Anatomy of a Mega-Wildfire

  

“It’s horrible, but we have to learn to live with it.”

Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in western Canada

The pictures above include a view from space and on the ground of a mega-wildfire which, between July 29th and August 3rd, had consumed over 55,000 acres in California’s Kamath National Forest. The horrific McKinney wildfire, the largest mega-blaze in the United States so far this year. As my recent Burning, Denial and Demoralized Fire Crews and Climate Change’s New Big Blaze Threat blogs have pointed out, insufficient and demoralized fire crews are quite literally trying to extinguish massive mega-fires that pack the power of hurricane or tornado-level winds in heat that can sap human strength… even as a misstep can incinerate a firefighter in an instant. If we cannot stop hurricanes and tornados – and we do not even try – the notion of containing this new amped-up power of forest fires seems almost futile.

Still, people rebuild and knowingly expand housing into fire prone areas and expect affordable fire insurance to cover them. To put it mildly, we still do not understand these new mega-blazes, fires that are so intense, so powerful, that they now deposit their soot directly into the stratosphere while creating their own independent weather patterns. Replete with their own lightening strikes and cloud formations, which are no longer rare and isolated phenomena. The most relevant weather precedents to date come from the centuries of data and observations we have been able to aggregate… from massive volcanic eruptions. Not from previous wildfires!

Writing for the August 3rd Los Angeles Times, Corinne Purtill examines this unprecedented new intensity that just may be becoming the new-normal: “Four times, columns of smoke rose from the flames beyond the altitude at which a typical jet flies, penetrating the stratosphere and injecting a plume of soot and ash miles above the Earth’s surface. It’s a phenomenon known as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a byproduct of fire that NASA once memorably described as ‘the fire-breathing dragon of clouds.’

“In Siskiyou County [California], the water in these clouds returned to Earth as rain, accompanied by thunder, wind and lightning, in a classic example of a wildfire producing its own weather,’ said David Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has developed an algorithm to distinguish fire-induced thunderstorms from traditional ones.

“Investigators have yet to determine the cause of the McKinney fire, which grew rapidly in hilly, challenging terrain and was uncontained as of Tuesday [8/2]… Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in western Canada, said he isn’t shocked to see fires this powerful. The data have been pointing in this direction for years. He just didn’t think they’d be happening this soon…

“It isn’t just that wildfires are more powerful, more frequent and burning more acreage each year than ever before, he said. The energy generated by these conflagrations is also creating columns of smoke so big that they leave the troposphere, the bottom layer of the atmosphere that wraps the Earth ‘like an apple skin,’ as Flannigan put it.

“The troposphere is where weather happens, and where eye-searing clouds of smoke and soot circulate even from moderately sized fires. But when a smoke column such as those emanating from the McKinney fire shoots through that layer and enters the stratosphere — the higher, more stable layer above — it creates havoc with local weather and seeds the Earth’s atmosphere with aerosol pollutants whose consequence science is still sorting out.”

The hotter, water-parched forest regions around the world are gigantic tinderboxes waiting for a spark… before they explode with their rising ferocity. Climate change has set the stage. Mankind’s seeming indifference and marginalization of the risk – notwithstanding recent efforts to “do something” about our hot new reality – have created a platform for disaster that is exceptionally difficult, at this stage, to reverse. By the end of the decade, estimates suggest that the number and intensity of these mega-fires will almost double.

Maybe those who suffered from the massive flooding in Kentucky might miss the connection with these wildfires in the Western states, but they are inexorably linked. Even with recent, one-sided legislation adding new support to combat climate change, half of our political system seems to be hellbent on resisting the obviously necessary changes in our energy use from fossil fuels to alternative sources. As you watch ads from Big Oil about all they are doing to combat climate change, realize that they are simultaneously doing everything in their power to extend our dependence on fossil fuels. Lips flapping in a searingly hot breeze.

I'm Peter Dekom, and Mother Nature does not care how much money special interests are spending to resist alternative energy or how politically unpopular such efforts are in red states, she will continue to flood, burn, decimate and desertify our lands in accordance with the immutable laws of physics.