings in Placer County in July. A new UC Merced report says such fires may double in the next 40 years because of urban growth and warming temperatures.

As notices begin to arrive in the mail to nearly 850,000 California residences in fire-prone areas for Cal Fire’s controversial new fire prevention fee, a study out of the University of California Merced offers a powerful rationale for beefing up the state’s wildland firefighting resources.

Warmer average temperatures coupled with urban growth will greatly increase wildfire risk to California homes in the decades to come, according to the new UC study [PDF] prepared for the California Energy Commission.

Lead author and environmental engineering professor Anthony Westerling, says wildfire risk to California homes may double over the next 40 years because of a combination of climate change, land alteration and urban development.

The report supports the findings of several other studies released earlier this year showing a correlation between warming Western temperatures and increased fire activity. The study projects that climate change will generally increase fire risk across the state, with the greatest threat posed to forests in the foothills and mountains of Northern California.

The interplay among climate, people and fires is complex. In some cases, according to the report, factors contributing to fire risk may even cancel out. For example, development may reduce the volume of flammable material available to fuel large fires but the corresponding increase in population will up the probability of human ignitions.

Even with large-scale efforts to reduce carbon emissions, Westerling says that some level of warming is inevitable and that the state must work to phase in sound policies to mitigate growing risk to property.

“While policies to mitigate climate change could help to limit changes in wildfire, some level of additional warming is going to occur regardless, requiring adaptation,” Westerling said in a press release.  “Fire suppression, fuels management and development policies such as zoning and building codes are the primary means we have to manage wildfire risks.”

The findings grabbed the attention of Cal Fire director Ken Pimlott, who spoke with Climate Watch senior editor Craig Miller last week. “When you have 11 of the 20 most damaging wildfires in California history happening since 2002, that tells us where things are going,” said Pimlott.

He noted that the models in the report are confirmed by the experience of fire crews in the field. “The computer models are helping us validate the things our firefighters and the public are seeing, real-time, on the ground,” said Pimlott. “We need to be responding to that now and into the future ”

Cal Fire’s fire prevention fee will be assessed on California homeowners living at fire-prone boundaries with open space.  The fee, which has been met with protests in Marin County and derided by critics as an “illegal tax,” will hit California homeowners with a maximum annual charge of $150 and is expected to generate around $84 million in revenue for the agency.

By Alice Daniel

Tim Walton

Rural homes are at greatest risk of wildfires. The state will now charge those homeowners a fee to help pay for fire protection services.

It’s fire season in California. The blazes may not be big enough to draw national TV news crews, but pulling from the top of CAL FIRE’s news feed it’s easy to see the agency is busy.

There’s the Volcano Fire in Riverside County, the Salt Creek Fire in Shasta, the Graham Fire in Tuolumne. Demand for services is as big as it’s ever been, but CAL FIRE has not been spared from budget cuts, which explains a new bill that roughly 800,000 rural homeowners, those who live in the most fire-prone areas, will soon have to pay.

The legislature-approved fee is up to $150 per home and should generate $84 million per year, says CAL FIRE spokesperson Daniel Berlant.

“All that money will go towards fire prevention in the state responsibility area,” Berlant said. “The most notable activities include brush clearance, forest health, fuel reduction.”

A recent state report on climate change says hotter temperatures already are causing more and larger fires. Berlant says 11 of the top 20 largest fires recorded in California have occurred in the past decade. “Even this year, we’ve seen about twice as many fires as we did last year. And that does have us concerned and does have us very busy this year,” said Berlant.

They’re doing it with less money — CAL FIRE’s budget has been slashed in recent years. “CAL FIRE has taken some major budget reductions over the past couple of years. Almost $80 million in the last year-and-a-half, including to seasonal firefighters,” said Berlant. We’ve reduced the number of firefighters on an engine, we’ve closed one of our air tanker bases.

There is some opposition to the fee. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association contends that it is an illegal tax. It says it will sue the state to have the charges refunded. Meanwhile the bills are slated to go out between now and December.

Craig Miller

The new normal? A temperature display in the Kern County town of Taft shows 105 degrees on a late afternoon in July.

Granted, it’s been a relatively cool summer in many parts of California. But state officials are saying, “Don’t get used to it.” How would you like to see the number of “extremely hot” days (105 or hotter) in Sacramento increase fivefold in the next few decades? That’s just one of many new projections from the state’s latest official climate assessment.

One hundred-twenty scientists worked on the report, entitled California’s Changing Climate (PDF). Funded by the California Energy Commission, it’s actually a portfolio of studies and contains some of the most specific warnings we’ve seen. For instance, it projects that going forward, average temperatures in the state will warm at three times last century’s pace. It’ll mean heat waves happening more often and lasting longer.

And there’s new evidence from a refined set of models that the state will be drying out. “By mid-century, already we’re seeing a drying trend which could be up to ten percent drier by the end of the century, says Susanne Moser, identified as the principal researcher for the report, “and that is significant for a lot of people.” Especially if you live in say, the San Joaquin Valley, where the report projects that the frequency of “dry years” could increase by about a third in the “latter half of this century,” compared to the late 20th century.

And authors expect the weird weather to get worse, projecting that as soon as 2050, what’s now considered a 100-year storm could become ‘an annual event.”

State officials nearly fell over each other to say that it’s not too late to blunt some of the worst effects, however, with astute planning and aggressive action to reduce global warming emissions. Ken Alex, who heads Governor Jerry Brown’s Office of Planning & Research, characterized the mounting climate threats as, “a series of plagues,” but added that, “we’re not helpless. We need to adapt and we need to understand what that adaptation requires.”

Some interesting numbers from the study:

• 1.7: increase in statewide average temp from 1895 to 2011, in degrees Fahrenheit
• 2.7: likely increase by 2050, compared to 2000
• 20: Number of days per year that the temp could reach 105 in Sacramento by 2050 (versus four, historically)
• 10-18: Likely range of additional sea rise along California by 2050 (v. 2000)
• 23: Number of San Francisco fire stations that would likely be inaccessible with 16 inches of additional sea rise (considered likely by 2050)

CA Climate Change Center

Scientists say how much temperatures eventually rise will depend on the pace of continued global warming emissions.

The study suggests that temperatures will rise more in the summer and inland, with springtime warming “particularly pronounced” and fewer cold nights. Farmers depend on chilly nights to produce some high-value crops, such as stone fruits. Officials at the Energy Commission expressed concern about potential impacts that rising temperatures will have on the state’s power grid, some of which we addressed in a previous post.

As for reducing emissions enough to make a tangible difference, Moser concedes that’s not a job that California can do alone. But she said this report is the first to target findings to the kinds of questions that officials and planners have been asking (like the aforementioned matter of how many triple-digit days they can expect–and how soon).

Craig Miller/KQED

A wildfire truck owned by California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire).

While CalFire experts, embedded with the California National Guard are helping fight the massive wildfires in Colorado, CalFire is also beefing up at home, preparing for the peak of California’s fire season. As of this week, the agency is fully staffed, with 7,000 personnel, hundreds of engines and dozens of air tankers and helicopters.

CalFire has already responded to 2,308 fires this year — that’s more than 1,000 more than at this time last year, and higher than the five-year average, too. Combined with the fires in local jurisdictions, there have been more than 2,500 fires this year, and that doesn’t include wildfires on federal land.

“We had some spring rains but in terms of fuel and fire conditions, it’s too little too late because we are seeing an increase in fire starts,” Janet Upton, the Deputy Director of Communications at CalFire told me. “We roughly respond to a thousand fires a month this time of year, but typically you’re not hearing about them because we keep them small and keep the damage to a minimum.”

The dry winter is partially to blame for the higher number of fires, but Upton says it’s not the only culprit. “We’re attributing it to a lot of things,” she said. “Climate change, certainly drought-stressed trees. We’ve had a number of consecutive years of drought in the past decade, and that makes the trees more susceptible to disease and bug infestation, like the bark beetle kill in Southern California and Sudden Oak Death along the North Coast and Marin County.”

California hasn’t reached its peak fire season yet. It typically begins around mid-August, and lasts through October. So CalFire is looking to Colorado, to get clues about what to expect here later this summer. “Where the nation goes, we tend to follow,” Upton said. “Fire season tends to move across the U.S. from east to west.”

Even a normal year in California comes with fire. But fire season is getting longer, and the fires are getting larger: eleven of the largest fires [PDF] CalFire has taken on since the 1930′s have taken place in the last decade.

So far this summer, California has been spared from massive wildfires like the ones raging in Colorado. You can keep tabs on fires in California on CalFire’s statewide map.

By Andrew Freedman

U.S. Air Force photo/Mike Kaplan/Flickr

The Waldo Canyon fire burns off the southern border of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Blistering and desiccating heat across the West and High Plains helped aggravate an already dangerous wildfire situation in Colorado and several other states, and now the heat is moving eastward toward the Midwest, South Central states, and eventually the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

Denver endured a record fifth straight day of 100-degree temperatures on Tuesday, and the high temperature of 105°F tied the city’s all-time record high, a milestone that reached just a day earlier. Colorado Springs also hit an all-time mark on Tuesday, with a high of 101°F.

At least 23 daily high temperature records were broken or tied in Colorado alone on Tuesday.

The heat, combined with drought conditions and afternoon thunderstorms that brought lightning but little rain, helped create ideal conditions for massive wildfires in Colorado. A thunderstorm-related wind shift caused the Waldo Canyon Fire near Colorado Springs to advance on the state’s second-largest city, prompting evacuation orders for at least 32,000. The fire has consumed an unknown number of homes and businesses.

According to the Denver Post, the wildfires are “shaping up as one of the biggest disasters in Colorado history.”

“This is a fire of epic proportions,” Colorado Springs Fire Chief Rich Brown told Reuters. Following a helicopter flyover of the Waldo Canyon blaze, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper told reporters: “It was like looking at the worst movie set you could imagine.

“It’s almost surreal. You look at that, and it’s like nothing I’ve seen before,” he said, according to a report on MSNBC.com.

The Waldo Canyon Fire had burned more than 15,000 acres as of Wednesday, and was just 5 percent contained.

This post is from Climate Watch’s content partner, Climate Central.

USFWS

U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Cal Fire crews fighting a wildfire near San Diego. Federal and state budget cuts have greatly reduced California's wildland fire resources.

As more than 400 firefighters attack a 2200-acre wildfire in Riverside County, and huge fires continue to burn in Colorado and the Southwest, recent studies have projected that the western U.S, wracked by an increasingly hot and dry climate, will experience more frequent and intense fires in the near future.

But pinpointing just where and when those larger, hotter, more destructive fires will occur — in the near term —  is a much different sort of science.

The job of seasonal wildfire forecasting, it turns out, falls to an agency called the National Interagency Fire Center. Each month, the Boise-based NIFC, a collaborative of eight federal agencies, including the National Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Weather Service, issues its Wildland Fire Outlook [PDF], which offers a year-to-date tally and projections of acres burned along with a comprehensive look at where fire conditions are ripe.

Ed Delgado, manager of the NIFC’s Predictive Services program, says his team looks at a number of factors including snowpack, drought, fuel conditions (that is, the amount of dry vegetation available to burn) and periodic climate variations such as El Niño and La Niña.

This year, the Great Basin, Rocky Mountains and northern Sierra are in the “above normal” category for fire, said Delgado, because of prolonged drought, low snowpack and high fuel-loading of of dead timber and grasses. “We had a very limited snow in the deserts of the Great Basin and that allowed grasses from previous years to remain standing tall,” said Delgado.  “This added to the fuels available to burn.”

As for California, the NIFC has predicted that the central Sierra and the Coastal Ranges will come into above average fire danger from July to September, with fires above 8,000 feet more likely than in recent seasons. (Richard Minnich, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, has predicted low fire risk at low elevations in the southern half of the state because of scant winter rainfall that killed grasses before they deposited seeds.)

Delgado says he has personally seen fire season come earlier by a matter of a few weeks in parts of Utah and Nevada. But the NIFC’s forecasts do not examine whether such changes in seasonal fire activity – such as that in the central Rocky Mountains where the forecast number of fires (1,888) are more than double, and the number of acres projected to burn (186,083) nearly double, the June average – are the result of long-term shifts in climate, or fire suppression, grazing and other management practices that have increased fuel stores – or some combination of these ingredients.

Figuring out just how these factors contribute to fire activity, year-to-year, may be critical, especially with resources stretched thin because of deep cuts to wildland firefighting budgets at federal, state and local levels.  Earlier this month, for example, the Guardian reported $512 million in federal cuts for wildfire suppression and preparedness – an overall decrease of 12 percent since 2010. In California, governor Jerry Brown announced an $80 million reduction in the Cal Fire budget. In response, the agency downsized the number of seasonal firefighters on its rolls from 3100 in 2010, to 1700 this year, and for the second straight year has reduced staffing on engine crews from four to three. (Cal Fire faces another $60 million in trigger cuts next year if the governor’s new tax plan fails to be adopted in the November election.)

Others, however, have questioned the wisdom of allocating tens-of-millions of dollars to fighting wildfires, which once were an essential part of the natural lifecycle of forests and grasslands. As Daniel Glick, writing in Audubon Magazine last year about the proliferation of billion-dollar “megafires”over the last decade, described it:

Experts wondered if “fighting” these colossal fires wasn’t about as effective as dropping DC-10 tanker loads of $100 bills into the flames. More than three million acres have burned each year since 1999—and a 10-million-acre year is almost certainly on the horizon. As the cost of firefighting crossed the billion-dollar mark every year since 2002, another measure of “mega” began to catch policy makers’ eyes: mega expensive. The money being thrown around to douse these fires has pretty much gone up in smoke—and more than 400 wildfire fighters have died since 1987.

The fire-prone reaches of the West are faced with a daunting future. Climate change coupled increased fuel loads from periodic drought, fire suppression and pine beetle outbreaks will make fires more frequent and more intense. Declining budgets coupled with rising costs of fighting these growing conflagrations will limit the resources available to suppress them.  While fire is indeed necessary to germinate seeds and reduce fuels, suburban and exurban growth has pushed to the edges — and deep into the interiors — of the nation’s forests and rangelands. (For example, more than 800,000 structures now sit in fire prone areas amid the 31 million acres of California open space overseen by Cal Fire.) This creeping development has permanently altered the natural dynamics of forests and has made some of the best tools for preventing large wildfires – prescribed burns, for example – into highly risky propositions.

The heat is on for solutions. What are your thoughts?

Cal Fire

A new study projects fires in the western U.S. will become more frequent within the next 30 years.

Large fires in the western U.S. — such as those currently raging in Colorado and New Mexico – may be part of a shifting pattern of wildfire risk brought on by climate change, according to a study led by researchers at UC Berkeley.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Ecosphere, analyzed the results of 16 different global climate change models. The models included variables such as annual precipitation and mean temperature of the warmest month and projected an increase in the frequency of fires across the majority of North America and much of Europe within the next 30 years.

“In the long run, we found what most fear — increasing fire activity across large parts of the planet,” said study lead author Max Moritz, a fire specialist with UC Berkeley, in a press release. “But the speed and extent to which some of these changes may happen is surprising.”

While the models diverge in their predictions for certain parts of the world, there was wide agreement about a growing fire risk in the western United States, a conclusion that supports other recent studies.

Moritz said the findings do not account for short-term shifts in the climate, such those brought on by El Niño. He also cautioned against connecting the study’s results to, say, this week’s red flag warnings in northern California or the small weed fires that broke out this weekend in Milpitas and San Jose. Moritz pointed out these events are likely attributable to offshore winds – such as the Santa Anas and Diablos.

“None of these wind-related phenomena are built into our models,” said Moritz. “Like the El Niño signal, the global climate models do not give us good wind projections.”

However, he did offer a powerful takeaway message of the study to millions of Californians living in fire-prone areas.

“We don’t ‘fight’ earthquakes, floods or hurricanes. But we fight fire,” said Moritz. “The bottom line is that we need to learn to accommodate and coexist with this natural process, particularly in places like California. We need to learn how to build accordingly, to plan our neighborhoods and developments…And climate change is going to force our hand.”