Spike in wildfires more likely in a warming world

The co-author of a recent study discussing the effect of climate change on western wildfires goes on to say, “Small temperature increases, less than 1 degree Fahrenheit, can lead to huge amounts of burning”.

Wildfire history over the past 2,000 years in Colorado’s mountains indicates that large fires will continue to increase in a warming climate, according to results of a new study.

The researchers also said that global warming may be bringing alterations and ushering in an era of high-elevation wildfires that have not been seen in over 1,000 years.

The researchers believe that this data recovery provides a new way of interpreting these processes in the present.

Calder and his colleagues’ research findings were recently published and made available to the public by the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a major scientific journal.

We maybe should have to worry about in terms of the aftermath of global warming and climate change. Ever since the mid 1980’s, the US has experienced some of the most extensive wildfires in history, such as Yellowstone National Park fires of 1988.

The research checked out how usually massive areas burned up to now 2,000 years.

The examined samples have uncovered that during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), which was between 1,100-1,200 years ago, wildfires burned around 83% of the area within just one century.

Tracing the wildfire evidence in the last 2,000 years, the areas burnt down by large wildfires seemed to happen only a few times. In an interview with Phys.Org, Calder said that the evidence suggests that it might have been quite uncommon to see wildfires of the magnitude the American West is experiencing right now in periods of the past. Results show that other than the 20th century, the only time when fires burned substantially more area was during the MWP. Meanwhile, temperatures across the Rockies have increased by around 1.25 degrees since 2000, which may have set the stage for the kinds of devastating forest fires that have been causing so much strife and destruction lately.

“Utilizing Yellowstone hearth historical past as a baseline for comparability, our minimal estimate of fifty % of Mount Zirkel websites burned inside a century firstly of the MWP exceeds any century-scale estimate of Yellowstone burning for the previous 750 years”, the scientists write of their paper.

Overall, about 50 percent of the sites the researchers studied burned per century.

“The large increase in the number of sites burned by fires during the MWP highlights the risk that large portions of individual landscapes may burn as the climate continues to warm today”, the scientists concluded.

Shuman’s analysis on forest dynamics can be funded by NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology.