AP Researchers link wildfires, climate change

[rodeodance]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060721/ap_on_sc/world_wildfires;_ylt=Aj1GecsBQQjZUvsvX47xR6qs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3b2NibDltBHNlYwM3MTY-


Researchers link wildfires, climate change

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Fri Jul 21, 3:57 PM ET

Scientists worldwide are watching temperatures rise, the land turn dry and vast forests go up in flames.

In the Siberian taiga and Canadian Rockies, in southern California and Australia, researchers find growing evidence tying an upsurge in wildfires to climate change, an impact long predicted by global-warming forecasters.

A team at California's Scripps Institution, in a headline-making report this month, found that warmer temperatures, causing earlier snow runoff and consequently drier summer conditions, were the key factor in an explosion of big wildfires in the U.S. West over three decades, including fires now rampaging east of Los Angeles.

Researchers previously reached similar conclusions in Canada, where fire is destroying an average 6.4 million acres a year, compared with 2.5 million in the early 1970s. And an upcoming U.S.-Russian-Canadian scientific paper points to links between warming and wildfires in Siberia, where 2006 already qualifies as an extreme fire season, sixth in the past eight years. Far to the south in drought-stricken Australia, meanwhile, 2005 was the hottest year on record, and the dangerous bushfire season is growing longer.

"Temperature increases are intimately linked with increases in area burned in Canada, and I would expect the same worldwide," said Mike Flannigan, a veteran Canadian Forest Service researcher.

[rodeodance]

1. this looks to be a good study:

....The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authoritative U.N.-sponsored network of scientists, has long predicted that summer drying and droughts would worsen forest fires, which in many regions are primarily set by humans.

Global temperatures rose an average 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century, and warming will continue as long as manmade "greenhouse gases," mostly carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, accumulate in the atmosphere, the panel says.

"The change is much more rapid than initially forecast 10 or 15 years ago," Brian Stocks, a retired Canadian Forest Service scientist, said of the fires. "It seems people are finally beginning to take a look at it."

The Scripps study, in the journal Science, was unique in collating detailed data from 34 years of U.S. western wildfires with temperature, snowmelt and streamflow records. Wildfire frequency varies widely from year to year, but the California researchers found a clear trend: The average number of large fires almost quadrupled between the first and second halves of that period.

[NVMojo]

2. looks right on the money to me ...heat waves all over right now again

[hatrack]

3. Wow, ya think?

:eyes: