Column: Forests Suffer as Climate Extremes Hammer Midwest

Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:

Weather changes and extremes have always been with us, and spring is a time when storms can be intense. But in a changed climate, the atmosphere holds more heat and moisture, the fuel that powers storms.
For the last several years, residents of Michigan have witnessed a steady stream of climate enhanced weather extremes outside their lived experience, from poisonous wildfire smog in 2023, to our first ever declared Tornado Emergency last May.

A few weeks ago, Northern Michigan was hit by a “generational” ice storm unlike any in memory.

From the UP to Grayling, and from Charlevoix to Alpena, power was out and trees snapped under the weight of ice. The Mackinac Bridge was closed as slabs of ice fell from the towers and exploded on the deck. 

“I’ve never seen an event as big or as devastating as this. There are acres and acres of trees just snapped in half,”  DNR Forester Lucas Merrick told Accuweather.

The storm that devastated Michigan was part of a larger “stalled” system that pounded the Midwest and lead to dozens of deaths.  Such storms are getting more likely as the Jet Stream, responding to climate change, slows, meanders and gets wavier, according to recent Columbia University research.

At the time of the storm, the jet stream over North America was split in two branches. Such splits are not new, but scientists have been suggesting that patterns like this might be happening more frequently, and making storms more damaging.

Dr. Jennifer Francis, of the Woodwell Climate Science Research Center told me that “when the jet stream does split like this, we see these very slow moving weather patterns stuck between those two branches.”
Judah Cohen of MIT says, “you have this no man’s land in between the two, so weather systems kind of get stuck.”

Michigan’s ice disaster fits that pattern.
Senator John Damoose, a Republican representing the tip of the Mitten to the Eastern UP, told interviewers “We had about five days of this storm, successive waves, that got worse and worse and worse each time.”
In just that way, stalled weather systems make an ordinary, one day storm into an extraordinary three or five day disaster.

Major utilities and corporations are feeling pressure from more damaging weather.

“We’ve definitely seen a 20 year trend of increasingly severe weather, worse winds. This year we had our first tornadoes in February,” Greg Salisbury, Consumers Energy’s Vice President for Electric Distribution Engineering told Michigan Public Radio.

In 2023, Consumer’s CEO Garrick Rochow said an earnings call, “Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen an increase in both the frequency of storms and higher wind speeds, some of the most extreme winds within the last four years. We’re clearly seeing the effects of climate change.”
According to Rochow, ratepayers will pay the price, as the design standard for transmissions lines, originally built to withstand 40 mph winds, has now been raised to 80 mph.

In addition, insurance companies, and their customers are taking a hit. The New York Times recently reported that “In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country” – including Michigan.

The effects of these climate extremes can last for years.
Mid-Michigan is still waiting for a rebuilding process on two dams that collapsed like dominoes in 2020 after heavy rains.

Likewise, Michigan’s forests will show damage from this year’s storm for decades.

“The damage from the storm will have a significant impact on our planning and operations for the next 40 or 50 years,” according to the DNR’s Merrick.

“These tree tops and branches, they will begin to dry out,” he said,  “and the potential for intense ground fires will increase throughout the next several years.”
This is ominous considering the increasing incidence of damaging wildfires in eastern North America.
One response to this would be forest management that included prescribed burns, but will communities in threatened areas be willing to go along with the disruption, smoke and inconvenience?

In a climate changed Michigan, average temperatures will be warmer, rains may be more intense, but more erratic, especially in summer, according to modeling by the University of Michigan’s Julia Cole. She told me this might mean a greater frequency of droughts, and conditions for wildfire.

If future storms continue to damage our forests, we may see how climate extremes build on, and amplify each other in unexpected, and potentially devastating ways.