More Big Wildfires May Be Future Norm for US
For the past 30 years, residents of tiny Laporte, Colorado, near the Wyoming border have gathered inside Bob’s Coffee Shop to swap gossip over coffee and danishes near the dense pine forest of Lory State Park. But since the weekend, Bob’s has become a very different kind of social hub: a de facto refugee camp for homeowners fleeing what many here call the worst wildfire in decades.As presumptive GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney faces criticism for wanting to slash firefighting jobs, the Colorado blaze has reignited debate over a controversial question: Are devastating fires like this one caused by climate change?
“There’s no question that humans have altered the background atmosphere on a global scale,” Hayhoe said. “And there’s also no question humans have altered the environment on the local and regional level,” she said, by living near forests and choosing how to manage them. “Climate change is often the final straw in a lot of those cases.”
A University of Arizona report from 2006 found that large forest fires occurred more frequently in the Western United States since the mid-1980s as spring temperatures increased, snow melted earlier and summers got hotter, and that the fire season has grown. According to University of Colorado, Berkeley fire ecologist Max Moritz, the Colorado fire features “a lot of the characteristics we would expect under climate change,” including plentiful, dry fuel as a result of low precipitation.