Northwest now is supported in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.

The signs of climate change are all around us.

Here in western Washington.

Wash out winter rainstorms, rapid snowpack, melt ups, receding glaciers, warmer water temperatures, and an increased risk of wildfire.

Tonight, our discussion with a group of climate experts who will give us a feel for what we're facing here in western Washington and northwest now.

Reporter steve kitchens brings us the story of endless fire seasons and the impact they have on the people and infrastructure.

Doing battle with the heat, the changing climate in western washington is next on northwest now.

Water restrictions, worries about fire danger, a die off of native trees, shrinking glaciers and stressed out cold water.

Crustacean and fish species in both the freshwater and the sound are just some of the observable consequences of climate change here in western Washington.

You might recall the heat dome that settled in during the summer of 2021, taking scores of lives.

That event prompted two teams from the University of Washington to take a hard look at what's coming and how we can all prepare.

As Northwest now, Steve Kitchens tells us from the Cerrado fire near New Salem in the North Cascades, one of the biggest impacts of climate change here in western Washington is the ongoing stress.

High temperatures put on human beings and infrastructure like Seattle City lights, dam and transmission facilities.

They negotiate challenging terrain and gusts and winds that push this fire up and down these canyons growing to hundreds of acres in size.

That's why there's nearly 350 firefighters fighting this hour to fire out.

Temperatures outside continue rising.

This is as far as we can get in the North Cascades since the end of July.

Why start closed another route to all traffic so firefighters can work without distraction.

Fire seasons didn't used to be this long.

When I was in California 40 years ago, we had a summer season.

Public information officer Pete Irving earned his stripes the Fire Lines Highlands backcountry.

He's been fighting wildland fires for decades.

He says firefighters number one defense to danger is a physical fitness.

Marching with heavy tool laden packs, plus staying hydrated and looking out for each other keeps crews safe, he says.

But stronger heat waves may present new challenges to old jobs.

Fire seasons are getting longer and more extreme, and it means that firefighters are under more stress and we're concerned both about physical and mental health.

Lots of smart folks are taking lots of good actions to keep all the fire fighters safe and fit.

This graph reminds us that we cannot focus only on the weeks or months ahead, but our preparation for decades to come, which may continue to resemble this same trend.

Gonzaga Center for Climate, Society and the Environment shared its findings this summer after the strong 2021 dump slammed the Pacific Northwest.

Average daytime highs are getting warmer than we we should reasonably expect.

Additionally, the University of Washington's June report, titled In the Hot Seat, shared a striking heat related death data pointing to this spike over the 2021 heat dome where 18 heat related deaths were daily average in the hot seat suggests installing green roofs and shade structures to reduce the impacts of urban heat islands.

Plus, showing vulnerable populations, the cooler areas can offer relief to the heat.

The report also pointed to already proven strategies like scheduling, hydration breaks, shifting outdoor water hours and increasing shade with temporary structures leads to immediate positive impacts on public health.

That's a bigger impact from wildland firefighters.

Using this growth in the more wild areas makes their work even more challenging.

North, south, east, West.

And I've been back to the same place several times.

And usually when I go back, there's more houses and there's more human made infrastructure in the wild land.

That makes our job as wildland firefighters more difficult.

In the North Cascades, still gets north northwest.

Now.

An in-depth conversation about the UW efforts to study climate impacts continues on the Steve on the Street podcast.

Streaming now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The debate about whether climate change is exacerbated by human activity is settled.

So we're not having it here.

But we can all agree that we need to understand the consequences of our changing climate and what it means going forward.

For that, joining us now are UW climatologist and returning guest Nick Bond.

Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric and environmental sciences professor at UW Bothell and UW Assistant professor of Environmental and Forest Studies.

Brian Harvey.

Welcome, all of you to Northwest now.

Great to have a very important conversation about about the nature of climate change here in western Washington where we all live.

Nick, I want to start with you with one of my pet peeves.

When I look at social media and somebody says, you know, there's an ice crystal on the on the porch and they say, well, so much for global warming.

They're talking about the weather and it just makes me cringe.

Would you lay out for us a little bit to some of the fundamental cause of what the weather is and what we're talking about when we talk about climate change?

Yeah, well, certainly the weather is on short timescales and maybe a trite way to put it, the weather determines what you wear that day and the climate determines what you have in your closet in terms of wardrobe.

And so that a much longer timescales and so they interact between each other.

But what we're really seeing are changes in the background climate in these slow changes, especially in temperature and over fairly long periods of time to correct.

Oh sure, yeah, over decades.

And we still have cooler years along with warmer years and cold periods.

You know, we can still get snow in the Puget Sound area, but unmistakably the temperatures are going up and especially in the nighttime temperatures.

And I think that's a topic we'll hit on in a little later.

Yeah, there are very, very few linear functions in science, right?

I mean, basically that's what we're talking about, right.

Dan, what is showing up in the data set that you look at atmospherics, what what tells you know, this this isn't a hot day or cold day or or strange day for particulates.

It's not a weather driven event.

This is, again, a longer term trend that I'm seeing here.

Yeah, well, in the last decade, two decades, we have seen an explosion in the amount of forest burned in the western US before about 2013.

You know, it was hard to find the worst air quality day in the last 20 years.

It might have been in 2000 or 2005, but starting about 2012, then 2013 and 2015, each year, we were breaking the records for the worst air quality day of the year 2018.

Big fires in 2018, worst air quality days around the Puget Sound until 2020 came along.

Then we practically doubled the air quality.

How bad it was for air quality in the Puget Sound region.

And then 2021 came along.

It didn't quite break the record, the 2020 record, but it pretty much came very close.

So we've just seen this progression of worse and worse days associated with wildfire smoke each summer.

And I don't think anybody but back to math class.

But you're looking at the slope of your data.

Well, you sure?

But these are very episodic events.

So as you said before, these aren't linear trends because what we're seeing now is about every other year on average in the last decade or so, is a really bad wildfire year around the West.

And it could be Washington, could be Oregon, could be California, could be all of us.

So, you know, here we are in a hot year and an El Nino year and things are getting warmer.

Odds are stacked against us that we're going to have another bad year, you know?

So, yeah.

Brian, what data sets do you look at and and what kind of informs your views about whether this is kind of weather related and short term deal or No, this is a this is a long term trend we've got to be concerned about.

Yeah.

So kind of building off of what Dan just said, we see very similar trends in the wildfire area, burned metrics.

And so one really interesting way to draw a line and look at the trends is since the early 1980s when area burned annually within forests across the western U.S. has been tracked.

There's kind of a total sea change before and after the year 2000, Since the year 2000, every single year has exceeded 1 million acres burned and more than half of the years have exceeded 6 million acres burned.

And so we're seeing a not just a, you know, a qualitative change, but, you know, like Dan was saying, there's each year is sort of a surprising new record breaking year.

However, I think we'll come back to this a little bit.

It's a little bit paradoxical because with wildfire we also are in an extremely fire prone region that has been experiencing wild fire and human use of fire for a very long time.

And so even with these recent records that are, you know, on this upward trend since the mid 1900s, we're really only starting to approach some of the historical area burned in a lot of ecosystems across the western U.S.

It's just a different kind of wildfire.

I was going to say burning, however, has different kind of stations.

There's useful fire and raging destructive fire.

And I know this is something that touches upon each one of your fields.

So try to break out some pieces of that for me and explain to folks the role that fire should have.

But now the fire, the role that fire does have this much more destructive.

Dan, you're shaking your head.

Well, I can comment on that because we did a study looking comparing acres burned to the amount of ppm particulate matter in the air, the amount of smoke produced, and incredibly, in the southeastern United States, they do a lot of burning and a lot of areas burned.

But the amount of particulate matter that gets generated is about a factor of ten less than for the same area in the western United States.

What's up?

Well, it's because most of this is prescribed burning and they're not burning things down to the ground.

And so they're trying to burn the lower understory and brush and burning a lot less biomass.

So they're generating a lot less particulates.

So this can fire these fire tornadoes and these crowning fires that we're seeing raging up a hill and with trees just literally bursting into splinters, that's not how it's supposed to look, right?

Well, if you want to protect the.

Yeah, I mean, I'll let Brian come in.

And this is where it gets really tricky with with fires in forests.

Right.

So fire has been a part of forests in western North America throughout the evolutionary history of the forest that we know and love.

Right.

And it's been a part of these forests for as long as people have been here for a very long time.

People's relationship with fire has certainly changed, but there's a wide diversity of roles of the way that fire has played in shaping these forests in many ecosystems.

If we think about Eastern Washington, for example, lower elevation slopes of the Cascades, historically fire would have come through every few years, two decades, and those fires would have been relatively low.

Intensity would have cleared away a lot of the fuels Each time one of those fires is coming through, it's basically removing fuel for the next fire.

And we often refer to refer to those as fuel limited systems.

Right.

And those would have been fairly low severity fires where we find that usually the trees that would be there and experiencing fires, surviving fires, but there's also other ecosystems even in the northwest where fire has played a different role.

And in some cases that means high severity fires and adaptations to that.

So one faster growing areas, though, probably too, right?

I bet you if you look at the tree ring data on that, the eastern Washington trees probably are substantial, substantially different than the western Washington ecosystems.

That's right.

Yeah.

There's a big productivity gradient in terms of how fast biomass is put on on the wet side versus the dry side of the Cascades, and that corresponds very closely with the difference in fire regimes at a course scale.

You know, there's certainly nuances within that.

But on the west side is where we do see some of those more infrequent and high severity fire regimes when they do occur, mostly because the weather and climate conditions are much more limited in terms of when it's conducive for fire spread on the west of the Cascades and when it does happen, there's plenty of fuel to burn and that has happened historically and in recent years.

There seems to be a general consensus, Nick, and maybe you can speak to this, that forest management practices in the 20th century lent themselves a little bit to increasing the chances of non-natural high intensity burns is climate.

It seems like we were kind of sitting here waiting for climate change to not kind of hit us, but to really hit us.

Am I characterizing this in any way that makes sense?

Well, yeah.

And what we're seeing from the climate perspective is the last couple of decades, which happens to coincide with this ramp up in acres burned and so forth, is drier summers, fewer days of rain and also just less rain overall.

And so it means when you have a particular weather event in particular, some wind come along to really fanned the flames that it's happening in the landscape that is just much more prone to a high intensity fire.

And we spent some time on fire.

But Nick, I know that Dan and Brian's specialties involve combustion, but I wanted you to speak a little bit to in terms of glaciation water levels, you know, wash outs in the winter, low flows in the summer.

I mean, there's there's many knock on effects of this.

We're talking about fire because it's and, you know, no pun intended, it's hot.

It's a hot topic right now.

But there are many things going on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I along with this change towards summer and drier summers which has been both anticipated and is projected with our climate models we're also expecting wetter winters and so more water when we don't really need it as much.

And just as you mentioned, the consequences there are that much more flooding, especially in places that have been burned.

Those are really susceptible to landslides and really, you know, disruptive events.

Yeah, we're not in the data seeing increased precipitation amounts in winter yet, but our climate models are suggesting that that will be appearing in the next few decades.

And we are seeing some greater floods in some watersheds than we used to see before.

But just overall, if you take in the Pacific Northwest average or something, we're still waiting for a wetter winters.

Yeah, and of course that's not going to be great news for a lot of fish is juvenile fish and the reds and things get washed out and they don't get that time to mature and river systems.

I don't know if you look at that.

Oh yeah exactly that.

Yeah.

The too little in summer and too much in the winter is kind of a12 punch for the salmon and Yeah.

So that is something we're keeping an eye on.

And one thing to realize is not all watersheds are feeling the same effects.

Yeah, Yeah.

And so it's, it's always in, you know, it's a very complex system and all that.

But nevertheless, the idea that we'll have more water from when we don't really need it is much, you know, that's, that's kind of a drag.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wanted to talk about use the word effects, I want to talk about health effects and, and then that obviously gets really into an area that you're looking at with particulate matter and also with the smoke load and some of those things.

And for us what what impacts does this climate change potentially have on human health?

As I know you're not doctors in a physician, but you're I'm sure you're working them, handing them the data, and you've probably picked up on a little bit of that talk a little bit about that.

Well, I mean, if we're talking heat, for instance, that's another issue, just being too hot, which kills a lot of people, which kills a lot of people, and not being able to cool down at night is a very important factor.

We're getting warm evenings right now this week, but going over to the wildfire smoke, I mean, PPM is bad and there are many different effects from asthma to shortness of breath to heart attacks, to any range of cardiovascular problems.

The more you breathe, the worse the PM loads, the worse it is people with preexisting conditions.

If you have COPD or if you have a heart condition, it's going to be worse for you.

I mean, basically anything you put in your lungs that isn't oxygen and nitrogen makes it harder for your body to function and get the oxygen through your system.

But it needs now particulate is not the only pollutant in wildfire smoke.

There's hundreds and hundreds of compounds.

We're also very interested in ozone, which forms from wildfire smoke.

There's a whole raft of what we call hydrocarbons or volatile organic compounds that come out of wildfire smoke.

Benzene is in wildfire smoke.

So there's a whole bunch of things.

Now, if you have to be in an environment where you're going to be outside in smoke, you need to be aware.

And then in 95 or something equivalent, I mean, depending on the levels, of course, and how long you're outside.

So if we get smoke in the area and I have to go walk my dog, I might not put it in 95, but if I'm going to be out for an hour, I absolutely will be wearing it in 95.

And if you're home, then you need to be thinking about indoor air quality and air filtration in some way or another.

I'm a data set of one, but I used to just not even be fazed by smoke.

I would say I'm in a sensitive group now.

I definitely, definitely feel it.

Brian Our health effects, anything that you look at in your research at all or it's not really part of what I focus on my research.

But if we could come back to the sort of climate versus forest management pieces of that, you know, one of the one of the really interesting challenges is that usually gets posed as an either or is it climate change or is it forest management?

And, you know, whether we're talking about the effects locally in a forest when a fire burns or the downwind effects of smoke impacts, it really is a both answer to that question.

Going back to the part I was talking about earlier, a lot of these forests, especially in drier areas of Western us historically, where you will limited forests because the warm, dry conditions are there.

Almost every summer fires would have burned more frequently.

So we call those fuel limited forests.

Yeah, those are the areas where fire suppression and fire exclusion of indigenous fire use has really led to a buildup of that fuel and there's no longer that fuel limitation on them.

And then other ecosystems where we have the climate conditions or the weather conditions are a lot less frequent in terms of being conducive to wildfire.

Now that limitation is being lifted off and so we're seeing sort of a dual action lift of both of the limits, but in different ways and in different places.

So both eastern, eastern piney forests and Western coniferous, you know that the trees that we all grow up with here, Douglas fir and whatnot, both both are in trouble.

Yeah, but there's another factor, and that is people in the woods.

Yeah.

And it's surprising the number of fires.

I mean, lightning is an important factor, especially in Washington.

But for around the West, a surprising number of fires are actually set by human carelessness.

Yeah.

Or truck dragging a chain or.

Yeah, they didn't put their campfire out.

So there is another important factor in that.

Nick Dan spoke about health effects, and I also wanted to drill down on a piece of that, which has to do with talking about low income communities and the effects of access to things like air conditioning and air filtration and property damage.

Can you talk a little bit about what is the state of the science right now of of looking at climate through that lens?

Right.

Yeah, we're trying to do a better job.

In summary, and we're aware that there is a disproportionate effects on lower income communities.

And when we have heat waves and so forth and there are projects involved in planting trees in the Tacoma area, there's one going on right now in green in Tacoma that but we're just taking baby steps so far and there's recognition it's a problem.

But figuring out what we can pull off most effectively is still something we're working on.

And there's a lot more to be done.

Yeah, Yeah.

Is it safe to say that the climate crisis is here?

What we've been talking about for the past 20 or 30 years, we are now experiencing, or is this just a warm up based on the data that you guys are seeing in your disciplines?

What do you think?

Oh, I think it's here in the 2021 heat wave here in the Pacific Northwest.

If nothing else, you've really drilled that home that, you know, this is how hot it can get here.

And we had a tragic loss of life from it.

Probably undercounted and yeah, exactly.

So and huge impacts on agriculture.

There were tremendous losses in various sectors there.

And so it's it's already a big deal.

And what's your view on?

Well, I would just add on that, you know, we need to be thinking proactively around clean air centers, clean cooling centers, how to make sure people understand that just because when the when the when the report says air quality is going to be bad today, go home and close your windows, it doesn't guarantee your home is going to be clean.

Lots of homes, including my own, I discovered, were really not very good until I put air filtration in.

So getting that message out, those messages out to especially to lower income communities is extremely important.

Brian, go ahead.

Yeah, and in terms of the trends of forest fire activity in particular, you know, as alarming as these trends are, they're pretty much in line with what has been expected and projected from science, you know, decade ago and beyond.

And so, you know, there's there's multiple factors at play, like we talked about climate warming is a big catalyst of that.

And then there's the fire deficit.

And a lot of these forests and the fuel structure is just kind of catching up to that that trajectory, that one with climate and I say trajectory intentionally because oftentimes people talk about, is this the new normal?

And I think that can be a little bit misleading because we are on a trajectory of change.

And as Dan was alluding to earlier, with record breaking events every year, it's hard to hard to really say we've arrived at a new normal and it's probably more appropriate to say we need to be, as Daniel said, proactive and adaptive to the fact that so aggressive fuels management.

Is that what I hear you saying in certain areas?

That is absolutely what needs to happen.

There's a there's a reading between the lines here.

There's a backlog of of fire activity that's been missing for a century and a half in a lot of areas.

And with each one of those fires that was missed, there's now doubling or tripling of the fuel load in some of these areas.

And so, you know, allowing them to burn right now in that fuel structure is when we do get to those anomalously high severity and really, you know, ecologically and societally catalog catastrophic outcomes.

But going in there proactively and thinking of that as an investment for the future on this trajectory that we're on is is really, I think, an important perspective.

Last 45 seconds here, Nick, I'll give this one to you.

What do we need to be prepared for?

Do we throw up our hands and say, man, it's here, there's nothing we can do?

Or are you optimistic?

Can we have an impact on this?

What do you think?

Well, the Pacific Northwest will be fit for human habitation.

It's it's already a different place and it's going to be increasingly different.

And so, yeah, adaptation is really key.

There's a lot of continued warming baked into the system, pun intended.

And it yeah, we have to both, you know, keep people safe, deal with our ecosystems and so forth and, you know, just manage our natural and human systems with that in mind.

Sounds like Buckle up, buttercup.

Yeah, There you go.

All right.

Thanks, guys.

Great conversation.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, Thank you.

Climate change plays a significant role in the crisis facing our native salmon runs here in the Pacific Northwest.

Our ongoing coverage of that issue continues with a new special called Breaking the Barriers, which will air later this fall.

So do keep an eye out for that.

The bottom line, climate change is real and we're going to have to deal with it.

And how effectively we deal with the change will make all the difference.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking to watch this program again or to share it with others.

Northwest now can be found on the web at kbtc.org.

And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Northwest.

Now, A Streamable podcast of this program is available under the Northwest now tab at KBTC.org and on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

That is going to do it for this edition of Northwest Now until Next Time.

I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.