President Trump and other republican legislators are blaming Canada’s wildfires on the country’s mismanagement of forests.
Members of Michigan’s Republican Congressional delegation wrote two letters to Canadian leaders about forest management and wildfire prevention efforts.
Michigan was one of the states heavily affected in recent weeks from wildfire smoke coming from Canada. The smoke contained high levels of particulate matter, posing health risks to residents.
Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the school for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a climate researcher, said while forest management is useful in wildfire management, the real issue is climate change.
“What we really need to do is work together as two countries, not just to manage forests better, fight fires better, but to fight climate change together,” he said. “That’s the big reason this is happening in Canada and the US and unless we do this together, climate change will get worse and the fires will get worse.”
He said as warmer temperatures dry out vegetation in the region, the circumstances surrounding fires will change.
“Yes, there have been huge fires here [Michigan] but those fires were really the result of dry conditions and human caused ignitions,” he said. “The fires we’re going to get in the future are going to be more like the ones out west, caused by the warming climate slowly drying out our vegetation, our forests. Then they too will start to burn.”
Overpeck said there are many signs of climate change in Michigan. One is an increase in storm activity.
“The storms are preferentially moving northward and out of the southwest,” he said. “They’re moving right across the continent to where we live here in Michigan.”
As the storms move Northeast, that leaves the Southwest with worsening drought conditions. And as the climate warms, the aridification, the process of a region becoming dry and water-scarce, also moves closer to the Midwest.
“It seems to be progressing further and further eastward towards the Mississippi River and, of course, the Midwest,” Overpeck said. “So at some point we’ll start to see aridification out here in more dramatic ways.”
He said Michigan has always had dry spells, but they have become longer and more severe. Overpeck studies ancient climates and said the last time there were several mega-droughts was during medieval times, when the temperature was not much different than it is now.
“What that says to me is that the Earth system is very sensitive,” he said. “It doesn’t take a lot of warming to start getting drier conditions. It’s quite possible that our computer models that we use to project future climates are actually not sensitive enough to subtle changes in climate forcing.”
Climate forcing, also known as radiative forcing, is the imbalance between the energy Earth receives from the Sun and the energy it radiates back into space. Researchers say it is the driving force behind global warming and cooling.
Overpeck said the medieval mega-droughts were brought on by natural changes, and now, as we continue to burn and use fossil fuels, those changes are happening more rapidly.
“It’s like hitting a climate system with a big hammer whereas in the past we hit it with little taps,” he said. “So I worry that we might be underestimating how bad it will get and how soon it will get really bad.”
