1) Over 500 people died in Paradise, who’s bodies have not yet been recovered.

2) Over 500 people fled Paradise, and now, getting on to weeks later in time, have not heard that hundreds are missing and unaccounted for, and that hundreds of searchers are looking for them in the rubble, with no small amount of danger to the searchers, anxiety to everyone else, and of course expense.

Obviously time needs to go by in this state of chaos, before contacts can be made, numbers of dead vs missing can stabilize. But with every day, and every day after that, and every day after that, the most lost, most destitute, most confused, most disrupted individuals must have some understanding that they need to call somebody and say, “stop looking for my body, I’m here on the phone with you.”

Obviously, we shift over time from believing 2, as it is likely most explanatory (and was very likely when the “missing” number was way over 1,000) to figuring 1 must explain most of the dead. But if that turns out to be wrong, and hundreds and hundreds of people from this village are not phoning in … in a world where there are 700 million phones … well, that would be an interesting phenomenon that needs further study.

As a point of information, the population of Paradise, California before the fire was about 26,000. So the percentage of this subset of humanity that were driven away from their city and have either decided to remain missing, or do not for some reason have the wherewithal to understand that they are among the missing, would be just under 2%. I suppose that is well within the percentage of people in a typical American population who have the ability to be astonishingly clueless. But as day and day and day goes by, one would think other people would notice, notice this person who seems to come from a burned out city in California, in some shelter somewhere, and wonder if they are among the missing.

Alternatively, when a town of 26,000 rather suddenly burns down,and there are not that many roads out of town, and the population is unaccustomed to this sort of thing, about 2% of the people might perish. I’m not sure what percentage I would have guessed a priori. But it sounds about right now.

It starts with California but discusses this as a world wide problem. Has a segment with Michael Mann, author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (recently in upgraded and expanded edition with a chapter on Trump).

Considering the top 20 most destructive California fires from Cal Fire’s database, 6 of those have happened in the last 10 months.

The worse so far is the Tubbs Fire last October, and that was HUGE. Nearly 6,000 structures were burned, 22 people were killed. The sixth on the list is the Carr fire, with just under 1,500 structures burned and six killed as of this writing, but that fire is still burning.

I’ll just add this. There was a moment in time between about 2 and 3 years ago, when it was apparent to me and many others that fires were getting worse. But the data was just coming in. There were studies that stopped their data roughly a year or a year and a half earlier that showed no statistically convincing increase. The delay in data range is normal. You get your data, clean it up, then Reviewer three adds eight months to the publication process, etc. so most studies are one or maybe two years late. Anyway, I was being told over and over again that I was wrong whenever I talked about fires. Much of that came from those who were sufficiently in the game to pretend they were not denying climate change, but who chose to get into the contrarian game despite the huge moral cost of doing so.

Well, we were right. We told you so. Shame.

Eventually, of course, the wildfires will stop. Like the surgeons say, the bleeding always stops. Eventually. One way or another.

As far as I know it is an up north thing, not a city thing. In fact, just the opposite. I used to live in South Minneapolis in a neighborhood where everyone had literally gotten together in a series of meetings and decided that they would always smile at each other and say “hello” when out walking. There were hand-outs for those who had not attended the meetings. They also decided to walk around all the time. This produced a somewhat odd, almost uncomfortable, effect, at first. But in the long run, once people settled into it, it worked out pretty well. It made for a neighborhood that seemed friendly. It seemed like if you needed something – if there was some kind of an emergency – people would be ready and willing to help out.

But up north everyone has this scowl. No smiles, no “hello.” Go north in Minnesota, at least one and a half hours out of the Twin Cities, and stop in at a gas station. Or go to some place to eat. Maybe a bait shop. A hardware store. Anything like that. People will be scowling. All of them.

There will be two kinds of scowlers. One is like this: the scowler sees you coming and stares, and scowls. The other is like this: the scowler avoids looking at anyone, but scowls to themselves. I’ll give you a minute to figure out why there are two kinds scowling, and this is the hint: it depends on who is doing the scowling.

I have a theory about why all the scowling. At the root of it, it is either a kind of guilt or a kind of belligerence that would be better if it was guilt but there is not enough spine to turn a bad attitude into a constructive emotion. And, likely, it is all subconscious.

The reason: many of the Caucasians who live full time up north either come down from earlier settlers, of the late 19th century through around 1950 or so, or they have adopted the culture previously established by those folks even if they can’t trace back to some grandparent or distant great uncle. These original settlers were involved in one or more activities of note that ultimately led to the scowl.

Some of them were involved in displacing or controlling Native Americans in the area. But not many, because that started out long ago and most of them were fly-by-night, Federal officials who came in, harassed the natives, then left.

Some of them were involved in the clear-cutting of all the forest in Minnesota. In fact, many of the ancestors of the deeper-rooted denizens of northern Minnesota come down from loggers. With the exception of a very small number of acres, the entire pine forest was cleared out by lumber contractors over a remarkably short period of time.

Some of them were involved in mining. There were probably a lot more people in lumber during its peak than mining during its peak, but mining was important from the late 19th century right up to the present, while logging came and went as fast as they could clear the entire state of its valuable trees. It will be centuries before all the minerals are extracted from northern Minnesota, because it is harder to do and takes more time.

There are some farmers up north, but farming is harder and less common than elsewhere in the state. (Latter day farmers were involved in the second phase of tree cutting, I mention here for completeness.) There are plenty of people involved in the tourist industry or the cabin industry (the latter being larger) who were not linked to mining or logging in their ancestry. But many of them, as noted, have adopted the local culture, including the logging/mining culture scowl.

Here’s the thing. If you live in a place and an age, like Minnesota right now, where people love the wilderness, revel in it, claim it as theirs, claim it as a good thing, and all that, but your ancestors were responsible for destroying it multiple times over, you might feel a little bad. It has been a long time since the clear cutting. The last big logging operation in Minnesota happened before World War I. There was a lot of restoration of forest after that, after Americans (thought not initially Minnesotans) discovered the idea of conserving forests (an idea that had been invented and deployed centuries earlier by their ancestors, but apparently forgotten). But the culture and reverence for those who tame nature is still very strong here. If, in a group, anyone can credibly claim a direct blood connection to an old logger or miner, they are given extra sway. You see it happen all the time at the local historic sites dedicated to either type of endeavor.

The logging was no small thing. The loggers wanted the white pine. Contracted crews were required to supply 16 foot logs of pine as the bulk of their product, at least 60% white pine and up to 40% red pine. Why the difference? Not any really good reason as far as the wood was concerned. People will tell you they like one or the other better for some reason, but the main reason the logging companies wanted either white or red pine was because it was one of the pines that was not that knotty (because the virgin red and white pines were very tall trees with no lower branches). The reason they wanted white over red is that white pine floated better, and was thus more easily transported down the rivers to the handful of lumber mills. There were other differences as well, but those were the main factors.

Anyway, the loggers cleared the state of its forests, cutting down almost every white pine that was not deformed. There were some white pines they missed by accident, and there was some white pine that conservationists saved. But those attempts at saving the white pine involved violent confrontations. Loggers and logging companies truly believed that they had the god given right to strip the landscape of all of its trees, starting with white and red pine. If you put all the acres of standing white pine that were not logged into one place, it would take up the land covered by an average size park.

After virtually all the white and red pine were cut down, the state caught on fire, and hundreds of people died. This is because the top, branchy parts of the trees were left on the ground, along with the stumps and whatever non-pines got wiped out during this process. That material, the slash, would easily catch on fire and entire towns full of people burned up with the slash. In some cases, a third of the people in a given town were permently displaced by fires that burned every single home to the ground, and a third of those “displaced” were actually burned to death. It happened again and again, always caused by the logging practices which were known to be dangerous, and every time it happened, people were surprised.

If you were part of of the group that was responsible for burning down these towns and burning these people to death, you might not look at other humans with a normal face. You might have some kind of scowl or some other look going.

Several thousand men spread out across a vast wilderness and utterly destroyed it in the most irresponsible way possible. One of the “great moments” of logging in Minnesota was the year the loggers cut the most trees ever cut in one year by any group of people, but because of the rainfall patterns that year, could get very few of them to market. Putting this a different way, a double-digit percentage of the state’s standing white and red pine trees were cut down all at once and then left to rot. If you are part of the group that did that, or their descendants, you might not want to look people straight in the eye with a normal face. You might have to perpetually scowl.

The mining is similar, but different. The early mining in Minnesota was underground, shaft mining. I’m pretty sure the miners were pretty hard workers who produced a necessary product that, because of the constraints of the method they used to acquire it, was less damaging to the landscape. But eventually the mining industry discovered that a different kind of ore – one that was much less pure but much cheaper to process — could be mined right off the surface over a large area of the northeastern part of the state. So, they proceeded to strip mine the wilderness just denuded of its forest. They don’t call it strip mining, for some reason, but that is what it is. It is still going on to varying degrees. In this case, the Minnesota scowl may arise from something other than personal guilt of killing hundreds of millions of stately organisms (and a couple thousand people) with reckless abandon, ignoring time honored sustainable methods developed centuries earlier in Europe (where these logger same from). Rather, it might include a large part of chagrin. The embarrassment of having the proverbial wool pulled over your eyes, again and again, by the mining companies, must be tough to take. Scowlworthy.

So, what about the two kinds of scowls? The eye-contact stare-scowl vs. the quiet brooding self-scowl?

The former is the one you get from people who actually live in the north. They either grew up here, or, as is the case with many, moved here from “The Cities” and then fell in line with the local culture.

The others are the visitors, the tourists, the cabin people, those passing through, me and my family, whatever. We all just scowl because if you smile and say hello the locals probably say “hey” back, but then they just stare harder and, if you are really unlucky, say something you don’t want to hear. Like, tell you a story about some guy who drove around in an open Jeep Wrangler for a week with a five dollar bill taped to the rear view mirror to prove that everyone up north is not a criminal, like down in “The Cities,” or some similar yahooish yarn.

So we just keep our heads down and scowl protectively.

As of last report, there are 15 known dead and 150 or more missing. Hopefully they are only virtually and not actually missing; there is a lot of confusion and communication resources are in many cases down.

Wild fires are tricky in more ways then one. It is easy to get caught in one (I’ve manage that myself), and it is hard to predict or fully understand why some years have more than others. There has been a long term trend nationally towards fewer wild fires, for several reasons, most of which have to do with human activities. The most significant part of that trend is that humans caused many, huge, often deadly wild fires in the past. The worst wildfire ever in Minnesota, in terms of Death toll, was during World War I and had mainly to do with farming and railroads being a bad mix. Cutting lots of land to farm provides the fuel, and in those days, railroads were travelling tinderboxes sparking fires everywhere they went.

But that all got under control partly because the timber industry finished cutting down much of America’s forests, and because practices changed.

But over recent decades there has been yet another increase in fires. Much of that increase is likely due to climate change. Human caused changes in rainfall patterns have made for concentrations of dry fuel. I’m not sure about the role of winds in the current situation in California vis-a-vis global warming. And there are other factors.

The public conversation is full of naysaying, mainly fueled by the great unpredictability of fires and the messiness of the data, not the least of which includes the uncritical conflation of fire data from a century ago with recent observations.

Climate Signals has a page on California fires, and they provided the graphic at the top of this post.

The graphic avoids the earlier fires that happened for very different reasons by starting in the Depression when those shenanigans were attenuated by lack of economic activity, and work programs had started up that involved caring for rather than systematically destroying all the forests. Also, while there were plenty of big fires in the West in those days, not so much in California. For t he most part, these fires ahve a strong global warming signal.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, many of the profound changes we’ve seen in weather patterns, especially with respect to storms and rainfall, seem to have happened around 1980, with these changes intensifying in recent years. This graphic shows that signal as well.

Stay tuned and if you are in California near these fires, stay safe!

Earth

As humans release greenhouse gas pollutants (mainly CO2) into the atmosphere, the surface of the Earth, and the top 2000 meters of the ocean, heat up. But some of the CO2 is absorbed into plant tissues and soil, as well as in the ocean or other standing water. Historically, about 30% of the extra CO2 is absorbed into the ocean, and another 30% converted into (mainly) plant tissue. We hope that enough CO2 is absorbed that the effects of greenhouse gas pollution is attenuated, at least a little. Unfortunately, there are two things that can go wrong. First, these “Carbon sinks” — places where the CO2 is either stored or converted into Carbon-based tissue, could stop working. Second, some of these Carbon sinks could reverse course and start releasing, rather than absorbing, Carbon.

The CO2 released in the atmosphere during any given time period starts a process of warming that takes years to finish. We know how much CO2 we have added to the atmosphere (we went from the mid 200’s ppm, parts per million, before this all started to 400ppm). We know how much we are currently releasing and we can estimate how much we will be releasing in coming years. Putting this all together with some very fancy physics and math, we can estimate the amount of surface warming over coming years. This calculation includes the Carbon sinks. If the Carbon sinks stop sinking Carbon, or worse, start releasing previously trapped Carbon, then future warming (next year, next decade, over the next century) will be greater than previously expected.

And there is now evidence that this is happening.

Andy Skuce has written up two pieces, here and here, that explain this. It is also written up here, and the original research is here.

This research suggests that some natural Carbon sinks are slowing down in the amount of Carbon they take in, or perhaps switching to releasing Carbon.

The problem is actually very simple to understand. In order for CO2 to be converted to O2 (free oxygen) and some combination of C and other elements (to make plant tissue), the other elements have to be available in sufficient quantity. For many terrestrial ecosystems, CO2 was a limiting factor (keeping water and sunlight out of the picture or constant). So, adding CO2 means more plant growth. But at some point, the other elements that are required to make plant tissue, such as Nitrogen and Phosphorous (otherwise known as fertilizer) are insufficient in abundance to allow plants to use that CO2. This would reduce or flatten out the amount of extra CO2 that can be trapped in solid form. At this point, the terrestrial biomass starts to release, rather than absorb, CO2.

Why would the terrestrial Carbon sink not simply stop absorbing Carbon, and start to release it? Well, because I as fibbing a little when I said this is simple. The more realistic version of the system has Carbon going in and out of the different parts of the system (atmosphere, ocean water, plant tissue, etc.). With warming temperatures, we expect the release of Carbon from terrestrial systems to increase in rate. So, before nutrient limitation is released, there is Carbon going in and Carbon going out, but on average, mostly going in. With Nutrient limitation on the system, when there isn’t enough Nitrogen or Phosphorus to match up with the CO2, the release continues while the absorption stops. But because of warming, the release not only continues, but increases. So, in coming decades, the net effect is that parts of the terrestrial ecosystem contributes to atmospheric CO2.

At present, climate scientists (mainly in the context of the IPCC) have estimates of future warming that involve estimates of how much CO2 we add to the atmosphere. All the known factors have been taken into account, including the Carbon cycle (which includes Carbon moving between the atmosphere, the ocean, and the plant and soil system at the surface. This research indicates that the numbers have to be changed to account for nutrient saturation.

This graph shows how it works. The black line is the increase in plant growth as originally modeled under a “high-emissions” scenario. This shows a 63% increase in plant growth by the end of the century owing to CO2 fertilization. The red line indicates the amount of extra plant growth that would actually happen due to limitations of Nitrogen. The blue lie indicates the amount of plant growth due to the limitation of Phosphorus. These are 29% and 20%, respectively.

If we include the increase in release of Carbon due to warming conditions (basically, more and faster rotting of dead plant tissue), the existing models produce the black line in the graph below. There is still an increase in plant growth, and the plant-based Carbon sink is still working. If limitations on nitrogen and phosphorus are considered, we get the red and blue lines.

This amounts, approximately, to adding about 14 years of human greenhouse gas pollution (at the current rate) to the time period under consideration (from now to 2100).

So that’s the news when it comes to climate change and the Earth. But what about the wind?

Wind

No new research here, just an observation. Where does wind really matter? Where do you really feel the wind? Wind is the expression of the large scale climate system (modified by local conditions) which is in turn the result of the spinning of the Earth and the heating of the planet unevenly by the sun, like it does. A valid rule of thumb is more heat, more wind, but that is a gross oversimplification. At a more complex level, more heat equals more wind doing different things in different places than usual, and also more water vapor in the air, and all this has to do with those times and places where we really feel the wind the most: Storms.

Tenney Naumer (of Climate Change: The Next Generation fame) came across an amazing graphic of the Earth, looking mainly at the Pacific, showing some wind.

The graphic is from here, and I added the “Storm World” just for fun. Except it isn’t really fun. The date of this graphic is, I think, July 5th or 6th.

Your homework assignment is to identify the named tropical storms shown in the graphic.

Fire

A few years ago there were some big fires. Australia burned, there were fires in California, Texas, Arizona, various parts of Canada, etc. Climate change and fire experts noted that there is an increase in fires because of global warming, but others argued that there was no significant increase, and we had had periods of abundant fires in the past. In truth, there was evidence of an increase, though maybe not very convincing to some. Also, past inclement conditions are a thing … recent global warming did not invent bad weather or extensive wildfires. But some of those past periods, like the 1930s in the US, are not evidence against current climate change, but rather, evidence of what to expect with climate change. Those periods are only barely as severe as the present state, are usually regional and not global, happened after greenhouse gas pollution was very much a thing and between periods of suppression of warming by aerosols (from volcanoes or industrial pollution). So they matter, but not because they disprove climate change (they don’t) but rather because these past events are windows into the future. But I digress.

The point is, a few years ago, those who are rightfully alarmed about climate change were pointing out the problem of increased wild fires referring mainly to research indicating a dramatic increase in wildfire potential, along with some evidence of actual increased wildfires. And others argued that until there were a lot more flames, there was not a problem.

Well, now we have the flames.

Yesterday (anecdote warning, this is not data) I went outside to check the mail and was assailed by a bank of smoke moving through my neighborhood. It smelled really bad. Assuming there was a house on fire, I dashed back into the house to grab my cell phone, in case I had to dial 911. Returning outside, I walked around and did not see anything obvious burning, but the smoke was coming in from the north. That ruled out a burning oil tank train (the tracks are from the south) and the local munitions dump on fire (that is to the west). But I still couldn’t see where the smoke was coming from. So, I hopped in the car and drove north a couple of blocks, and by the time I got to the nearby Interstate, it became clear that the smoke was simply everywhere, pretty uniformly.

I then guessed at the cause, and returned to my computer where I checked the Wundermap and some other sources. Yup: it was Canada and Alaska, thousands of miles away, pretty much on fire. Here are two graphics to illustrate this.

From the Wundermap:

And from here:

Ice

Glacial ice is melting, and it is melting faster every year. Earlier in the year we learned that Alaska (on fire, see above) has been losing mountain glacier and ice sheet water at an alarming rate. Now, we are seeing an amazing spike in melting on the surface of Greenland. From here:

The graph is of ice melt extent so far this year. The blue dotted line is the average over recent decades as in dicated. The grey area is 2 standard deviations around that average. The vast majority of observations (nearly 100%) would be in that grey area. The red line is this year. This is what you call unprecedented melting.

Why is this melting happening? Because Greenland is unusually warm, but as expected under global warming. Some of this melted ice will refreeze in the winter. Much of it, however, is going into the sea.

Record High Temperatures Being Shattered

Hot Whopper puts this in some context and adds some other sources, here.

The Weather Channel has this map of current western heat alerts:

More on the western heat wave here at Weather Underground.

The extreme heat has even surged north into Canada. Cranbrook, in far southeast British Columbia at an elevation of about 3,000 feet, set a new all-time record high of 98 degrees (36.8 degrees Celsius) Sunday, according to The Weather Network.

Even Revelstoke, British Columbia – 130 miles north of the U.S. border, about 1,500 feet above sea level and better known for skiing – reached an amazing 103 degrees (39.5 degrees Celsius) Sunday.

Great Britain is sweltering “on the hottest July day on record,” according to Jessica Elgot at the Guardian.

As temperatures reached 36.7 °C at Heathrow, commuters were facing difficult journeys on the London Underground. One platform at Kings Cross underground station recorded 33 °C however the temperature on tubes is believed to be even hotter.

Charlotte Dalen, originally from Norway but now living in London, said: “It was pretty warm and very smelly. People were waving pamphlets to keep cool but it didn’t look like it was helping.”

The map at the top of the post of current heat anomaly estimates across the globe is from Climate Reanalyser.

An Unprecedented Tropical Cyclone

Raquel is a Pacific Tropical Cyclone (hurricane) which is the earliest to form in the region (The “Queensland Zone” as tracked by the Australian meteorologists) in recorded history. From the Bulletin:

TROPICAL Cyclone Raquel has formed in the south-west Pacific near the Solomon Islands, triggering the earliest cyclone warning on record issued for the Queensland zone.

“Certainly it’s a unique scenario,” Jess Carey, a spokesman from the bureau’s Queensland office, said. “Since we’ve been tracking cyclones with satellite-based technology, we haven’t seen one in July.”

The storm became a category 1 cyclone early on Wednesday morning and had a central pressure of 999 hPa about 410 km north of the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara as of just before 5am, AEST, the Bureau of Meteorology said. It is forecast to strengthen to a category 2 system on Thursday.

“The cyclone is moving southwest at about 16 km per hour and should gradually intensify over the next 24 hours as it approaches the Solomon Islands,” the bureau said in a statement. “The system will remain very far offshore and does not pose a threat to the Queensland coast.”

The official cyclone season runs from November 1-April 30. Any cyclone after May or before October is considered unusual.

Wildfires Gone Wild

Over the last several days and continuing, there have been extensive and unprecedented fires in the west as well. Drought in California has increased fire danger, and now things are starting to burn. This year the fires started earlier, with one of the largest fires having burned during a normally low-fire month, February. Also, fires are burning where they are normally rare. According to Will Greenberg at the Washington Post..

Cal Fire has already responded to 1,000 more incidents this year than they see on average annually. The agency reached that same landmark last year as well — but in September.

By the end of June, officials had fought nearly 3,200 fires.

In total, Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service have responded to fires stretching over 65,755 acres so far this year.

And this is just the beginning for California’s 2015 wildfire season.

Meanwhile, in Washington, where it has been dry and hot, hundreds have been forced to flee from some amazing wildfires. From the Guardian:

The wildfires hit parts of central and eastern Washington state over the weekend as the state is struggling with a severe drought. Mountain snowpack is at extremely low levels, and about one-fifth of the state’s rivers and streams are at record low levels.

Eastern Washington has been experiencing temperatures into the 100s, and last week Washington governor Jay Inslee issued an emergency proclamation that allows state resources to quickly be brought in to respond to wildfires.

In Alaska,

The number of Alaska’s active wildfires is literally off the charts, according to a map recently released by the state’s Division of Forestry.

Over 700 fires have burned so far this summer, the most in the state’s history, and that number is only expected to get bigger as the state is experiencing higher temperatures, lower humidity and more lightning storms than usual, said Kale Casey, a public information officer for the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, which serves as a focal point for state agencies involved in wildland fire management and suppression.

Here’s a map of current Alaskan fires:

California Drought Still A Drought

And, of course, from the US Drought Monitor …

The great cycle of climate change. Anthropogenic Global Warming has resulted in a relatively increased warming of the poles, which changes the dynamic of jet streams forming thus causing quasi-ressonant (stuck in place) Rossby Waves (curvy slow moving jet streams) which then fuels Weather Whiplash (or Weather Weirding if you prefer) which at the moment is causing unprecedented wild fires especially in Western Canada and Siberia, which causes a darkening of glacial surfaces in Greenland (Dark Snow) which decreases albedo which then contributes to both Arctic Amplification and Global Warming.

It’s happening now at your local planet.

Here’s some information about the fires, some older, some newer:

<li><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/18/us/washington-wildfires/index.html?hpt=hp_t2"><strong>Wildfires drive residents from homes in Washington state and Canada</strong></a></li>


<li><a href="http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/polar-jet-stream-wrecked-by-climate-change-fuels-unprecedented-wildfires-over-canada-and-siberia/"><strong>Polar Jet Stream Wrecked By Climate Change Fuels Unprecedented Wildfires Over Canada and Siberia</strong></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/17/forest-fires-in-canada-confirm-predictions-of-unprecedented-wildfire-activity/"><strong>Forest fires in Canada confirm predictions of ‘unprecedented’ wildfire activity</strong></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/siberian-forest-wildfires-triple-within-three-days/25398654.html"><strong>Siberian Forest Wildfires Triple Within Three Days</strong></a></li>

Photo from here.

Global warming causes more rain and more frequent and more severe storm lines. More rain causes more plant growth in otherwise arid regions, and severe storms knock a lot of that vegetation down. This causes more light to get to the ground, so “ladder” vegetation, which enhances fire spread, increases, and the fallen branches add to the fuel that has already been increased by the increased rainfall.

Global warming causes drought, when it isn’t busy causing rain. So, areas with increased amounts of fuel that has been configured to increase fire intensity and spreadability become tinder-rich. Along with the drought comes increased spring and summer temperatures, also caused by global warming and this dries out the vegetation making it much more likely for fires to start, grow quickly, spread, and become large.

We’ve known this for some time, and there is all sorts of evidence to back up the assertion that global warming is the reason for the fire seasons on steroids effect we are seeing now (links to some of this are provided below).

So, yes.

James West has written a very thorough piece demonstrating all these connections, and more, in Mother Jones: How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse.

And here’s some backup information for you:

<li><a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060710084004.htm">More Large Forest Fires Linked To Climate Change</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/full/nature09763.html">Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes</a></li>


<li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/04/climate-change-america-wildfire-season?CMP=twt_gu">Climate change causing US wildfire season to last longer, Congress told</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/ES11-00345.1">Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity</a></li>

<li><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051000/abstract">Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes</a></li>


<li><a href="https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/1036/record-high-temperatures-far-outpace-record-lows-across-us">RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES FAR OUTPACE RECORD LOWS ACROSS U.S.</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x09-153#.Ubnq5fb7289">Potential changes in monthly fire risk in the eastern Canadian boreal forest under future climate change</a></li>

More on Climate Change here.

Photo Credit: jonathanpercy via Compfight cc