On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:36:08 -0700, 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.

(SNIP)


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



From the same article:

The severity of the burning and size of the fires caught the eye of
Tom Swetnam, one of the world's leading fire ecologists. He wanted to
know what's touched off this annual inferno and whether it's truly a
historic change.

At the University of Arizona, Swetnam keeps a remarkable woodpile,
comprised of the largest collection of tree rings in the world. His
rings go back 9,000 years, and each one of those rings captures one
year of climate history.

Swetnam found recent decades have been the hottest in 1,000 years. And
recently, he and a team of top climate scientists discovered something
else: a dramatic increase in fires high in the mountains, where fires
were rare.

"As the spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, the
snow on these high mountain areas is melting and running off. So the
logs and the branches and the tree needles all can dry out more
quickly and have a longer time period to be dry. And so there's a
longer time period and opportunity for fires to start," Swetnam says

"The spring comes earlier, so the fire season is just longer," Pelley
remarks.

"That's right. The fire season in the last 15 years or so has
increased more than two months over the whole Western U.S. So actually
78 days of average longer fire season in the last 15 years compared to
the previous 15 or 20 years," Swetnam says.

Swetnam says that climate change -- global warming -- has increased
temperatures in the West about one degree and that has caused four
times more fires. Swetnam and his colleagues published those findings
in the journal "Science," and the world's leading researchers on
climate change have endorsed their conclusions.


More on this paper he

Originally published in Science Express on 6 July 2006
Science 18 August 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5789, pp. 940 - 943
DOI: 10.1126/science.1128834


Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire
Activity

A. L. Westerling, H. G. Hidalgo, D. R. Cayan, T. W. Swetnam


http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5789/940

Western United States forest wildfire activity is widely thought to
have increased in recent decades, yet neither the extent of recent
changes nor the degree to which climate may be driving regional
changes in wildfire has been systematically documented. Much of the
public and scientific discussion of changes in western United States
wildfire has focused instead on the effects of 19th- and 20th-century
land-use history. We compiled a comprehensive database of large
wildfires in western United States forests since 1970 and compared it
with hydroclimatic and land-surface data. Here, we show that large
wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s,
with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and
longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in
mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have
relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated
with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring
snowmelt.
....


Click on link above to get the complete paper.

--
Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!
--

The Curse of Tecumseh
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/curse.htm