Denver’s skyline was frequently hazy this summer because of wildfires.

The emissions from the fires are doing more than messing with our view. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have found that the emissions are pumping out tens of thousands of tons of particles, carbon dioxide, pollutants that form ground-level ozone and even mercury produced by power plants and absorbed by vegetation.

Atmospheric scientist Christine Wiedinmyer at NCAR in Boulder is among the researchers studying what the wildfires are doing to our air quality. It’s a crucial question for the Denver metro area and northern Colorado, which have struggled through the years to meet federal air-quality standards.

It’s a serious concern for the entire region, where wildfires, including Colorado’s most destructive on record, have burned all summer. And it’s a problem likely to get worse as record hot, dry weather, driven by climate change, intensifies the fire danger in the West.

Wiedinmyer has compared Colorado’s wildfire emissions in 2002—another bad year—to this summer. Carbon monoxide emissions from April through June 2002 totaled 47,000 metric tons, or the equivalent of 15 percent of all human-caused sources for that time period. During the same period this year, wildfires in Colorado produced 76,000 metric tons of carbon monoxide—equivalent to 24 percent of all human-caused carbon monoxide in those three months. Carbon monoxide is an air pollutant regulated by air quality standards and is also released from man-made sources such as cars and power plants.

Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas produced by human activities, was boosted by the wildfires this year. Wiedinmyer calculated that the fires generated 1.3 million metric tons of the gas through July. In 2009, the last year for which data were available, Colorado’s entire commercial sector emitted 4.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. The grand total for all sectors was 93.7 million metric tons.

“Overall, the fires are equivalent to a small fraction of that the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide,’’ Wiedinmyer said, “but when you start looking at individual sectors, at individual types of fuel, like coal or natural gas, it can be significant.’’

Smoke rises from a wildfire burning in Boulder’s foothills.

The figure of 1.3 million tons from this year’s wildfires covers just the first seven months. The number doesn’t include emissions from out-of-state fires that drift into Colorado.

The research has caught the attention of Colorado state health officials, who are trying to figure out what larger, more frequent wildfires will mean for air quality – and the mandate to meet federal standards. State regulators have tightened regulations on the natural gas industry in eastern Colorado as the metro area has slipped out of compliance the past few years.

So, health officials want to know the volume and type of emissions coming from wildfires, said Gordon Pierce of the state air pollution control division. Pierce said much of the state’s concern centers on the fine particles and other pollutants that form ground-level ozone.

Other states are also looking at the research on pollution from wildfires.

“One of the reasons we’ve looked at that, and the carbon releases from the fires, was that states are looking at their carbon emissions and trying to understand their carbon budget for policy purposes,’’ Wiedinmyer said. “Particularly in the Western U.S., it’s really important to consider the fires and what’s happening to the ecosystems. You have large releases of carbon to the atmosphere when you have these large-scale fires and they are significant when you compare them to anthropogenic emissions.’’

Pledge to vote wildlife-friendly this election>>

As the US Senate prepares to consider clean energy and climate legislation, a new report lays out in novel ways the direct connection between what our leaders do today with impacts on people and wildlife in the future. The bottom line: taking a path of inaction now would commit us to clear and devastating consequences.

Today, the National Academy of Sciences came out with another powerful report on climate change science and the implications for policy action. Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts marks the fourth Academy report in just two months that, taken together, make an incredibly compelling case for immediate and aggressive action to limit carbon emissions.

Two conclusions of this report stand out for me:

• Limiting the impacts of climate change requires “deep emissions reductions” of 80% or more

• “[T]he world is entering a new geologic epoch” and our policy decisions will determine how long it lasts and how significant the disruptions to Earth’s environment.

In other words, we are fundamentally changing how Earth’s environment is evolving, but immediate & decisive policy action can limit how much and how severely. Strong statements from a body that tends to take a conservative view of what the science says about climate change.

What’s especially interesting about this latest report is that it explicitly links policy choices about emissions to resulting amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and finally to the likely impacts on natural and human systems. Previous scientific syntheses have done this sort of analysis in a more piecemeal fashion, with different groups of scientists assessing each step of the procession. Indeed, that piecemeal approach was used in the three reports the Academy released in May: one study committee addressed how to limit the magnitude of climate change (i.e., the policy choices), while another examined the science of climate change, within which the topics of how the climate might change and the impacts on various sectors were addressed separately. Thus, the reader is left to track down the connection between specific policy choices and likely outcomes.

Now, at last, some of the country’s top climate experts have devoted nearly a year to carefully laying out for us the connections between the choices we make today and the long-term climate consequences. This sort of study is science informing policy at its very best. It is why we have a National Academy of Science.

So what are our choices and what are the consequences?

To be honest, the report is complex and explores many of the scientific subtleties involved in making these sorts of statements. I had to do some connecting the dots to lay out the choices the way I did above and I wish that the authoring committee could have taken the analysis just that one step closer to what will effectively inform policy making. That said, this report is so chock full of useful information that I expect it will become indispensible for anyone working at the interface of climate science and policy.

And, if this report doesn’t convince policy makers why we need to address climate change now, I really don’t know what will. Once the connections between policy choices and consequences are made this obvious, it’s awfully hard to consciously commit future generations to these sorts of impacts.