An unusually early start to the year’s fire season, combined with continuing dry weather conditions, has given the fires time to grow, said University of Maryland-College Park researcher Eric Kasischke.
The fire ecologist has been studying Alaska wildfires for more than 20 years, and most summers, he treks to the Tok and Fairbanks areas for his research. This season, Kasischke stayed home (a decision made before the fires started); but even from his East coast office, he has been following Alaska fire stats as passionately as a baseball fan following a favorite team.
“What’s unusual this year is that you’re having so many large early season fires,” Kasischke said earlier this week. “There has never been a year in the past 10 when you’ve seen this much burn so early in the fire season.”
With July wildfires already consuming forest at a rate between 60,000 and 180,000 acres per day, Kasischke said, it’s a conservative guess they will continue to grow by at least 100,000 acres per day. That means Alaska could hit the 3-million-acre mark by as early as the end of this week. If the total surpasses the 3.2 million acres burned in 1990, that would make this the third largest fire season on record.
Read the rest at Alaska Science Outreach.
“Talk to climatologist and they’ll tell you something happened around 1976. Since then, glaciers have been melting more quickly, El Nios have happened more frequently, and Alaska, Northwest Canada and Siberia have become five degrees warmer.”
Yeah, something happened around 1976. The 30 year cooling period ended so it’s been getting warmer. Duh. Also ask the climatologist whether it’s been getting warmer since the Little Ice Age ended about a hundred years ago. Guess what happens to temperatures when a cold spell ends?
Then ask the climatologist if half the recent warming happened before 1945. Most of the carbon dioxide from petroleum was produced after that date. Kind of hard for that CO2 to have produced warming before 1945.
Alaska, British Columbia, Washington right through to California… last year was nasty, and this year promises to be much worse.
Already, they’re predicting fires of the severity seen last year in the (typically dry) BC interior – down in the rainforest that is the BC south coast. I’m scared to think what the interior will be like…
There is at least one study of how much more burning happened when the original prairie was still in North America. I can’t find it at the moment. Anyone have it, or any studies of how much forest burned in the past?
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…into places they shouldn’t go — and then gets upset when things change. For example, the idio…, er, people who build homes on barrier islands, in flood plains, next to rivers, or in the pristine wilderness get upset when nature retaliates. What’s worse, everybody who moves there wants to be the LAST person there, so that nothing changes from the reason they bought in.
There are several studies that confirm the natural destruction — and then rebuilding — has been ongoing for millennia. I remember reading them, but I can’t Googletm them either. So I agree with you, SEWilco, in the past things (like fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, or other weather ) did the same thing, and on a scale that was similar if not greater than what’s happening now.
jon