A second, subtler effect amplifies the drying. As the planet warms, the poleward edge of the Hadley cells, where the deserts are, expands a couple of degrees latitude farther toward each Pole. No one really knows what causes this effect—but nearly all climate models predict it, making it what modelers call a robust result. Because the Southwest is right on the northern edge of the dry zone, a northward shift will plunge the region deeper into aridity.
As the meeting neared its close, Held and Seager stood out on the lawn, discussing Hadley cells and related matters through mouthfuls of coffee and doughnuts. The two men had lately become collaborators, and a few months before had published with colleagues the sobering Science paper analyzing the results of 19 different simulations done by climate modeling groups around the world. They then averaged all these results into an "ensemble." The ensemble shows precipitation in the Southwest steadily declining over the next few decades, until by mid-century, Dust Bowl conditions are the norm. It does not show the Pacific locked in a perpetual La Niña. Rather, La Niñas would continue to happen as they do today (the present one is expected to continue at least through the winter of 2008), but against a background state that is more profoundly arid. According to the ensemble model, the descent into that state may already have started.
People are not yet suffering, but trees are. Forests in the West are dying, most impressively by burning. The damage done by wildfires in the U.S., the vast majority of them in the West, has soared since the late 1980s. In 2006 nearly ten million acres (four million hectares) were destroyed—an all-time record matched the very next year. With temperatures in the region up four degrees F over the past 30 years, spring is coming sooner to the western mountains. The snowpack—already diminished by drought—melts earlier in the year, drying the land and giving the wildfire season a jump start. As hotter summers encroach on autumn, the fires are ending later as well.
The fires are not only more frequent; they are also hotter and more damaging—though not entirely because of climate change. According to Tom Swetnam, director of the University of Arizona tree-ring lab, the root cause is the government's policy, adopted early in the 20th century, of trying to extinguish all wildfires. By studying sections cut from dead, thousand-year-old giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevada and from ponderosa pines all over Arizona and New Mexico, Swetnam discovered that most southwestern forests have always burned often—but at low intensity, with flames just a few feet high that raced through the grasses and the needles on the forest floor. The typical tree bears the marks of many such events, black scars where flames ate through the bark and perhaps even took a deep wedge out of the tree, but left it alive to heal its wound with new growth. Suppressing those natural fires has produced denser forests, with flammable litter piled up on the floor, and thickets of shrubs and young trees that act as fire ladders. When fires start now, they don't stay on the ground—they shoot up those ladders to the crowns of the trees. They blow thousand-acre holes in the forest and send mushroom clouds into the air.
One day last summer, Swetnam took a few visitors up Mount Lemmon, just north of Tucson, to see what the aftermath of such events looks like. In May 2002 the Bullock fire roared up the northeast slope of Mount Lemmon, consuming 30,000 acres. Firefighters stopped it at the Catalina Highway, protecting the village of Summerhaven. But the very next year, the Aspen fire started on the slope just below the village, destroying nearly half of the 700-odd houses in Summerhaven and burning 85,000 acres, all the way down to the outskirts of Tucson. The entire mountainside beyond the village remains covered with the gray skeletons of ponderosa pines, like one big blast zone. "Ponderosa pine is not adapted to these crown fires," Swetnam said, contemplating the site from the scenic overlook above the village. "It has heavy, wingless seeds that don't go very far. When you get a large hole like this, it will take hundreds of years to fill in from the edges."
Mount Lemmon's forests are also experiencing a slower, broader change. The Catalina Highway starts out flat, at an altitude of 2,500 feet in the Sonoran Desert, with its saguaros and strip malls. As the road leaves the last of Tucson behind, it climbs steeply through the whole range of southwestern woodland ecosystems—first scrub oak, then piñon and juniper, then ponderosa pine and other conifers, until finally, after less than an hour and a climb of 7,000 feet, you reach the spruce and fir trees on the cool peak. There is a small ski area there, the southernmost in the United States, and its days are certainly numbered.
As Swetnam explained, the mountain is one of an archipelago of "sky islands" spread across southeastern Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and into Mexico—mountains isolated from one another by a sea of desert or grassland. Like isles in the ocean, these islands are populated in part by endemics—species that live nowhere else. The sky-island endemics are cool- and wet- loving species that have taken refuge on the mountaintops since the last ice age. They are things like the corkbark fir, or the endangered red squirrel that lives only on nearby Mount Graham. Their future is as bleak as that of the ski area. "They'll be picked off the top," said Swetnam. "The islands are shrinking. The aridity is advancing upslope."
All over the Southwest, a wholesale change in the landscape is under way. Piñons and scrubbier, more drought-resistant junipers have long been partners in the low woodlands that clothe much of the region. But the piñons are dying off. From 2002 to 2004, 2.5 million acres turned to rust in the Four Corners region alone. The immediate cause of death was often bark beetles, which are also devastating other conifers. The Forest Service estimates that in 2003, beetles infested 14 million acres of piñon, ponderosa, lodgepole pine, and Douglas fir in the American West.
Bark beetles tend to attack trees that are already stressed or dying from drought. "They can smell it," says Craig Allen, a landscape ecologist at Bandelier National Monument in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. Global climate change may be permanently teasing the piñons and junipers apart, and replacing piñon-juniper woodland with something new. At Bandelier, Allen has observed that junipers, along with shrubs such as wavyleaf oak and mountain mahogany, now dominate the beetle-ravaged landscape: pockets of green gradually spreading beneath a shroud of dead piñons.
