On Oct 22, 3:36 am, Roger Coppock wrote:
Expert: Warming Climate Fuels Mega-Fires
Scott Pelley Reports From The American West's Fire Lines On The
Rising
Number Of Mega-Fires
Oct 21, 2007 CBS News

(CBS) Every year you can count on forest fires in the West like
hurricanes in the East, but recently there has been an enormous change
in Western fires. In truth, we've never seen anything like them in
recorded history. It appears we're living in a new age of mega-fires
-- forest infernos ten times bigger than the fires we're used to
seeing.

To find out why it's happening, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley
went out on the fire line to see the burning of the American West.

Last fire season was the worst in recorded history. This year is
already a close second, with two months to go. More than eight million
acres have burned this year already. The men and women facing the
flames are elite federal firefighters called "Hotshots."

Nationwide there are 92 hotshot crews of 20 members each. 60 Minutes
found a group of New Mexico hotshots in the Salmon River Mountains of
Idaho. They had set up camp in a burned out patch of forest with fire
raging all around. They were hitting the day, exhausted, halfway
through a 14-day shift.

Leaving camp to scout out the situation, the firefighters anticipated
a mess and they found it: the valley was engulfed in smoke. The flames
blew through the firebreak lines they dug the day before.

"We were trying to turn the corner yesterday, and that's when it kind
of blew out. I think we got more ground over here that's been taken.
Any questions?" a firefighter said.

No question, this day the fire won. It surged across the mountain,
forcing the hotshots to evacuate. All across the West, crews are
playing defense, often pulling back to let acres burn, but standing
firm to save communities. One stand this season came in August at
Ketchum, Idaho. Forecasters said it was 99 percent certain Ketchum
would be lost if nothing was done. Some 1,700 local, state, and
federal firefighters came from across the nation, working around the
clock from a mountainside camp.

Residents were evacuated, as 300-foot flames headed for homes.

60 Minutes joined up with Tom Boatner, who after 30 years on the fire
line, is now the chief of fire operations for the federal government.

"A fire of this size and this intensity in this country would have
been extremely rare 15, 20 years they're commonplace these days,"
Boatner says.

"Ten years ago, if you had a 100,000 acre fire, you were talking about
a huge fire. And if we had one or two of those a year, that was
probably unusual. Now we talk about 200,000 acre fires like it's just
another day at the office. It's been a huge change," he says.

Asked what the biggest fires now are, Boatner says, "We've had, I
believe, two fires this summer that have been over 500,000 acres, half
a million acres, and one of those was over 600,000 acres."

"You wouldn't have expected to see this how recently?" Pelley asks.

"We got records going back to 1960 of the acres burned in America. So,
that's 47 fire seasons. Seven of the 10 busiest fire seasons have been
since 1999," Boatner says.

[ . . . ]

The rest of the transcript of this very good CBS 60-minute segment is
at:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n3380176.shtml

That is a beautiful allegation - that agw is causing the fires.
Wonderfully absurd and it has an exquisite tinge of desperation.

The sillier the alarms the quicker we put this baby to bed.