On Oct 21, 6:34 pm, 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

[ . . . ]

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.

(cut) How much hotter is it now than it was in 1000 A.D. And just
how were
the temperature proxies arrived at. Is he using the discredited
"Mann" hockey
stick? According to the Huang-Pollack borehole measurements,
temperatures were slightly warmer 1000 years ago than they are now.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shaopeng/97GL01846.pdf

According to this study, drought conditions DROPPED in the latter
part of the 20th century.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shaopeng/97GL01846.pdf

Perhaps due to a negative to positive switch in PDO. And now that we
may have switched back from positive to negative, additional drought
in the
southwest US may be expected.

http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-

- A. McIntire