Timberland Investment

The Fourth National Climate Assessment focuses on human welfare, societal, and environmental elements of climate change.

It lays out the devastating effects on the economy, health, environment, and wildfires. Within the 1,656-page document wildfires are covered extensively.

The scientists conclude that by the middle of this century, the annual area burned in the western United States could increase 2–6 times from the present, depending on the geographic area, ecosystem, and local climate. The area burned by lightning-ignited wildfires could increase by 30% by 2060.

In the Southeast rising temperatures and increases in the duration and intensity of drought are expected to increase wildfire occurrence and also reduce the effectiveness of prescribed fire. Intra-annual droughts, like the one in 2016, are expected to become more frequent in the future. Thus, drought and greater fire activity are expected to continue to transform forest ecosystems in the region.

In the Southwest, recent wildfires have made California ecosystems and Southwest forests net carbon emitters (they are releasing more carbon to the atmosphere than they are storing). With continued greenhouse gas emissions, models project more wildfire across the area. Under higher emissions, fire frequency could increase 25%, and the frequency of very large fires (greater than 5,000 hectares) could triple.

The Northwest is likely to continue to warm during all seasons under all future scenarios, although the rate of warming depends on current and future emissions. The warming trend is projected to be accentuated in certain mountain areas in late winter and spring, further exacerbating snowpack loss and increasing the risk for insect infestations and wildfires. In central Idaho and eastern Oregon and Washington, vast mountain areas have already been transformed by mountain pine beetle infestations, wildfires, or both, but the western Cascades and coastal mountain ranges have less experience with these growing threats. Forests in the interior Northwest are changing rapidly because of increasing wildfire and insect and disease damage, attributed largely to a changing climate. These changes are expected to increase as temperatures increase and as summer droughts deepen.

In his first remarks on the vast California wildfires that have killed at least seven people and forced thousands to flee, President Trump blamed the blazes on the state’s environmental policies and inaccurately claimed that water that could be used to fight the fires was “foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.”

State officials and firefighting experts dismissed the president’s comments, which he posted on Twitter. “We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires, but let’s be clear: It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires,” said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency.

He and others said that Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to a perennial and unrelated water dispute in California between farmers and environmentalists. Farmers have long argued for more water to be allocated to irrigating crops, while environmentalists counter that the state’s rivers would suffer and fish stocks would die.

The president first addressed the fires late Sunday, writing on Twitter, “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized.” He also referred to a debate in forest management about the effectiveness of removing trees and vegetation as a fire control method.
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William Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, said he believed Mr. Trump was referring to the battle over allocating water to irrigation versus providing river habitat for fish.

That debate has no bearing on the availability of water for firefighting. Helicopters lower buckets into lakes and ponds to collect water that is then used to douse wildfires, and there is no shortage of water to do so, Cal Fire officials said.
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Mr. Trump raised another issue when he wrote that officials “must also tree clear to stop fire spreading.” Scientists and forest experts said the president was referring to a valid and continuing debate.

The timber industry has argued that “thinning” forests — removing certain trees to improve the health of the remaining ones and diminish the plants and underbrush that fuel fires — reduces the risk of wildfires. Republicans in Congress have sought to loosen environmental restrictions to allow more thinning. Democrats and environmentalists argue the practice will open the door to expanded commercial logging and threaten wildlife.
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The president in the past has dismissed climate change as a hoax and his top cabinet officials have questioned the established science that rising global temperatures are caused by human activity.

Michael F. Wehner, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said it was not possible to quantify precisely the likelihood that climate change is having an impact on forest fires, as can now be done with other extreme-weather events such as heat waves.

And, he said, it’s not easy to weigh how much of the problem can be laid at the feet of forest-management practices.

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California fire officials on Monday said the Carr Fire in Shasta County had ravaged more than 160,000 acres while the Mendocino Complex fires grew overnight and had charred more than 273,000 acres across Mendocino, Lake and Colusa counties.

Hurricanes hitting the Southeast coast can supercharge the region’s forests, spurring them to store more than 100 times the carbon released annually by all vehicles in the U.S., Duke University researchers have found.

Rainfall associated with hurricanes acts as fuel for photosynthesis, drastically increasing trees’ carbon absorption rates, according to a recent study published in the journal Biogeosciences. Forests hit by tropical cyclones account for 9 percent of the warm season forest carbon sequestration in the region, the study said.

The researchers studied the Southeast coast because it is the target of more hurricanes and tropical storms than any other part of the U.S. It also harbors massive forests that absorb large amounts of carbon.

Scientists are unsure how a changing climate will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, but studies suggest that the Southeast coast could see more tropical storms and hurricanes in a warming world along with more frequent drought due to warmer temperatures.

The bend-don’t-break adaptability of trees extends to handling climate change, according to a new study that says forests may be able to deal with hotter temperatures and contribute less carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than scientists previously thought.

In addition to taking in carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, plants also release it through a process called respiration. Globally, plant respiration contributes six times as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as fossil fuel emissions, much of which is reabsorbed by plants, the oceans and other elements of nature. Until now, most scientists have thought that a warming planet would cause plants to release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn would cause more warming.

But in a study published Wednesday in Nature, scientists showed that plants were able to adapt their respiration to increases in temperature over long periods of time, releasing only 5 percent more carbon dioxide than they did under normal conditions.

Warmer temperatures brought on by climate change will lead to drier soils and reduce tree photosynthesis and growth in forests later this century, according to a new University of Minnesota study published in the journal Nature.

That important conclusion comes as scientists have speculated the opposite: that a warming climate might speed up a forests' photosynthesis and facilitate growth in cold-weather climates found in North America, Europe and Asia.

"These results have important implications for the future," said Peter Reich, a professor of forest resources in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences and the study's lead author. "Typical dry spells already occur frequently enough to erase most of the potential benefits to tree growth of warmer summer temperatures. In a warmer future, the extra evaporation from warmer plants and soils will make those dry spells drier, further suppressing photosynthesis."

Cool summers slow the growth of forests in cold places. That's why scientists had hypothesized that warmer climatological conditions might help increase a forest's growth rate in the future.

In their study, University of Minnesota researchers looked at more than 2,000 young trees from 11 different species—including birch, maple, oak, pine and spruce—growing in 48 plots in two forests in northern Minnesota. During the three-year study, researchers increased temperatures at the test plots—without use of chambers of any kind—by 3.4 degrees Celsius (6 degrees Fahrenheit), an increase that might happen in Minnesota by the end of the 21st century.

During the course of the study, researchers routinely measured photosynthesis at the plots to see how fast leaves were taking carbon dioxide out of the air to make sugars for the trees. Researchers found that:when soils were moist, photosynthesis was higher in plants growing at warmer than at ambient temperatures;in moderately to severely dry soils, which occurred during two-thirds of the growing season, warmer temperatures reduced photosynthesis;as a result, photosynthesis was reduced—on average—by the experimental climate warming.

"These results show that low soil moisture will slow down or eliminate any potential benefits of climate warming on tree photosynthesis even in moist, cold climates like Minnesota, Canada and Siberia," said Reich.

Beech trees are dominating the woodlands of the northeastern United States as the climate changes, and that could be bad news for the forests and people who work in them, according to a group of scientists.

The scientists say the move toward beech-heavy forests is associated with higher temperatures and precipitation. They say their 30-year study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Applied Ecology, is one of the first to look at such broad changes over a long time period in the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada.

The changes could have major negative ramifications for forest ecosystems and industries that rely on them, said Dr. Aaron Weiskittel, a University of Maine associate professor of forest biometrics and modeling and one of the authors.

Beech, often used for firewood, is of much less commercial value than some species of birch and maple trees that can be used to make furniture and flooring.

"There's no easy answer to this one. It has a lot of people scratching their heads," Weiskittel said. "Future conditions seem to be favoring the beech, and managers are going to have to find a good solution to fix it."

The authors of the study, who are from the University of Maine and Purdue University, used U.S. Forest Service data from 1983 to 2014 from the states of Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont to track trends in forest composition. They found that abundance of American beech increased substantially, while species including sugar maple, red maple and birch all decreased.

That's a problem not only because of beech's lower value, but because of the spread of beech bark disease, which causes the trees to die young and be replaced by newer trees that succumb to the same disease.

The authors found that the rise of beech and the decline of other species is associated with "higher temperature and precipitation" in the forests. The dominance of beech was also especially notable in some key tourist areas — the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont.

And beech has the possibility to grow even more because it's not a favorite food of deer, which will eat more seedlings of other trees, Weiskittel said.

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However, there are far less emotional—and far more realistic and shrewd—reasons to remain level-headed should the US formally withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. A number of economists and analysts believe that President Trump’s decision essentially changes nothing because COP21 commitments are non-binding. ***

Key reasons why President Trump’s decision will have no measurable impact include:

• The official global target of a 2°C temperature rise is “utterly inadequate,” according to a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Petra Tschakert from Pennsylvania State University and a coordinating lead author of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report noted that, "The consensus that transpired during this session was that a 2°C danger level seemed utterly inadequate given the already observed impacts on ecosystems, food, livelihoods, and sustainable development.” 

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• Fundamental economics and rapidly emerging technologies, rather than regulation, are driving the US shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. Besides the improving economics of renewable energy sources, coal is coming under pressure from competitive natural gas prices. 

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• "The increasingly favorable economics of renewables are more important than the presidential election’s impact on the industry, in our view,” says Stephen Byrd, a senior analyst with Morgan Stanley. “Wind and solar are price-competitive in many parts of the US. It’s the economics and not the politics that’s driving the use of renewables.”

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• The process of a US withdrawal from COP21 is complex; it’s not as if the US can immediately scrap its current responsibilities as a member nation of the pact—even if they are non-binding in this case. A country that is part of the Accord can withdraw only four years after giving notice of its intent to do so.  

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Josiah Neely astutely notes that, “[The] United States has over the past decade reduced its greenhouse-gas emissions by more than almost any other country. It did this despite the fact that it had not joined the Kyoto Protocol, a previous international agreement meant to fight climate change. Instead of imposing costly measures to reduce emissions, the United States succeeded because of new technologies that were both cheaper and cleaner than existing sources.”

While such nebulous international agreements as COP21 and the Kyoto Protocol do have the potential to galvanize support, the free market—not government—will ultimately develop and implement scalable renewable solutions that will benefit both the environment and humanity in the coming decades.