FORESTS
FLOODS
FIRES
FISHERIES
Michael Golden has hunted elk on this mountain in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley his entire life. It’s a tradition he shared with his father. But his son is growing up in a starkly different environment.
Montana has warmed 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, considerably more than the United States as a whole. That added heat is contributing to raging forest fires and bark beetle outbreaks, a combination that has devastated the state’s forests.
What Golden and his son have witnessed is part of a broader trend. The forests have seen so much damage that Montana’s trees, which had provided the crucial function of pulling carbon dioxide from the air, are sending the greenhouse gas back into the atmosphere.
And forests that once provided a counterbalance to climate change are at the moment contributing to it, as carbon-rich trees suddenly burn, or die and slowly decompose.
Montana is one of six states in the West where trees have been emitting carbon in the past decade or so, according to an analysis by David Cleaves, former climate change adviser to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service.
The other states are Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Four of these states’ forests have flipped in recent years to become carbon emitters — with Montana showing the biggest changes of all, according to the analysis, which only measured the carbon content of trees, not soil. In the 1990s, Montana’s forests were pulling some 20 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year. But by the 2010s, they had reversed course and were putting a few million tons per year back again. The net result is that Montana is sending an extra 20 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
Montana’s forests have historically been large carbon sinks, pulling carbon dioxide from the air. In recent years, disease and other disturbances have caused forests to die, emitting carbon dioxide instead as they rot.
Carbon pulled from the atmosphere
“In the last 10, 15 years, there’s been quite a bit more mortality than in earlier times,” said Cleaves, who is now a consultant with the conservation group American Forests. “So much so that … it crept up to become a small but noticeable source of emissions.”
“The warming climate has allowed beetles to hang on, reproduce faster — multiple broods in a year — and access trees at higher elevations that used to be resistant because of the cold,” says Carl Seielstad, a fire expert at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Between 2000 and 2015, 14 million acres were damaged by beetles and other pests or diseases, more than half of the state’s total forested area.
Forest impacted by bark beetle, fire, and/or logging
Undisturbed forest
Since 1997, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have been losing about 2 percent of their trees every year, says Christopher Williams, a forest and climate change researcher at Clark University in Massachusetts. That’s the equivalent of some 800,000 forest acres annually.
But he’s sure of one thing: He thinks the U.S. Forest Service deserves the most blame. He says they could remove more dead trees, and that would help matters a great deal.
“The hunter’s perception is definitely correct that fires really do shift elks around the landscape,” added Mark Hebblewhite, an elk specialist at the University of Montana in Missoula. It could be, Hebblewhite said, with so many downed trees, elk can see hunters from much farther away and avoid them.
But Hebblewhite added that the elk are still out there, simply adapting to changing forests as they’ve always done.
The elk adapt, but it’s not clear that the forests will.
Normally, forests that died off would grow back and return to drawing carbon out of the atmosphere, providing what scientists call a “sink.”
But the fields of what Golden called “pick-up sticks” suggest a more worrying idea. Maybe, in a new climate regime, forests don’t grow back in the same way. Instead, they shift into a different state.
“When they get hammered so intensely, and we don’t get regeneration, they’re no longer like forest sites anymore, they’re grassland sites,” Cleaves said. “That long-term sink capacity is permanently gone.”
That closely matches the findings from storm surge modeling by researcher Rick Luettich at the University of North Carolina.
Storm surge from Hurricane Florence
The National Guard rescued Cantlow and her family the next morning. She was relieved to be safe, but shocked when she returned to her home, which was devastated by water damage.
Preliminary research has shown that Florence was probably somewhat larger and dumped more rain than it would have if the same storm had arrived in a world without humans’ greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.
When it comes to how Lois Cantlow was affected, climate change was more directly in play. Her home is some six to seven feet above the local high-tide line — but in the massive storm surge that swept up the Neuse River, her home was not spared.
Rising seas, caused by the melting of the planet’s ice and the swelling of the ocean as it warms, make any coastal flooding event worse, even on sunny days. They also worsen the impact of hurricanes when they cross shorelines.
In Cantlow’s case, climate change wasn’t the biggest driver behind the water that ultimately wound up in her home — but it did worsen the flooding, experts say.
Another sea level expert, Benjamin Strauss with Climate Central, said seas off the East Coast have risen by nine inches since 1900.
“We can say, with a high probability, that at least five or six of those inches are human-caused climate change,” Strauss said. At Cantlow’s house, that would translate to perhaps 10 percent of the water.
That may not sound like much. But over time, as seas continue to rise (and rise at a faster rate), more and more water driven inland by storms will be attributable to climate change.
What’s more, many parts of New Bern experienced less flooding than Cantlow’s house did. For some of these areas, climate change could have made the difference between wet and dry. In all of them, it would have accounted for a larger percentage of the overall flooding.
In 2017, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculated a staggering price tag from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria: $265 billion dollars.
In sheer dollar costs, Hurricane Michael — which intensified quickly before it made landfall, taking residents by surprise — and Florence weren’t as damaging as the 2017 storms. But they still had a combined toll of $30 billion, according to reinsurer Munich Re, and join a growing list of devastating storms.
Part of a new generation of firefighters, Gabe has been trained on the swift, massive conflagrations that have wracked California in recent years — megafires like the Carr Fire that devoured over 229,000 acres last year in and around Redding, a northern California city nestled amid national forests.
Climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows a clear correlation between very hot and dry years, like 2017 and 2018, and more destructive fires.
Average temperature
One of the most alarming developments: These more explosive and rapidly spreading fires leave communities with little notice or chance to evacuate. Such fire behavior stood out in the deadly 2018 Carr and Camp Fires in California, among others.
The Carr Fire ultimately caused nearly $800 million in damage across California. And the worst fire was yet to come.
The Carr Fire generated an enormous tornado-like vortex that stunned fire researchers.
The “firenado” was “one of two scientifically documented cases of that happening,” said Neil Lareau, a wildfire expert at the University of Nevada at Reno. “Not only is it extreme, we’re talking about events that have only been recorded a handful of times.”
While there is a lot we don’t know about extreme fire activity and its causes, the dryness of trees and brush feed explosive blazes, Lareau said.
Note: Adjusted for Nov. 2018 cost for beginning of each fiscal year
There is also the mounting devastation. In just one year, the Carr Fire killed seven, following by the swiftly spreading Camp Fire, which destroyed an entire town, Paradise, and killed at least 86 people.
The Camp Fire, the worst in California history, cost an estimated $16.5 billion in damage, according to insurance company Munich Re, making it even more destructive than the year’s worst hurricanes.
Since 1963, Greg Mataronas’s family has been making a living catching lobster off of Little Compton, R.I. But as water temperatures have risen rapidly along the coast, there are fewer lobster to be found, prompting a shift to other species, like whelk.
The state’s lobster haul peaked at over 8 million pounds in 1999. It hasn’t exceeded 3 million since 2005. And in 2017, it barely reached 2 million. As a result, a way of life is rapidly changing and, for some, ending.
Mataronas now fishes for whelk and sea bass and other fish, as well as lobster. To provide for his family, he couldn’t just fish like his father had.
The haul has exploded. Maine’s fisheries have gone from landing about 20 million pounds of lobster each year in the 1980s to nearly 120 million pounds this decade.
Lobster ranks among the most valuable fisheries in the United States, generating over half a billion dollars in revenue annually, most of it in Maine. So the record harvests have been a bonanza for the state’s economy.
The changing density of American lobster catch
The big question is: What’s causing these sudden changes? A number of scientists agree that the Gulf of Maine’s rapid warming over the past several years has helped shift the lobster population northward.
Ocean water temperatures are rising around the world; 2018 was likely the oceans’ warmest year on record. But that alone may not explain the dramatic shift in the Gulf of Maine. Some scientists have found that a slowdown of the so-called overturning circulation in the Atlantic is preventing some warm water from reaching higher latitudes and is instead causing the Gulf Stream to dump it at the New England coast.
“The Gulf of Maine, temperature-wise, is changing very rapidly compared to the rest of the world,” said Dave Carlon, a marine scientist at Bowdoin College. “It’s a little microcosm for what’s going to happen in other parts of the world as the temperature changes.”
Not everyone in the Maine lobster industry agrees that they have climate change to thank for their good fortune — the same climate change that has helped weaken the fishery farther south.
Skeptics like Joyce say lobsters have fewer predators because populations of groundfish like cod, which eat young lobsters, have crashed. They also say Maine fishermen have a longstanding set of self-enforced conservation practices that set them apart from the southern fisheries.
Last year, a team of scientists warned that if uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions continue, the Gulf of Maine will keep warming, and the Maine lobster fishery will decline substantially from its current peak.
The finding was so controversial that the state’s Department of Marine Resources questioned the study and said it wouldn’t take it into account in future planning. The dispute spilled into the pages of the local Portland Press Herald, with state regulators and lobster industry officials disputing the science.
If the research is correct, it would mean Maine’s lobster future is closely tied to the world’s decisions on climate change.
“If the Paris [climate change] goals are met, Maine holds on to a lobster fishery,” said Andrew Pershing, one of the lead researchers behind the work and a scientist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
There’s hope in the sense that the Maine lobster industry knows how to protect its catch and conserve the environment, which has made a difference.
But the ability of lobster populations to move — quickly — has clearly been established.
Nobody knows how much warming the future holds — or when the world will come up with a solution that matches the scale, and speed, of climate change.
Forest carbon data sourced from the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis Program. Forest disturbance data provided by the Biogeosciences Research Group at Clark University. American lobster density data sourced from the Pinsky Lab, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University. Maine lobster harvest data sourced from the State of Maine Department of Marine Resources. Hurricane Florence modeled storm surge data provided by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence. Satellite imagery sourced from Mapbox. Acres burned and emergency fund fire suppression expenditures for California sourced from CalFire. California temperature and precipitation data sourced from NOAA.
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