 Okay, we're a minute out. Can you get a little more light in the house, Scott? Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather. Okay, 15 seconds. Okay. Welcome to the Longmont Museum, a center for culture in northern Colorado where people of all ages explore history, experience art, and discover new ideas through dynamic programs, exhibitions, and events. My name is Justin Beach. I am the manager of the museum's Stuart Auditorium and we are coming at you live and direct this evening from the Stuart Auditorium. I'd like to thank all of those who make our programming possible, the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Stuart Family Foundation, the Friends of the Longmont Museum, our many museum donors and members. We simply couldn't do all that we do without you, so thank you. For more information about all that we do here or to find out about how you can support the museum's work, visit our website at www.longmontmuseum.org. Tonight, we're offering part two of our four-part Big Picture Climate Change series co-presented by the mighty KGNU community radio out of Boulder, Sustainable Resilient Longmont, and the City of Longmont's Sustainability Program, with a special shout out to Francie Jaffee and Autorod Newsrot for their assistance. This week, our Stuart Auditorium becomes Climate Change Central with each night dedicated to a different element. Last night, we explored air. Tonight is on fire, followed promptly by water tomorrow and ending this Thursday with Earth on Earth Day appropriately. Each program will feature a panel comprised of climate change scientists and other experts sharing what they've learned about these vast and shifting realms. The week will culminate with Sustainable Resilient Longmont's annual Earth Day celebration on Saturday, featuring programs for children and teens and ending with a panel discussion on climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusivity that evening. You can find more info on Sustainable Resilient Longmont's Earth Day programming at srlongmont.org. The Big Picture Climate Change is marvelously co-curated and the panel is definitely moderated by none other than journalist and co-host of KGNU's How on Earth, Susan Moran. The entirety of the series is available to view on the museum's live stream page, as well as Facebook and local Comcast cable. For those of you viewing on Facebook, you're invited to submit questions for our panel in the comments field. We'll do our best to get to as many of those during our Q&A portion of this evening's program. Now allow me to introduce the co-curator of the Big Picture Climate Change series and our moderator, Susan Moran. Susan is a freelance journalist and editor and a host and producer of How on Earth, the KGNU science show. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The Economist, Biographic, Nature, and more. Susan was an adjunct journalism instructor at CU Boulder for seven plus years. She has served on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalism, was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder. She was previously on staff at Reuters, Business 2.0 magazine, and other news orgs. She's got a couple of masters, one in journalism from Columbia University, and another in Asian studies from UC Berkeley. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Susan Moran back for round two of our Big Picture Climate Change series. Thanks so much, Justin. She made it back. And thanks to all of you who are coming back, and thanks to all of you who are watching the new. We really hope you stay with us this week, because every night is so distinct. So thanks Justin so much, and the Longmont Museum, as well as our key sponsor KGNU. I'm super honored to have this stellar group of expert panelists. Each, I really think brings such a unique set of perspectives and experiences to the conversation. I just want to get out of the way first, since this is 420. A lot of you know, as Michael reminded me, 420 p.m. is the time when many, at least on campus here and around the West, light up its cannabis day. But that time came and went, it is just a coincidence. We're still going to have a lot of fun here. So welcome. And I just thought as we crawl out of this deep, dark tunnel of COVID, it seems like an opportune time to take stock, to listen, to learn from each other, and maybe even change. Or at least stretch our minds, our brains, our hearts, and create new possibilities. So no doubt many of you are already informed and active on the climate and wildfire fronts. So we want to learn from you as well. So as Justin alluded, please put any questions you might have into chat while we're having the panel, and then we'll get to questions about the last 15 minutes. So I'm going to introduce everyone. We're going to play a short video. They're going to have up to 5 minutes to give sort of introductory talks, a little teaser. Then we're going to have an open conversation and then open it up to you by 8.30 maybe even before. So welcome everyone. And I want to introduce first Michael Kodis, a friend and colleague. He is senior editor at Inside Climate News. That's a non-profit news organization. Michael's first recent book, and hold it up if you will, is Megafire. A Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame. And it won the 2018 Colorado Book Award. Huge kudos to you Michael. That's great. And before joining ICN he was deputy director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at CU for several years. He was also a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at CU in 2009 and 2010 when I met him. And before that Michael had worked on staff for many years as a photojournalist at the Hartford Current in Connecticut. He was part of a team that was awarded a huge Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for breaking coverage. Congrats. So glad to have you. And next Dr. Colleen Reed is an assistant professor of geography at CU Boulder. Her work focuses on how environmental and social exposures interact to influence health, particularly exposures caused by global climatic changes and society's responses to those changes. In her research she has studied the health impacts of exposure to air pollution from wildfires, extreme heat events, and urban green space. That's a good effect. Previously she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society scholar at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. She has a Ph.D in Environmental Health Sciences from Go Bears, University of California Berkeley. And then Don Wittemore, welcome. He has been training and leading teams of organizations in complex high risk environments since 1982. He served as an assistant chief of Fire Department and incident commander of a national incident management team. His leadership assignments include Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the Colorado Floods, and Wildland Fires from Alaska to Florida. And Don currently works with organizations such as the U.S. Navy, the EPA, Emergency Management Australia, and the U.S. Forest Service, helping them with critical thinking and strategic planning. He also works for Colorado's multi-mission aircraft program, which provides wildfire detection and near real-time intelligence. Don holds a master's degree from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Welcome to you all. I know they're giving a big clap out there. So I hear it, I hear it. So we're going to start with just a three and a half minute clip from a really powerful video that features Don Wittemore himself. And it was the video itself is called unacceptable risk. Firefighters on the front lines of climate change. And it's produced by good friends, journalists Dan Glick and Ted Wood. So take a listen. Oh, seems like we're having audio problems on the video. Bear with us a bit. Hopefully we'll bring it back. I wonder if I should, let's give it a couple of minutes, and if it doesn't work let's drop it, and I'm going to go to your intro remarks. A little cup of wine or tea everyone? We'll give it 30 seconds. I don't see it. When you're getting kind of right up close to the fire and really kind of intimate with the fire, and you're digging your heads down in your scratching line, you're down in the dirt, and you're working and sweating, and it's hot and it's hard to breathe. You're choking because of the smoke, your eyes are burning, and you're just right up against it, and you look up and there are fire whirls, which are like a tornado of fire literally. And these fire whirls are six feet around, and they're almost 70 feet tall. There's tall as a tree. It's just a moment that you're terrified in an awe all at the same time because there's nothing there in your experience to help you to really grasp the gravity of the situation that you're in right then. What they are seeing is scary, what they are seeing is not what they're used to at all, and that's terrifying. Colorado used to be considered, we called it the asbestos state, because it just was not a significant fire environment state, and in the last ten years that significantly changed. In 2010 we had the four mile fire. Within two years of the four mile fire the record for most destructive fires was eclipse twice, and since then it's been eclipsed I think two more times. Ten day fires, four day fires, three day fires, that was kind of the norm. Not two weeks, three weeks, two months, all summer long. We're being confronted and asked to suppress or battle fires that didn't exist 20 years ago. The Heyman fire from 2002 is in my opinion probably one of the best indicators of the impacts of climate change along the front range of Colorado here. We had not seen large plume dominated fires. We had what we called one day wonders. When it was windy the fire would grow, but when the wind stopped the fire would basically go out. Heyman fire was not like that. When we were on the Heyman fire watching a five mile run through the canopy and just knowing that that's not what's supposed to happen. While there are many reasons from that it comes down to talking about drought stress trees, lack of spring moisture, and higher than normal temperatures. Those combined created and signaled really a shift in the fire environment along the front range. We saw fire behavior we haven't seen before, and little did we know that was the precursor to what we're seeing today and it's become the new norm. Thank you, wow, super powerful. So one who's seen so much of this and photographed so much of this, Michael Kotis for those who may have joined late photojournalist, editor at climate news. So we're going to give him first and then everyone up to five minutes to give introductory and visual teaser for you. Thanks. I need to call up my slides. So the first slide in my presentation is actually of a fire that was in the video that we just saw that Don's really familiar with. This is Helen Richardson photo, she's a photojournalist at the Denver Post, her photo of the Waldo Canyon fire. And I'm going to describe the first time I saw a wildfire, which was basically I heard about it over a police scanner in my car, maybe a year into my first job, drove to where I could see some wisps of smoke in the distance, hopped over a couple of fences with my camera, found some guys digging a fire line around this grass fire and raised my camera up to my eye to get a picture of them doing their work and heard screaming and looked up from my camera and there was a guy about the size of a bulldozer running at me and proceeded to tackle me and as he did that I realized he's wearing a badge and as he started to drag me away from the scene he explained that this is a prison that you just climbed over these fences into and those were all prison inmates. And as that was happening the wind turned, picked up the fire blew up and was about to burn over one of the inmate firefighters and I'm trying to raise a camera with a telephoto lens to get a picture of this action and I can explain that when you're being restrained by a guy that's about twice your size who's trained to restrain you, that's pretty much impossible and then the prison guard looked down and saw what I was trying to do and I figured well now he's just going to handcuff me and keep me here and I'm not going to get to leave but instead he picked me up by my armpits and he kind of aimed me towards the action and I was able to make a sequence of photos of this firefighter running for his life which was a really interesting lesson for me because as a photo journalist I really was fascinated by the flames and the smoke of wildfires. But the reality was that most of the really fascinating things about wildfires happen behind the smoke and the flames. All of these political and cultural events that are involved in wildfire and in the case of this one what fascinated me was that prison inmates fight wildfires and when I looked into that I discovered actually thousands of prison inmates fight wildfires across the country and in fact in California about a third of the firefighters that are working during a busy fire season are prison inmates. That's a really interesting story for us in the last year because here in California had its worst wildfire season in history after a series of really bad wildfire seasons and actually a third of their firefighting workforce was unavailable to them because of COVID and the prison inmates could not join in with these firefights. That's the kind of stories that I look for inside climate news and I'm just going to run through a few of our headlines here to kind of talk about some of the things that we've dealt with so this was the first story I did last summer on the explosion of wildfires that we saw through California and the west and into Colorado. In the case of these fires it was all kinds of climate signals you know deepening drought record temperatures and then some really unusual things you know in a windy state they actually had really record winds on a number of days and although it's too early to say how much climate played into it there was also a freak lightning storm that had 12,000 strikes of lightning hit in Northern California in a day when they normally have no lightning whatsoever and the estimate is about one in five of those lightning strikes started a fire. So you know really a very serious fire season last year and that spread into here in Colorado as well as across the west and into Oregon records being set all over the place but these records were actually a part of kind of a global trend and most people here will probably remember even though it seems like so long ago that the incredible fires that they had in Australia you know starting about a year and a half ago and Australia had its worst fire season in history. It's a very fire prone state an area about the size of South Dakota burned and about one million to three million animals were killed and the smoke and emissions from the fire warmed the climate now a new report came out to say about two degrees in the stratosphere for up to six months which means that these fires affected fires everywhere else on the planet. We saw a similar function in the Arctic where fires burned where they never burn. Siberia had a hundred degree heat wave they've never had temperatures like that and these fires burned in permafrost which hold huge amounts of carbon and methane which also when released in these fires warm the climate. Another story that we've looked at in the Arctic is the increase in lightning that is expected as the climate warms. Huge increase in lightning that is anticipated to bring more fire. Then you come back to here where the largest publicly owned utility in the country was forced to declare bankruptcy a year and a half ago due to all the lawsuits against them for people killed in fires started by their power lines. That's something that utilities throughout the west are afraid of. I'm just going to touch on two other things here just because I've picked on our other two panelists for these. This is a story that I spoke to Don about at length. This is fires threatening superfund sites, wildfires threaten nuclear contamination in landscapes, superfund sites all kinds of areas that we don't really consider as a threat and they also produce smoke that has health impacts hundreds of miles away from where the fires are actually burning and we're actually looking at another year similar to last year or possibly even worse. We've got a deepening about really bad fuel moistures this year, really bad soil moistures this year. So all of the climate signals are for a fire season that could actually eclipse the record fire season of last year. On that powerful Dante note, I'm going to introduce her again in case people are joining late. Dr. Colleen Reed is an assistant professor of geography at CU Boulder. Thanks. So I'm a health scientist and so I'm going to shift our talk to talking a little bit more about the health impacts of wildfire smoke. So although some people do die directly from the fire, most of my research is focused on health impacts of the smoke itself and more people likely die from the smoke from the fires. This is a headline from about a paper that recently estimated that the smoke from wildfires in California in 2018 killed more than 30 times as many people as were directly killed by the smoke. And when I was asked by a journalist about this, I said it's highly likely that that estimate is accurate. And that's because we know that the smoke has a lot of toxic contaminants in it. The smoke cloud that you see, this is an image from not far from where I live from fires last summer, is a complex mass of gases and solid and liquid particles. And when you look that dark cloud is the solid and liquid particles that don't fall out by gravity. And the smaller they are, the deeper they get into the lungs and it affects not just the respiratory health, but it can affect the health of the cardiovascular system and we find these particles throughout the whole body. And there's evidence of premature mortality, respiratory impacts, cardiovascular impacts, and even impacts on developing fetuses. What we normally measure is PM2.5, you've probably heard of this and that just means particles that are 2.5 microns are smaller in diameter. Just to give you a sense of scale, about 20 of those could cross the width of a human hair. One of the reasons we care about smoke is because wildfire smoke is offsetting the improvements in air quality we've had because of regulation through the Clean Air Act. This is from the paper, not my own, but it came out in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences by McClure and Jaffe. And what they found was what you see here is the purple and the eastern part of the US is showing declines in fine particulate matter, these particles that impact our health. On the western half of the US we don't see those declines and it's been proven by this paper and others that this increase in the red areas or the not decline in the green areas is because of wildfire smoke. So wildfire smoke is an increasing part of the air pollution we're breathing. Wildfire smoke doesn't just affect our physical health. I'm also getting much more concerned about the mental health impacts of these exposures. This is an image from San Francisco from last fall. There was that day that people said the sun didn't rise. It looked apocalyptic. Many people I know in that area were contacting me showing me pictures. And I think that as we have more of these episodes, the concern about the impacts of telling people to stay indoors for long periods of time because the air quality is so bad, we should be thinking more about the mental health of that and the fact that it doesn't feel like living on earth. And then I'm not just interested in studying the health impacts of wildfires. I'm also interested in which populations are more affected. In my research I found that although the smoke does not differentially affect people by race or class, the wildfire smoke is spreading throughout the western US, we do find that the health impacts are differential. In my work we found that communities with lower median incomes, the individuals there are much more likely to visit the emergency room or be hospitalized for respiratory health issues during these high air pollution events during wildfires. And this idea is something I'm toying with is it's the idea of a palimpsest. All health impacts and natural disasters happen on top of the history of the society we live in. And it's not too surprising that the populations that are most impacted are the ones most marginalized. We see this with hurricanes, we also likely see it with wildfires. Thank you. While we're transitioning, what is a palimpset? Sorry. It's these historical documents where when there wasn't a lot of paper they would use the same document and write on top of it and now with special machinery they can sort of see the history of the document by removing layer upon layer. And that's this idea that our society, the history is still there and it's playing a role in how we're being impacted. Thank you for asking that question. Good for Hangman. Don Whitmore. Thank you. Thank you so much Susan for having me. It's certainly an honor to be here. To help shape the discussion I'd like to offer three concepts for us to consider moving forward. First, I'd contend that there's no such thing as a natural disaster. There are only natural events with potentially disastrous social consequences. I mean, if you think about it planet earth as we know it has existed for eons with wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and so forth. Our ecosystems, our landscapes, our life forms and in fact humanity itself owes itself its existence to these stochastic expressions of nature's raw power. Only when we began putting things of social value, crops, timber, homes, businesses, infrastructure, entire communities out in front of these natural events did they earn the distinction of disastrous. A wildfire for example occurring in a remote wilderness area where there are no social values impacted from structures to air quality to view sheds. If there's no social values there, it's not an issue. It's not a problem. It's not a disaster. Only when we put things of social value in the path of these natural events do they become disastrous. And so if you consider over the past 150 years the population in the U.S. has increased roughly tenfold. So for simple minds like mine it's easy to extrapolate that the social impacts from an equal number of acres burned is going to have ten times the social impact. But as we just heard from Michael and from his marvelous book Megafire and from Colleen, we know that the number of acres has increased and that the economic, social and health costs have grown exponentially. So not only are we having a greater number of acres burned but the social impacts have grown exponentially as well which brings me to my second point. For much of our history managing or suppressing wildfires was considered a complicated endeavor. I mean whenever you put humans out in front of something it'll kill them. It's bound to be a complicated operation. So yes, it was always challenging but relatively speaking it was straightforward. Management efforts were largely focused on simply putting out the fire and we were very very very successful. In fact the original U.S. Forest Service strategy was called the 10 a.m. policy which meant that all fires should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the following day and if they weren't the resultant the backup plan was by 10 a.m. the following day. As we've experienced here in Colorado firsthand over the past 20 years, we can see that the wildland fire management situation has become complex. Complex systems in contrast to complicated exhibit nonlinear exponential and often asymmetric relationships. And today rather than simply focusing on fire suppression, fire managers must take into account and manage these other nonfire dimensions, what we call the possessive dimensions. Indeed today these are the incident. It's not about the fire, it's about how the fire impacts these social systems, norms, and expectations. As I said at the outset it's a social disaster not a natural disaster. And here's the kicker. If you think about social societal changes even in just recent years, we'd all agree that the world has become more complex and with increased complexity comes increased vulnerability. And this brings me to my third and final point. To adequately consider the wildfire problem we need to understand the relationships and interplays between these complex systems, namely social systems, natural systems and climate change. What we've witnessed in recent years is this exponential and asymmetrical interaction between these key elements. If we were to be successful in addressing the escalating wildfire problem, we must focus on what's actually driving the problem, namely societal behaviors actions and choices. In closing we can't simply forest manage our way out of the dilemma. We can't simply fire suppress our way out of the predicament. Those are complicated solutions to be sure, but we can never solve complex problems with mere complicated solutions. So much there. Thank you so much. I just want to ask you, so you said they're natural events with sometimes devastating social consequences, but to your last comments especially, would you even define them as natural events? I mean it sounds as though they're going to happen anyway because people are living in the urban world, whatever, while in the interface, or because we've allowed forests to get so so so dense, then they're problems. But it sounds like that itself is kind of an unnatural or human-caused event. We certainly over the last we'll call it 100 years greatly influenced natural landscape primarily from a fire perspective through our very successful efforts at suppressing fires. I mean think of it as... Smokey the bear, many of us remember. Right. Think of it as you have a fireplace and one day you go in, you put in some kindling, some newspaper, and some logs, but you don't light it. And the next day you come in and you put in more kindling, newspaper, fire, logs, and don't light it. And you do that for many many years when you eventually light a fireplace your whole house is going to burn down. That's what we've done in the forest. By removing the natural fire regime we have an artificial buildup of fuels on the forest floor. So when we do have fires we have extreme fires. We have super hot fires that sterilize the soils that do much more... As in there's no carbon, I mean there's nothing left to grow. So yes, we've created it. With regards to the urban interface, the studies have shown it's not contributing to the fire regime per se, what it's contributing to is the social consequences of those fires. The cost of suppressing fires, the risk to firefighters trying to protect homes and communities and the overall cost of fire suppression have skyrocketed in trying to protect homes and the urban interface. But it hasn't changed the fire regime and the fire behavior that much. Michael Kodas, you had so many powerful statistics and visuals in the book and one is about the density of the trees per acre in an average forest now in Arizona I think, but it could apply probably to Colorado as well. How that's changed over the years just to give me and people a sense of why that is so different now. To follow up on Don's point, it depends on the type of forest you're in and that's one thing I think that we've learned in the last few decades is that we can't paint this problem with as broad a brush as the federal government wanted us to. And the statistic I think you're referring to is looking at ponderosa pine forests which we have plenty of here in the front range that are badly overgrown, but down in areas of New Mexico and Arizona where not only did they put out every fire in these forests for a hundred years, but they also seeded some of them to try to prime a timber industry. A natural ponderosa pine forest in some of these places had a low intensity ground fire every two to five years. So if you think about the math that if you had a forest that had fire in it every five years and you put out every fire there for a hundred years, you're going to have exponentially more fuel in that forest. So some of these forests have 40 times more trees in them than they did prior to our intervention in the fire cycle and in some cases our efforts to actually grow more timber in these forests. So the conditions and the matrix and the makeup of forests is so different now from years ago and then we have we can talk sort of big picture now the forecast even though whoever might have driven here now we just had a snow storm and things look like oh there's a lot of precipitation going on right now. I think at least half of Colorado itself is still in a extremely dangerous drought situation and I think the U.S. Drought Monitor and NOAA have just predicted and you alluded to this in your opening things are going to get worse. We've got dry soil, we've got more drought conditions coming sounds like more prescription for mega fires galore as the new norm certainly in 2021. How does that look to you? Yeah no I think that's very true and we have cycles climate and weather cycles that are changing with this to work against us and so one is snowpack which is a story that I just worked on with a couple of our reporters a week ago. So we have pretty thin snowpack throughout the west and you know we've caught up largely here in Colorado and we just had this big snowstorm yesterday. I got a foot of snow at my place in Boulder but snow in April doesn't help us that much. Snow in the depth of winter when it creates a nice hard snowpack that will take a long time to melt and will be trickling down moisture into a forest until you know June or July that helps a lot but these storms that come late and then you know I had 12 inches of snow on my driveway when I pulled out to come here it was all gone and melted away that's not that helpful in June or July. That's not going to be around to keep those forests moist and so the way that the winter has changed one thing that's happened is that we're seeing a lot more snowpack melt off in winter a lot of snow not come until later in the season when it's not going to last very long so our snowpack is gone you know quite early in the year in California I think they're talking about about half the normal snowpack at this point. Yeah in the northern Sierra which means that those forests are going to be available to burn you know weeks if not months earlier than they had been historically. And has this been measured is there much of a measurable additive effect from beetle kill spruce beetle kill so you don't have the leaves even well maybe not the conifers but you don't have the leaves holding the snow and allowing that trickle effect so is that compounding the cycle that's already happening? It does the impact of beetles on forest which is a story that I've been working on with one of our science writers for actually quite some time is very complicated and there's been great debate about how much beetles are making fires worse there's a lot of research at CU Boulder that says that beetle kill hasn't at least in models made fires worse there's more recent research that says that they have the common thought about it and Don can correct me at least among firefighters when I started to write about this was that the forests were kind of color coded during an insect outbreak in a coniferous forest and so a green forest was generally fairly healthy if it was a red forest where the trees had died but the needles were still on all the branches then that forest those needles they're very dry they're desiccated so they're going to ignite really easily so the red forest would burn much more easily and then when those needles fell off and you had what was a gray forest because there's no green needles or red needles on the trees those forests don't tend to burn don't tend to have crown fires because they don't have those fine fuels to carry them but the lack of the needles on the trees have all kinds of other impacts on fire one you mentioned it's they don't hold snow they also let more sunlight into the forest floor so fuels that are on the forest floor are going to dry out earlier they also allow a lot more wind into that forest that influences the fire and so you know I think it gets back to you know one of the things that Don was talking about is that even outside of the social aspects of what happens when we live build have resources in these places the way that climate has impacted insect outbreaks has a very complex impact on wildfires that's very hard to categorize as you know these bugs have made the fires worse or these bugs have made the fires less severe it's much more complicated than that and really hard to model fascinating and one more thing on that note then I want to get to some of the human physical and social impacts as well but we also have as part of that this so-called positive feedback loop where you talk about the dry soils that themselves are contributing to wildfires and the wildfires themselves are making the soil more dry and barren and I take it there's no end in sight of this sort of cycle which seems to accelerate the whole problem the vicious cycle of fire and climate you know one place to look at this is when we look at permafrost or peat and I did a lot of work in Indonesia on fires and the rainforests in Indonesia many of them grow on deep what they call lenses of peat and peat is basically vegetation that has fallen to the ground but remains so moist that it does not decompose and eventually it would turn into coal to give you a sense of how much you know carbon is in this peat those peat lenses can be 60 feet deep and they hold 10 times more carbon than the rainforest on top of them so when these fires in Indonesia get into that peat it releases immense amounts of carbon and methane and to give a sense of that the World Resources Institute estimated that in the 2015 wildfires in Indonesia which were all human starts they don't really have a natural fire cycle they all start as fires to clear land for agriculture and then they lose control of them these fires burned into those those peat lenses and for 40 days the WHO RIS estimated that those fires in Indonesia released more carbon into the atmosphere than the entire US economy produced during that period of time that's tragic well Dr. Reed I wanted to bring you in you alluded to so much in your opening about not just that there are human physical and mental health of the smoke and the fire and living near it but that it's disproportionate in terms of who is affected and in what way talk about that more like who are the most vulnerable and how because it seemed like you were saying because they're the ones who are going to the emergency room but I have so often hear that those in poorer communities don't have access to the healthcare so they may get sicker but it's not logged or it's not caught soon enough but this is different yeah there's a lot to it when I was talking about the evidence from my research where individuals in lower income communities were more likely to show up in the emergency department seeking care for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease during wildfires compared to more wealthy communities that there could be a bunch of different reasons for that one is that you know in the United States not everyone has access to health insurance and the healthcare system and so actually individuals who do have health insurance are much more likely to go to their regular physician and be able to keep their respiratory health under control because they can afford their medications and they can keep they can go and refill their medications when it's wildfire season and so actually the individuals who don't have health insurance are much more likely to show up in the emergency department in general and then that's what we were seeing there and it's probably possibly through that route because there are some studies in countries that have universal health care that have not seen these differential impacts by socioeconomic status or class but I would say that the populations most affected are anyone who has respiratory health issues and or cardiovascular disease we do there are some studies that show there's impacts on individuals with cardiovascular disease there's some evidence that you know there's more heart attacks during wildfires particularly more severe heart attacks but it's different by different studies and there's been some who have argued that it might be due to the actual fuel that's burned because the chemistry of the smoke can be different so there's a study in North Carolina that they hypothesized is because it was peat that was burning why they saw a cardiovascular impact whereas some of my work in California did not see a cardiovascular impact but some of the more recent fires that have lasted longer some of the studies coming out of those fires are showing more of a cardiovascular impact because sometimes we have this really high air pollution event but it's only a few days from fires you know even just a decade ago versus now we're having the air pollution doesn't abate for a couple of weeks and therefore it doesn't allow the body to recover right you're still breathing that that tough air and so there's I would say that anyone who has any you know chronic health condition should be more concerned about the air pollution during a wildfire event than you know your average healthy individual who doesn't have a chronic disease yet and yourself for sharing a pretty powerful story not only does Culling research the health effects of fires but I have mild asthma but it is something that I think about when I look outside and I see that I can't see to the end of my street because of smoke I consider myself a sensitive group and so when I see the air quality warning saying that it's unhealthy for sensitive groups I would consider myself in that population even though I have health insurance and I use my inhalers regularly and I'm probably you know pretty well protected in that regard it is something that I that I think about or I look at the air quality apps to see okay is there going to be a shift in the winds and therefore the air quality is projected to get better later today I might go outside and spend my time outside when I think the air quality is better it's like everyone knows what AQI is after last year right yeah so if you were say the Anthony Fauci bless his soul of the wildfire related human health department of the United States I know you're not in the business of prescribing but like one or two things you would recommend besides anyone who's at risk stay indoors like you said that has its own mental health effects is it kind of a systemic problem where the healthcare system is not addressing this right or it's more a climactic political issue where we got to just tackle the underlying causes or I'll be above well for sure we need to tackle the primary causes of I think we need to do everything we can to try and slow climate change we need to do everything we can to manage our forests differently but those will take a long time and in the meantime we're going to have many wildfires and severe air quality impacts and so then I take a public health approach to the near term we can tell people to look at the air quality forecast in addition to the weather forecast and make your decisions about the physical activities that you are involved in outside but also people who have respiratory disease before fire season make sure your medications are up to date I talked with physicians just a few weeks ago I was talking with physicians at Kaiser Permanente about what they can do and telling them that and also telling their patients who have respiratory disease you're a sensitive group actually because I think a lot of people don't always think of themselves that way and so that they should take the extra precautions in those events and then also one thing that's been shown to really improve air quality indoors is getting HEPA filters right so we're getting used to this idea of getting air from an infectious disease standpoint but we can also think about that from an air quality standpoint and for individuals who cannot afford a HEPA filter for their home which can really improve the air quality inside, I think some municipalities in California are starting to think about having clean air shelters during wildfire events similar to having a cooling center during a heat wave a place where individuals can go to cool off during a heat wave or to breathe clean air because so many homes especially rental properties and older homes are very leaky and the air pollution gets inside Wow fascinating. In Fairbanks, Alaska, I think a year and a half ago, 2019 fires I believe they had to open a series of those and not just in Fairbanks but that was the one city that had to do it because in Alaska not many people have air conditioning they generally just open their windows to cool the house so they didn't even have a level below HEPA filters and I don't have HEPA filters in my house and I'm sure Don and Colleen remember when the Cameron Peak fire smoke came over the continental divide. Which was what year? That was last summer. So that's the one that's the largest fire in Colorado history now and we actually have houses burning another fire that burned into, you know, right down to Route 36 in Boulder it burned houses about five miles from my house but it was the smoke from the Cameron Peak fire that hit North Boulder where I live and I watched the purple air monitors and it basically they went off the charts for EPA, you know, a particular matter health standards and my wife has sensitive lungs and we had to leave we just drove down to southwest Colorado where there wasn't any smoke from feeling like she needed to go to the emergency room to being fine the next day as soon as we got her out of the smoke. Powerful. A friend pointed me to a website of air filters today saying, look prices are already going up kind of like a huge lamps everyone was getting outside and for that matter the HEPA filters during COVID That's actually a question I've got for Colleen is have you noticed when you talk about disadvantaged communities that can't afford air cleaners or HEPA filters or air conditioners, you know, I saw that in Montana as well where there were communities that they don't have that many hot days their rural they don't have that much money and then when they got smoked out they just didn't have the resources to protect their lungs and they also didn't have the resources to really go anywhere else Yeah and actually in Missoula, Montana got a grant and purchased some HEPA filters and they identified individuals who needed them and they loaned them out now and it's something that I wonder if that will be increasingly something you can get from your public library or something. You rent out your HEPA filter or something. I mean I think it's a great idea for communities that get impacted by air pollution on a regular basis but it is an equity issue right and so that's the same thing is that you know as I mentioned before I do think that health insurance is playing a role in some of these differential impacts. That also could be the reason why you know there's more chronic health conditions that are uncontrolled in populations that don't have health insurance but there's also lower income individuals are more likely to live in homes that are leakier. They're more likely to live in rental properties that are not well maintained and so they're getting a higher exposure to the air pollution even if the plume is not differential in terms of where it goes the amount that you're breathing because of your ability to either you know go somewhere else you can look at the maps and figure out where the air is clean or you have your own air cleaner. You have your HEPA filter in your home. Yeah another thing I wanted to ask and I grapple with this a lot and don't understand it enough so I want to have a round of it is should people be living in areas where more and more people are living now and that's the Wildland-Urban interface seems like that's where there's the greatest economic consequences social consequences and if so who should pay? General taxpayers obviously home insurance is going up and does go up in certain places but it just seems this vaccine perhaps not solvable problem but it does seem that's an area where understandable it's beautiful where people are living and want to live and it's a huge cost and huge problem from a fire, not fire well fire suppression but fire management standpoint no? Maybe Don take a crack at that Boy it's hard to say whether people should or shouldn't and I'm not sure I'm willing to wade into that but I think You could make it more nuanced than that. There's ways to live responsibly and in communities that have been very active in mitigation in understanding the wildfire problem within their community and whether it's building codes or as I said mitigation defensible space those kinds of proactive actions generally history has shown that those are successful and when firefighters come into a community to assess whether or not they can attempt to make a successful stand against a fire they're going to look at those things and if a community hasn't done any proactive work and it's forest right up to back decks and trees overhanging and shaking the roofs or needles in the gutter or whatever it is going to be the firefighters are going to back off and appropriately decide to go to another neighborhood another subdivision where those things have been taken so it's less dangerous it's not so much it's a combination of managing the risk but it's also where can you be successful you know during more and more of these fire seasons we're seeing just not enough resources not enough firefighters not enough engines not enough aviation assets to be able to adequately try to respond and suppress and so if you're looking at do I defend community A that hasn't done anything and community B that has where am I going to be most successful with my scarce resources I'm going to throw it at community B and right now it's all voluntary no I mean I know there's some county incentives and voluntary in terms of defending and to what degree they defend protect around but it's largely voluntary you're seeing more communities Boulder was one of the first in fact I want to say 30 years ago maybe that limited you couldn't use shake shingle roofs anymore because if you have a shake shingle roof you might as well just go burn your house down right now because it will eventually they're extremely flammable and create numerous spot fires in the downtown wind so it's a huge problem so you're seeing building codes coming into effect you're seeing insurance agencies starting to no longer ensure properties without either mitigation or even in some cases I think especially in California where they're just not ensuring homes that are in the interface and insurance companies are opting out and saying no way just like some are doing in hurricane prone areas I think it's a question of who pays if you live in a high risk area yeah I mean right now we pay for fire suppression through our tax dollars whether that's to the federal government or to your local fire protection district so yes I mean common sense says the cost should be born by those who are creating the risk but the trouble is we're all paying through increased taxes we're all paying through increased insurance rates and then there's broader implications if you're not doing the right mitigation in your communities then you have the potential to impact a watershed and or a view shed so now it starts to play out that community A's unwillingness to do the work necessary to protect its community now has secondary and tertiary effects like erosion that's causing mudslides or the view shed that's decreasing property values I haven't heard that term view shed if you could imagine the whole front range of Colorado which isn't that extreme to imagine it burning property values on the front range down in Louisville we'll call the Flatland communities their property values would decrease if the whole backdrop of Boulder County or Fort Collins Larimer County was blackened I know Don's heard this a thousand times because I've maybe heard it a hundred but the number of people you talk to up there and you talk about mitigating your property and they say well I don't want to cut down any trees I moved here for the trees and they don't recognize that they're in one of those forests that we talked about before that may have 40 times more trees than where they're naturally so they're in a really hazardous location that they don't recognize the other thing they don't recognize is that when we develop into these areas we become the primary fire starter and so we change the fire season you know fire only starts when we got lightning that's really the only natural igniter of wildland fire whereas when we move into an area our power tools our cars our power lines we start fires in myriad ways and so research out of Jennifer Balch's terrific earth lab at CU went through about 20 years of fire reports across the country basically every wildland fire report and determined that 84% of wildland fires are started by humans in one way or another whereas general fires what percentage how does that compare with a general population of fires you know I don't know but 84% you know whereas a landscape that doesn't have humans or their development there it would be 0% you know we're not there so you know I think that that's you know something that people don't consider when they move into the wildlander of an interface is that not just that their properties at risk and that they're introducing fuel but they're actually adding new sparks that are going to start that have the potential to start these fires so I'm thinking and hoping that we're getting a whole batch of questions coming in and I hope that's the case and really want to address them I want to give each of you one to two minutes sort of closing statements any take away you really want people to walk around and walk with look at their computer screen with do we have those other slides we do I hope you do so we'll call them up so we'll go in the same order as the beginning there we go Michael so I'm hoping that I can read these so this is this is a good follow up because it gets back to Don's point about maintaining your property and in my reporting one aspect of maintaining your property that I found problematic was the number of people who said well you know I got a metal roof I built with fire retardant materials you know I cleared all this space around my property I'm good and the reality is that you have to be maintaining your property all the time you know I used to talk about how it's so many people think that it's a building issue and if I just build my house right I'm prepared kind of like it's surgery I have this problem and I'll deal with it one time and I'm done for life when in reality it's a chronic thing and you should really think about it like brushing your teeth you should be cleaning out your gutters all the time well that hopefully is at least twice a day but are you talking like quarterly for this kind of depending on the property it could be as often as weekly where you're going out and sweeping up the needles and cleaning the branches and trimming down mowing your lawn all these things that put your house at risk you know if you decide to live in the wildlander of an interface then it will be a constant matter of upkeep to protect your property so you know and another aspect of that that I think is really important is to know your property it's one thing to say well I need to clear trees for a hundred feet around my property it's another thing to know what type of tree they are and how does the fire interact with this vegetation and is this the type of vegetation that tends to have crown fires or is this you know the type of vegetation that tends to support low intensity ground fires that wouldn't be as threatening and so many people you know move into these areas and they say they move there for the trees but they don't know what type of trees they are and they don't know what type of vegetation is growing under those trees and what their relationship with fire is so you know one thing that when I was teaching this to students and that I really advise people to do you know if we're going to live in these areas and live with these areas is to start to see beauty in the fire cycle because we're going to see a lot more fire and you know burned forests are really beautiful places with different kinds of animals that come into them and you know this is part of the natural cycle. Interesting so you're saying don't just see it as a graveyard a dead zone but get to know what happens with the whole area. You can hike up on Bear Peak or South Boulder Peak here and see the flagstaff fire and hike through the burned forest and you can go just north of Boulder and go in there and go on one of the trails there and you know hike through it if it's safe and you know see what you see you know learn to appreciate the burned forest and then the final point I wanted to make is is to listen to Colleen and Don listen to Colleen and Don you know and I'm using them as symbols of their professions and when I first started covering fire in 1980s you know I'd deal with a lot of fire scientists and every once in a while I'd get one you know that would complain that you know firefighters don't take anything that we do seriously you know they don't pay attention to the science they're just adrenaline junkies that want to go out there and fight fires and I'd talk to firefighters and occasionally one would say you know the scientists don't provide me anything that's valuable to me on the front lines when I have to make these split second decisions and that's really changed. I actually think that there's a lot more firefighters out there that really understand the science and care about the science and there's a lot of scientists out there that are trying to produce data that is useful to the person on the front lines and they're listening to each other and we should be listening more closely to the scientists and the firefighters out there about what they're seeing and how things are changing. The final point is then you know maybe not don't listen to the media quite so much. Some of us are really interested in this and really try to learn and really try to spend time with people like Colleen and Don and you know others are a young journalist on their first job and they get sent out to the fire line and it's the first time they've seen one of these things and they're as naive as I was when I was on that prison. So you know take the time to actually find the experts in this field and learn what they can teach you about how to care for your property and how to prepare for wildfires and most importantly if they tell you to evacuate get out of there. Absolutely. The threat that you put others into when you don't do that is really you know I think you know another unacceptable risk. Yeah really good point it's not just a risk to yourself and your family but think about the firefighters and others. Thank you. Colleen. Well I think I already talked about some of the things that I'll address and I come at this from obviously thinking about smoke and health and so one thing I'll mention is that everything I've talked about with the health impacts that we've learned is just the tip of the iceberg because we're using data that's regularly collected most of us when we're in a wildfire smoke event. We'll have some subclinical effects we might have some symptoms but we won't show up at a doctor's office and so there's more impacts there that then could affect your health later on if exposed regularly so it's something to think about even when you don't have respiratory health impacts already you can go to the next slide but I often talk to people about we need to do a better job communicating to the public about smoke and this is an app from the EPA it's called SmokeSense which I think is really great. You can put in your zip code it tells you your current air quality index and for most zip codes this is my zip code so it for some reason doesn't project to tomorrow but most of them do and so you can try to get a sense of what the air pollution is going to be like when it's green, it's healthy yellow is moderate, the darker the color the worse it is obviously if you have any health issues make sure you're up to date with your medications and the HEPA filters and the clean air shelters like I mentioned before Thank you. Don Wittemore. Alright so I tried to break up my kind of what you can do to get into the four areas that I previously talked about so climate change one is we have to get aggressive about supporting climate change research policies and innovations you know there's a recent study that showed across 50 countries globally over two thirds of the population of those countries saw climate change as a global emergency Was US one of them? Yes. And in fact a Yale study showed that 72% of Americans think that climate change is an emergency so we need to think up the policies and the innovations with the politics. The politics are sadly 30-40 years behind where we are with the science what society wants. Second social systems we have to accept that things are going to have to change but any change that we can orchestrate is going to be far more beneficial and universally acceptable than what's being enforced on us. We don't have a choice about change right now. Change is happening and right now the climate systems natural systems, the social systems are driving the change. We are on a runaway train. We have to get out and get back in the saddle and take control of that. Natural systems. Senator Bennett introduced the outdoor restoration fund bill today. At least it was a plan to be introduced today. That needs our support. It's going to put billions of dollars towards the forest management aspect and we need to get things from prescribed fire to fuels mitigations to hiring additional crews to help deal with the problem. Doesn't that include what we call wetland and watershed restoration in a broader sense too to make the whole watershed more resilient? Yes. It's huge. Go Michael Bennett. Finally on the wildfire management side as last year pointed out, we don't have enough resources. Firefighters engines, air aviation assets, we need to start funding and not be running out of these resources when they're critical. We need to be able to give firefighters a break during the season. When they're working two, three weeks, 16 hours a day, then only have two days off and then be right back at it. They're working 1,000, 1,500 hours of overtime in six months. They're burnt out. They're exhausted. The mental health aspects. Firefighters have among the highest suicide rate of any profession and wildland firefighters are among the highest. So we need to give the firefighters more support to be able to do their job. What's so moving? I actually read something recently that wildland firefighters have a substantially higher suicide rate than structure firefighters. Why? Because it's so much more risky? I don't know that it's so much more risky. I do think it's more isolated. You're working with a small crew. You're often out in the woods. You see horrible things that happen. One thing that I've talked to Don about a lot is the fact that when I first, I spent one summer as a wildland firefighter a long time ago and you got trained to go cut down trees and deal with fire in the woods and more and more the wildland firefighters are dealing with fires in the Wildland Urban Interface, where they're seeing homes burnt, where they're seeing really terrible things that used to be just structure firefighters dealt with. Then they go back to a fire camp or they disperse as opposed to the structure firefighters that go back to their firehouse and they're all gathered together and they've got a built in support system. I don't know that there's been a lot of research about that, just that the numbers show that and also that they're seeing such a steep increase in wildfire. We've seen three years in the last five, where we had 10 million acres of U.S. forest burn. In the 1970s, the average was just over 3 million acres a year that burned. Since we had basically took on fighting wildland fire, those are the first times that we've seen this huge increase in land burning and it's all happened in just the last five years. So the job for the wildland firefighter has changed remarkably in the last couple of decades. Ah, to say nothing of landscape itself. So we want to hear from you all. Justin, take it away. We do have a couple of questions here and time for just a few, I think. Lydia wants to know about the title of the program, which is Fire Friend and Foe. She wonders, where's the friend in fires these days? Are there any benefits of forest fires anymore? Great question. I'll dive in. Great question, Lydia, and thanks for asking that. It's so easy to get caught up in the drama of it. You know, fire has been an essential component of our natural landscape, as I said at the beginning for eons. Some trees depend on it to reproduce like lodgepole pine. Others, it's a cleansing mechanism. It maintains forest health. You know, part of the problem that Michael alluded to with 10 to 40 times the number of trees per acre and you throw on that drought stress, and now you don't have a natural fire regime. Whereas fires frequently used to clean that up, keep that number of trees per acre down to what was natural, maybe 40 trees per acre, and it maintained a healthy forest. So yes, by removing fire, we have created an unhealthy forest balance. And through prescribed fires, we're trying to restore that natural fire regime so that fire can play its natural healthy role in the landscape. I mean, whether it's trees or shrubs or grasses, and the multitude of wildlife depend on a natural healthy forest that sees frequent fire, depending on the forest type, but sees the periodic fire regime as its own health for, again, the animals and so forth. One thing to point out as we talk a lot about all the animals that are affected by really severe fires, and obviously in Australia it's horrible to see billions of animals killed by wildfires. But we also have lots of species that are dependent on wildfire that fell into steep decline when we put out too many fires. Here in the west is one of the species that are really known for that is the black-backed woodpecker, which depends on what they call a snag forest, a severely burned forest for its habitat and for its food. And actually, as we've seen increasing fire in certain areas, we've seen populations of black-backed woodpeckers recover. And in the southeast, the bobwhite quail, which was a really popular game species, fell into steep decline about 70 years ago from putting out too many fires and it was prescribed fire that brought back those populations. So there's all kinds of animals that need this fire cycle on these regular fires in their forests to thrive. Fascinating. Great question. And then we have a question for Don. Last night, Denay Carles, Deputy Director of the Global Systems Laboratory at NOAA discussed the increase in billion-dollar extreme weather disasters. But when asked how much of that was due to an increase in the number and severity of events versus how much to increased development in numbers of people living in vulnerable areas, he could not say. Given that, what would be your advice to NOAA and to the federal government, generally not to mention local governments concerning the social vulnerability aspect of this issue? Thank you for that. There's quite a question. There's a couple dimensions if I heard the question right. One is assessing the costs or the economic impacts. And I mean yes, clearly as we put more people in the interface as we've seen more people build along the coastlines in hurricane-prone areas or along earthquake faults, when you'll have an event, you will have more economic impact. But what I think is maybe missed in that discussion is simply looking at the quantity and severity. And not just the economics, but what we do see from fires and hurricanes and even floods is a greater frequency and a greater severity of an event. And so to separate those out is kind of where I look at it. I mean our fire season is now 30% longer than it was largely due to climate change. We don't see the temperature changes we used to, so that's increasing the winter temperature decreases used to help kill off the mountain pine beetle. We don't get as cold in the winter, so we're not getting the beetle kill-off that we used to. So we're seeing lots of these other natural system effects from climate change that exacerbate the challenge and then contributes to greater economic impact. So I'm not sure I am in any seat to give Noah advice, so I'll pass on that. But I think what we have to look at is this frequency and severity and not just the economics. I'll toss out just one little bit of advice only to make my employer happy, which is that we've had two or three stories about the increase in billion-dollar disasters at Inside Climate News. And you can find them on our website and it's free. InsideClimateNews.org Great. And keyword, wildfires, megafires, because you guys do so many stories again. You get disasters for that one because it includes hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes. Believe it or not, that's about all we have from Facebook in terms of questions. I did want to give a shout out to Sustainable Resilient Longmont's website. We've developed a resource guide for actions individuals can take to combat climate change, including fire. And that's www.srlongmont.org forward slash resources. Well with that I want to say thank you so much to the panelist Michael Kotis, Dr. Colleen Reed, Don Whittemore, thanks so much Justin Beach to the Longmont Museum and Cultural Center and to the big sponsor KGNU. So thanks so much and I want to give a plug for the water panel which will be tomorrow night which will be fantastic and so much overlapping themes of course. And then Thursday night finally we'll have the Earth panel. We'll have a strong ag land use angle to it including with Farmer doing a lot of regenerative ag. So there's a lot coming for the rest of the week. So stay tuned. Thanks again. Don't touch that dial. Thank you Susan and thank you all for joining us. And thank you all out there in internet land for tuning in tonight. See you tomorrow.