Yeegads.
The serial regurgitation in media is impressive. Here’s the money quote:
And the new research dispels the notion that beetle-killed trees present no greater fire danger than live ones, a theory that had gained traction after a couple of wet, cool summers tamped down fire activity in the region, Jolly said. On the contrary, beetle-killed trees can hold 10 times less moisture than live trees, Jolly found. That means they not only ignite more quickly than live trees, but they burn more intensely and carry embers farther than live trees, Jolly said.
I’m not trying to make fun of the pine beetle threat, which is serious, but it seems pretty darned obvious to anyone who has ever has a Christmas tree or seen one of those fire department Christmas tree videos that brown dead pine trees burn quite a bit faster than green ones.
While a model for such a thing in wildlands might be useful, it would seem an almost impossible fire to fight.
Dead pine trees, whether beetle killed or by something else, burn much faster than live ones. On the plus side the article does not mention climate change or global warming.
Full AP story here h/t to reader Steve Keohane
Around 30 or 40 years ago there was an earlier infestation of pine beetle in the Ponderosa Pines of Colorado. It wasn’t the beetle that killed the pines; it was the blue stain fungus that they spread into the phloem (innermost) layer of the bark. It also turned the wood a pretty blue color. If you cut your infected trees down and stacked them properly before the beetle had hatched out the Forest Service would come out, spray the stack and cover it with Visqueen to poison the beetle as they hatched. There was also a product on the market at that time (I think it was called Pine Tree and Ornamental Spray) that you could spray your live trees with to protect them from the beetle. For several years the infestation kept spreading to the point where, at least in our area, it had killed 50% to 60% of the Ponderosa. What finally terminated the epidemic was Mother Nature. When the temperature dropped down to -35F for over 4 hours one night it killed something like 99% of the beetle. Blaming this current infestation on anthropogenic global warming is ridiculous. It’s been going on for thousands of years.
What a bunch of cynics you are , their next study on the difficulties of starting a fire underwater , will surely silence you all.
Re: joe says:
May 2, 2011 at 8:59 am
“what i have heard is that the enviros try to prevent the logging and removal of these dead trees despite the increased fire danger…”
I can assure you from first hand experience that they do. After the Mt. Saint Helens explosion, I tried to get permits to salvage downed trees to be chipped into fuel for four wood-burning power plants my company owned. The “enviros” as you call them held me off with environmental objections until the trees in question were too rotted for commercial use.
If you take a look at the incidence of forest fires on federal lands where thinning is not routinely performed versus private timber lands where it is, you will see a stark contrast. Your “enviros” typically respond that “forest fire is natural”. I would respond that “so is typhus and polio”, but I recommend inoculation.
CH
Wow. Lots of ignorance on display on this one!
First of all, everyone who claims to have known the answer already because they use wood in their fireplace, go stand in the corner because you don’t understand the question, much less the answer. The concern about beetle-killed trees is related to foliage characteristics — relatively little wood is consumed in crown fires, so the flammability of firewood at home (or in the woods) isn’t relevant here.
Next, the science on fire behavior in situations like the recent bark beetle outbreaks really isn’t settled (hmmm…where have I heard that phrase before?). That’s partly because most of the fires that occur happen in “green” forests, and that’s what we know more about. We also know that flammability changes over time in response to changing fuel conditions, as does the type of fire that might result (e.g., many years after the beetles are done, there may be little chance of a crown fire because of a lack of needles and fine twigs; however, ground fuels might be increasing).
There are lots of factors at play here, but a couple of important ones are the changes in foliage quantity and “quality” (changing waxes, resins, and oils) and the fact that we haven’t really seen this many beetle-killed trees in one place at one time. This study appears to be quantifying the flammability curve from green to red to gray stage, which is important when attempting to estimate rate of spread, etc.
Those like Mike @ur momisugly 9:43 who got that point get a gold star. It’s mostly about planning and firefighting strategy. Those who have done the Christmas tree torching demo / experiment (as I have) get an “E” for effort, but you would probably be equally entertained by torching a “green” tree right off the lot. The big difference between lighting your old tree with a match and a forest fire, is that the latter will be doing quite a bit more pre-heating of the subject tree before it blows. No much difference between “fresh” and old if you toss it into a furnace!
Oh…and for Stephen Rasey: You are probably recalling a letter written mostly (or all)by academics to the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior (then Ann Veneman and Gail Norton), back around 2003.
I have to disagree with almost everyone here. The “obvious” should be investigated for the express reason that sometimes you’re wrong. Do I really have to mention that a study that showed that the world is flat would have seemed “obvious” only a few hundred years ago. Be happy that they are doing real science, based on empirical evidence.
I’d like some grant money to study people who didn’t manage to grasp before they were eight years old, that dry wood burns better than wet. You will understand that I only want the grant. The last thing I want to do is the study, which would involve getting somewhere near these people.
joe says:
what i have heard is that the enviros try to prevent the logging and removal of these dead trees despite the increased fire danger…
I remember some years back there were a bunch of huge fires throughout Southern California. (Since this happens with moderate frequency, this was the one where a KTLA News reporter almost got caught while reporting from Arrowhead/Big Bear) A lot of homes were lost – and it came out afterward that many might have had a chance, except for the laws against clear-cutting near these houses.
Lots of hollering, but not much ended up changing afterward, as I recall.
We may be doing the USFS a disservice here. If the greenies are preventing these damaged trees from being cleared because “they don’t represent a significant fire threat” this study may really be ammunition. And, if it allows those damaged stands to be removed, it may save a LOT more money than the study cost.
There is no need for modelling here. In most of Europe it is a well established thousand year old practice to clear forests of dead wood, both standing and those laying on the ground. It helps prevent serious insect damage (as bugs just proliferate on dead wood) and at the same time mitigates fire hazard. One does not need much science to see it works, some common sense suffices.
If dead wood is left in place, modern firefighting techniques make things worse, not better. They can extinguish small fires (those used to consume most of the stuff before forest management began), but sooner or later a big one comes and then we are utterly helpless.
JohnS
May 2, 2011 at 11:37 am
Wow. Lots of ignorance on display on this one!
###
Wow, a lot of greenie blindness on display by this one. Go stand in the corner until your brain starts working.
Fortunately. the past two bitterly cold winters should decimate North American pine beetle populations and cripple their reproductive abilities.
Regarding how dead trees burn, recall how Yellowstone burned. Much of the forest were beetle infested, dead and dying lodgepole pines. Of course, the fact that the Parks Service prohibited the use of mechanized equipment inside the Park boundaries. As I recall some 700,000 acres were burned by a fire that had nearly been controlled by the Forest Service before it entered into the Park.
I experienced the mother of all fires in an already fire killed forest. In 1951 fires re-burned much of the Oregon Tillamook Burn after fires in 1939 and 1945. There were no green trees in most of the Burn. The fire killed trees, predominantly old growth Douglas fir, were huge. Many were 200 to 300 feet tall and from 6 to 10+ feet in diameter.
Ongoing salvage logging in the Burn was extensive. The snag trees, called buckskins, had shed their bark and rotted for several inches from the outside in and the top down. The wood inside of the sapwood rot was like it had been kiln dried. It was well preserved, very sound and of extremely high grade.
When standing trees caught fire responded like giant Roman candles. I recall one canyon that burned again contained an estimated 2o MMBF (million board feet) of felled and bucked logs in it. Those logs burnt like wood in a fireplace and with nothing left but ashes.
I remember the heat released was enormous. The fire generated winds were gale force. Fire containment was limited to building fire breaks and praying that fires did not jump them by spewing burning embers onto adjacent ridge tops. If equipment like trucks and cats got to close the paint on them caught fire.
Empirical knowledge of this sort renders the USFS modeling of how dead trees burn an absurd analysis of the obvious. This is another example of the idiots in control of the asylum.
Steeptown says:
May 2, 2011 at 8:35 am
Obvious really. It’s why I dry logs for at least two years before feeding them to the wood-burner. And I worked it out for myself without a big grant from the taxpayer.
Now you see, that’s why you are not a scientist. If you were a member of the team you would have got a grant for testing the burning hypothosis of dried wood and not have to pay a cent to keep warm for the next 30 years. /sarc off
This story, again. The mt pine beetle has become a fake poster child for The Warming.
Bottom line, if Smokey the Bear had not created vast areas of suitable habitat (mature pine trees) these massive epidemics could NEVER have happened no matter how warm winters got. Period.
People concerned about dead trees around their homes should cut them down and create an open fireguard. No fuel, no fire. People who do not deal with these fuels are fools, period.
JohnS says:
May 2, 2011 at 11:37 am
Wow. Lots of ignorance on display on this one!
Don’t show your stupidity so openly. Keep at little mystery to yourself.
a reader says:
May 2, 2011 at 10:42 am
A question for the chemists and people involved in industry who frequent WUWT–pines are very rich in hydrocarbons and resins and turpentine if I remember correctly. So much so that the wood can be distilled for liquid fuel or even “tapped”. So as the wood dies does the flammability actually decrease as the wood decays?
————————————————-
As you have pointed out, it is not quite that simple. No-one disputes that rotted wood burns poorly, or that seasoned wood burns well. The term ‘dead wood’ in a forest does not distinguish between the two. I guess that the discussion about managing forests is about removing ‘seasoned wood’.
In Australia, it is complicated by the fact that many birds (especially parrots) and marsupials nest in the hollows of dead and very old trees. Maintaining a forest of trees without hollows, which makes sense in terms of forestry, is not always the way to go in the bigger picture.
You are right about resinous/oily trees. In a very hot bushfire, such as we have in Australia most years, eucalypts and pines in plantations literally explode. Water content is irrelevant in the face of hot winds, volatile oils and very high temperatures.
Forest management is a lot more complicated and specific to locations than the jump-up-and-downers on both sides claim.
a reader says on May 2, 2011 at 10:42 am:
A question for the chemists and people involved in industry who frequent WUWT–pines are very rich in hydrocarbons and resins and turpentine if I remember correctly. So much so that the wood can be distilled for liquid fuel or even “tapped”. So as the wood dies does the flammability actually decrease as the wood decays?
Lodgepole pines have rather thin bark, and the most of the volatile terpene fraction evaporates from a tree that has been mass attacked and killed. Usually, red trees are burned up from fire caused by lightining strikes in late spring or early summer. Fire melts the resin of the serotinous or heat sensitives cones and causes the scales to open. This allows the seeds to drop to the ground, and a new forest cycle starts again.
Lodgepole pines forest are short lived and have a life cycle of ca 100 years. The range is from about 89-150 years.
If red trees are not burned up, they become grey trees and eventually fall down. If these trees dry out and catch on fire, they burn so hot that all organic matter is burned out of the soil and seeds from the serotinous cones are killed. Such areas are prone to soil erosion and it takes much longer for the forest to regenerate.
In many of semi-arid regions of the Pacific Northwest suchas the interior of BC, lodgepole pine is tree that can grow with good success.
Hold the Front Page….Astonishing Revelations:
Pope’s amazing admission – ‘I am a Catholic’
Dry things burn faster than wet things
Bears s**t in the woods
Sun rises in the East
Harold Pierce Jr says:
May 2, 2011 at 1:24 pm
“In many of semi-arid regions of the Pacific Northwest suchas the interior of BC, lodgepole pine is tree that can grow with good success.”
Not “semi-arid” but relatively dry. In the semi-arid parts the characteristic tree is the Ponderosa Pine or Interior Douglas fir, or intermontane grasslands.
This whole story is founded on the fact that lodgepole pines are a FIRE-ADAPTED species. Not like Ponderosa Pines where individual trees can withstand fires (unless Smokey the Bear prevents those fires, allowing fuel buildups and young flammable trees to crowd around the vets).
The long term survival strategy for lodgepole pines is based on their periodic destruction by fire. Without fire these short-lived trees are eventually crowded out by longer living spruces (typically) which can start growing in the shade – lodgepole pines need full sun to start growing… and fires pop their cones open to simultaneously plant what becaome the typical even-aged stands… which when they mature become big swaths of mt pine beetle habitat. That is why we had such big mt pine beetle epidemics. Huge swaths of even-aged mature lodgepole pines, thanks to Smokey the Bear.
On another tangent, most, if not all, of these AGW fire related fairy tales are due to excessive fuel build ups due to fire suppression. No fuel, no fire. The most obvious example is California. Native Californians managed their landscapes through fire. Those nice California oak stands were their creation (as acorns were one of their key staple foods).
And they were not so stupid as to let their lands turn into tinderboxes.
Theo,
The difficulties fighting fires out west are much different then out east for many reasons.
-What the east calls mountains mostly wont make it as a foothill in the west.
-The terrain is very rugged and not easy to get around in. Even worse, enviro politicians have decided to require the state to rip out what few roads are there to turn back into a “natural state”. That certainly doesn’t make the issue any better.
-Dry tinder + steep canyons + fire = a damn hard fire to stop.
-There are huge tracts of wilderness areas that no mechanization is allowed, even to stop a fire.
-Enviros have made it very difficult to properly manage forests on state/fed land. Examples are: too many trees per acre, no culling of dead timber, using lawsuits to stop any and all forestry practices other then those that they agree with (aka stay out except for the privileged few).
Gareth Phillips says:
May 2, 2011 at 11:01 am
“When the tree is infected by the beetle, the tree exudes copious amounts of resin which I understand is extremely flammable. If a stand of trees that died from say, drought, is compared to a stand of trees that have died from beetle infestation, the beetle infested group will be more incendiary than the non-infected group by a large margin. Maybe the piece should be read in the light of that fact.”
And this is the science of what? What difference does it make to anything? Fire control is a matter of reading the topography, knowing what winds will do locally, and intervening with fire breaks and back fires to destroy fuel for the fire. Anyone who does not have enough experience in the forest to know in his gut how those beetle infested trees will respond is totally and completely lost. Get him a job away from forests and fires.
Latimer Alder says:
May 2, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Hold the Front Page….Astonishing Revelations:
Pope’s amazing admission – ‘I am a Catholic’
Dry things burn faster than wet things
Bears s**t in the woods
Sun rises in the East
####
But what if a bear becomes Pope?
Darrin says:
May 2, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Theo,
The difficulties fighting fires out west are much different then out east for many reasons.
-What the east calls mountains mostly wont make it as a foothill in the west.
-The terrain is very rugged and not easy to get around in. Even worse, enviro politicians have decided to require the state to rip out what few roads are there to turn back into a “natural state”. That certainly doesn’t make the issue any better.
-Dry tinder + steep canyons + fire = a damn hard fire to stop.
-There are huge tracts of wilderness areas that no mechanization is allowed, even to stop a fire.
-Enviros have made it very difficult to properly manage forests on state/fed land. Examples are: to many trees per acre, no culling of dead timber, using lawsuits to stop any and all forestry practices other then those that they agree with (aka stay out except for the privileged few).
Thanks for your very helpful response. My darned day job limits my response at this time, so I will just select two really juicy items.
“-The terrain is very rugged and not easy to get around in. Even worse, enviro politicians have decided to require the state to rip out what few roads are there to turn back into a “natural state”. That certainly doesn’t make the issue any better.”
How can I describe this politely? How about “Way beyond insanity into a kind of adolescent evil?” I grew up in the largest US forest outside of the Pacific Northwest and I can assure everyone that log roads are incredibly impermanent and hurt nothing. By the way, a “log road” is a road for log trucks and forest service trucks. It is not for tourists even with four wheel drive. My father was very proud that he could create a log road with an axe. It’s all in seeing the lay of the land.
“-Enviros have made it very difficult to properly manage forests on state/fed land. Examples are: to many trees per acre, no culling of dead timber, using lawsuits to stop any and all forestry practices other then those that they agree with (aka stay out except for the privileged few).”
They put a stop to forest management! Control freaks. The forest that I grew up in was totally managed but you would never see the marks of the forest service and rarely would you see the marks of loggers. It was a pristine paradise. In that forest, you might as well have been living ten thousand years ago. The trees were rigorously culled but no one could detect it, unless they were there at the moment of cutting.
“-What the east calls mountains mostly wont make it as a foothill in the west.”
Regularly set the top of the mountain on fire, especially when there is snow on the ground and let it burn at leisure. Drives the ecos wild(er).
Good luck convincing the judges who award injunctions to Greenies barring salvage logging sales after fires/beetle kills. It’s like having a big patch of kindling awaiting a spark to take out the dead trees plus 10’s of thousands of acres of nearby healthy forest.
Don’t bother trying to hug the trees, they know they are doomed.
One of the reports and studies, that this study is probably reacting to.
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/firefighters_should_calm_down_about_beetle_killed_forests/C41/L41/
Here’s more.
http://landscape.zoology.wisc.edu/Projects/beetles_fire_logging.html