Warming Climate Increases Fire

When I first moved to Colorado, back in the last century, forest fires were rare, and they didn't start breaking out until July. Now, they seem to break out just any old time of year and several can burn at once. There are currently so many burning around the state that they aren't even saying how many any more.

Wildfire is licking at the outskirts of Colorado Springs. The High Park fire, the second largest in the state's history and the most destructive in terms of property, burns just outside of Fort Collins. Many homes are destroyed. Domestic animals are homeless. The Larimar County Fairgrounds have become a shelter for displaced horses. Evacuated humans haven't known whether their homes are still standing.

Those of us living in city limits often fancy ourselves immune from wild fires which generally happen way off in the mountains. While the flames generally don't get into the city as far as my house, the effects of the fires occasionally do.

It's one thing to see aerial views of 100 foot flames on TV. It becomes more real when your eyes sting from smoke and you actually see ash blowing around in your parking lot. People with respiratory ailments really suffer, even 60 miles away.

One reason the fires are more serious now than in years past is because of the massive kill off of trees due to the mountain pine beetle. Huge swaths of forest have been reduced to the skeletal remains of dead trees, just waiting to be ignited by lightning or a careless smoker.

The beetles are so deadly because winters are no longer cold enough to kill them off, enabling them to thrive on a massive scale. With a temperature today of 104, I'm inclined to believe that the climate is indeed getting warmer.

 Fire suppression over the last century has changed the natural cycle of fire into potentially huge, deadly super-fires. Add global warming, a pine beetle disaster, and more people living in the mountains and you've got a recipe for trouble. Kind of makes me long for the past.