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Climate Change Doubled the Size of Forest Fires In Western US, Says Study (time.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: Man-made climate change has doubled the total area burned by forest fires in the Western U.S. in the past three decades, according to new research. Damage from forest fires has risen dramatically in recent decades, with the total acres burned in the U.S. rising from 2.9 million in 1985 to 10.1 million in 2015, according to National Interagency Fire Center data. Suppression costs paid by the federal government now top $2 billion. Now a new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that a significant portion of the increase in land burned by forest fires can be attributed to man-made climate change. Other factors are also at play, including natural climate shifts and a change in how humans use land, but man-made climate change has had the biggest impact. That trend will likely continue as temperatures keep rising, researchers said. Climate change contributes to forest fires in a number of ways. Fires kill off trees and other plants that eventually dry and act as the fuel to feed massive wildfires. Global warming also increases the likelihood of the dry, warm weather in which wildfires can thrive. Average temperatures in the Western U.S. rose by 2.5 degree Fahrenheit since 1970, outpacing temperature rise elsewhere on the globe, according to the research.
The only man made problem here is the fact we've stopped forest fires in the first place. They are worse because of all the underbrush that didn't burn in the first place.
Climate change has nothing to do with it, except it got the author a new grant.
There's also been a big change in forest management practices during that time. How were those factored in?
Could have had a discussion without trump or hillary but you've already ruined it.
Anyways, if I wasn't so busy out dicking bimbos...... I'd just grab climate change by the pussy.
Here's the raw data, the article itself is behind a paywall. Choosing 2015 is kind of cherry-picking for the headline, since in 2014 there were only 3,5 million acres burned.
There's a fairly strong correlation between temperature and wildfires, so, this finding seems reasonable.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Firefighting also increases forest fire size. Attacking nearly every fire allows flammable materials to collect, we end up trading a series of small fires for a very large conflagration when an area eventually burns.
... as a scuba diver ... recovering and hooking up buckets helicopters dropped (if a lift doesn't feel right its a safety precaution, quick detach cable and try again) into a lake being used as a water source. Take that myth busters, scuba diver in a tree at a forest fire, plausible. :-)
There is some debate about being less aggressive and to allow a process closer to natural, but development and the protection of structures complicates things.
So man made causes, those of a climate change variety and others are both at work. It would be interesting to see how they separate the two. Plus increased human activity in an area also increases fire risks, from unsupervised campfires to bad mufflers on dirt bikes and atvs. Its not as simple as saying there was an increase from 3M to 10M acres over the last 30 years. I've witness a lot of increased development and increased human activity in southern california hills that are prone to wild fires.
I also worked a wild fire once
Uhm, I think it's the fires that cause the warming, not vice versa.
[No whooshies, please!]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Average temperatures in the Western U.S. rose by 2.5 degree Fahrenheit since 1970, outpacing temperature rise elsewhere on the globe, according to the research.
Western North America was cooler than normal for the period running from about 1949 to 1972, IIRC (I used to work in a lab that studied past climates using 13C from trees and 18O from ice cores). You could just as easily flip it and say 1970 was 2 or 3 degrees cooler than 1940.
I'll put this one on the article writer rather than the scientists, but - sloppy work like this just give the denialists more ammunition to keep ignoring actual valid data. Cooking the books in an attempt to provoke a stronger reaction ends up back-firing, more often than not.
#DeleteChrome
It's the case in Australia if you believe this document from some well respected government scientific institutions (see the second page under Recent Trends)
http://www.climateinstitute.or...
I can't speak for other countries.
It's turtles all the way down.
Which should we blame, poor land management or climate change? Hmmm, climate change is popular, lets go with that.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
rapid increase in global population=more co2=climate change kill 1/2 the population=fighting climate change
am i doing it right?
No. People's biological processes are part of a short-term closed loop. The CO2 they exhale has been recently extracted from the atmosphere by plants (and maybe went through an animal or a few). If you don't understand that, your opinion is entirely spurious. See carbon cycle and Dunning-Kruger effect.
Stephan
Energy in has to equal energy out. Plants take in CO2 and H2O, and use sunlight to convert it to (C6H10O5)n - cellulose. Energy from sunlight gets converted into energy stored in cellulose. That energy is released during fires. So for global warming to be causing a two-fold increase in forest fires, it must first be causing a two-fold increase in the creation of cellulose - growth of plant matter Any increase in fires without a corresponding increase in the creation of plant matter is just a transient blip in the data.
By conservation of energy, the long-term average of plant matter destroyed by forest fires has to be proportional to the long-term average rate of plant growth. But the people trying to blame these things on global warming are also usually the same ones decrying deforestation. The first implies an increase in energy storage by plants, the latter implies a decrease in energy storage by plants. These two assertions are self-contradictory. So in all likelihood, this is nothing more than a transient spike in the data caused by too-aggressive firefighting of brush and forest fires during the last century.
Ah, but if you look closely you'll notice that the heat only starts when we start measuring it with satellites. Conclusion: Satellites cause global warming, we have to stop funding NASA. If we can't measure it, it doesn't happen.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What if global warming is actually saving us from the next ice age. What if humans liberating a lot of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere is "Gaia"'s way to liberate itself from an ice ages cycle?
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
The Obama administration has already used political imprisonment in two well-publicized cases. Given her nasty personality, in a Hillary administration the number is likely to skyrocket.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The fact that the argument keeps changing should tell anyone everything they need to know.
Not to mention we're still in a cold period.
And the notion that there's some global temperature that climate is "supposed to be' is patently unscientific and ignorant of history.
The data shows we SHOULD be in a cold phase but the Earth has been warming rapidly compared to the last 10,000 years. The last time the average temperature rose 1c rapidly it took 900 years. Since the Industrial Revolution( roughly 1850s) the average temperature has risen a bit over 1C.
You can insist that given the great complexity of the Earth's ecosystem, scientists could not possibly know what will happen. They can theorize about weather change and some are right and some are wrong. But there is no doubt that the average temperature is rising and some areas close to the equator will start to be come uninhabitable in 20-30 years.
http://xkcd.com/1732/
Here's the main journal article xkcd referenced for that comic.
You've noted, in different words, that the trend since around 1900 is unprecedented in the entire time frame of the temperature reconstruction, last 20k years or more. You are absolutely correct, the journal article re-confirms that the graph trend from 1900 onward is unlike anything in the 20,000 years prior in the entire dataset.
If you read closer though, there is another potential explanation beyond human CO2 emissions that must also be accounted for. If you check the article, you will find that the data set from 1900 backwards is a DIFFERENT data set than the one graphed from 1900 forwards. The data graphed prior to 1900 is reconstructed from proxy sources, the data graphed after 1900 is the instrumental record.
When temperatures averaged over 100+ years, it's tough to average the tail end last 100 years well so using the instrumental record isn't wrong. Drawing conclusions SOLELY on the divergence that happens at 1900 though is to say the least, nuanced. Plainly, the most important and probable factor that must first be thoroughly ruled out is that the change in data sets is having an impact. There's a possibility that thermometers measure temperature more accurately than proxy records that are statistically analyzed and averaged over hundreds or thousands of years.
Sure. A higher temperature has nothing to do with the chance on wildfires. Everyone knows that!
Oh, yes. I forgot. You don't 'believe' that average temperature has risen by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit...
Compared to:
- Something like an order-of-magnitude increase in fuel load, due primarily to environmentalist driven legal action.
- Injunctions against cutting fire lines or re-clearing existing ones.
- Substantial delays in reporting the start of wildfires, due to similar activity - closing roads, limiting access, stopping logging. (Hint: Loggers are one of the main sources of reports of wildfire starts in remote places. They may be the only people working outdoors in a particular valley, and they have a lot of incentive to avoid becoming trapped in a forest fire, or lose both their livelihood's raw material and their tools.)
- Substantial interference with access for firefighting equipment and personnel - again by such things as road closures and road maintenance interference. You can't build much of a fire engine on a Jeep or other 4x4 chassis, and when that's all you can GET to the fire line you have a problem establishing containment before things get out of hand.
There are thousands of wildfires every year. In the absence of human activity they get started by lightning. The issue isn't the chance they get started. It's how they spread and what it takes to put them out. The change in that is well documented, and it's all a matter of how the management of forests and fires has changed, mainly thanks to environmental legislation, regulation, and environmentalist-driven legal activity. A couple degrees change in the global average temperature, even if it exists, is buried in weather-noise compared to these interventions.
But how convenient: First turn the continents' forests and planes into tinderboxes. Then, when they burn up (destroying more homes and killing more firefighters), deflect the blame from your own groups' activities onto "global warming", and use it for MORE interventions against your political opposition.
Government has been said to be a disease masquerading as its own cure. It seems to me that, with this pronouncement, the environmental movement had graduated to the same status.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way