Wildfires burn twice as much land as they did 40 years ago and the fire season is two months longer than in the 1970s because of climate change, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service told a Senate committee hearing today.
The Forest Service has nearly doubled spending on combating wildfires since 2000, going from $540 million to $1 billion last year and despite predictions that hotter, drier conditions in 2013 will increase the likelihood of fires in the West and Southwest, sequestration budget cuts mean the forest service will hire about 5 percent fewer fire fighters this season and the money spent by the forest service on fire prevention has been cut in half.
In his prepared remarks before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Thomas Tidwell, Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said:
Florida, Georgia, Utah, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, have all experienced the largest and/or the most destructive fires in their history just in the last six years. On average wildfires burn twice as many acres each year as compared to 40 years ago, and there are on average seven times as many fires over 10,000 acres per year.In 2012 over 9.3 million acres burned in the United States. The fires of 2012 were massive in size, with 51 fires exceeding 40,000 acres. Of these large fires, 14 exceeded 100,000 acres. The increase in large fires in the west coincides with an increase in temperatures and early snow melt in recent years. This means longer fire seasons. The length of the fire season has increased by over two months since the 1970s.
This is not a prediction how ignoring greenhouse gas emissions now will impact the United States in 2040 or by the end of the century. No, this our new reality: a fire season two months longer, wildfires burning twice as much acreage than 4O years ago, and firefighting costs doubling in little more than a decade. This is climate changed."The largest issue is how we adapt our management to anticipate climate change impacts and begin to mitigate their potential effects," Tidwell told the committee.
"It's hard for the average member of the public to understand how things have changed," Tidwell told The Guardian after the hearing.