Western Wildfires and Global Warming

The wide-open spaces of the West are rapidly changing from carbon filters to carbon emitters.

Western forests historically have filtered between 20- to 40% of the amount of carbon dioxide produced in the United States. In the 1980s, though, the frequency and severity of fires in the West started to climb precipitously. While fire is a natural and naturally-healthy part of the West, these fires are catastrophically more frequent and hotter than anything nature has previously produced.

Some scientists claim this hyperactive fire cycle is a product of global warming. Others note vegetative causes, like unnaturally high fuel loads (from overly-aggressive fire prevention and proliferation of highly-flammable invasive species). Regardless whether the fires are a product of global warming, a causal contributor to global warming, both (in a feedback loop that might occur during warming trends), or neither – it is a fact that increased western fires currently are pumping tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Anyone serious about reducing carbon emissions should take a good look at the health of the West’s wide-open spaces, to see if these unnatural fires can be reduced and a more natural fire cycle reintroduced.

Some context: All gasoline-powered cars in Utah produced 9.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2005 (latest data I have). In June/July of this year, wildfires in Utah produced 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That I recall, these were mostly grass fires. I make the distinction, because timber fires produce more than 10 times the amount of carbon emissions per acre than grass fires.