Global Warming is Obviously Real...

[Aubs]

I'll let you guys provide the commentary.

http://www.summitdaily.com/article/2...NEWS/108180051

Six years ago, climate scientist Anthony Westerling began obsessively poring over the meticulously detailed invoices that U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service land managers use to itemize firefighting expenses.

"These things will have 170-plus fields," says Westerling - including information on when a fire was first reported, when firefighters finally controlled it, and how many acres were burned. Westerling, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (which also studies climate and earth sciences) in La Jolla, Calif., didn't aspire to be an accountant, nor was he searching for fraud in government spending. He was hoping to answer a question that had not been seriously asked before: How do rising global temperatures affect wildfire behavior?

Along with fellow researchers in La Jolla and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Westerling wove the information in the invoices together with data from streamflow gauges, soil moisture measures, and temperature and precipitation records to form a comprehensive picture of the driving forces behind the West's fires.

The group will present its findings in the journal Science next month; a preliminary article appeared in the July 6 issue of Science Express. The basic conclusion may not startle: Large forest fires increased beginning in the mid-1980s - particularly in the Northern Rockies, the Sierra Nevada and the southern Cascades - and the changes closely correlated with an increase in spring and summer temperatures during the same time period.

But some of the nuances are surprising. Westerling and his colleagues found that a delicate "tipping point" exists, particularly in forests in the Northern Rockies and Northern California. When snowpack melts earlier in the spring - even just a few days sooner - the severity of the fire season intensifies greatly. "It didn't take a very big temperature increase (to) switch from very few fires to a lot of fires," says Westerling. As spring and summer temperatures gradually increased, "You were getting closer and closer to this tipping point, so that the (climate) variability from year to year just pushes you over it easily."

Westerling grew up in Los Angeles but vacationed at a family cabin on the east side of the Sierra, and later lived abroad in places like Saudi Arabia, China and Brazil.

He returned to California to get his Ph.D., and in 2000, he went to work at Scripps. That year proved to be a banner one for fire, and that's when Westerling began looking more closely at the relationship between climate and fire.

Because of the wide variability in fire regimes throughout the West - from ponderosa forests in the Southwest to chaparral in Southern California to lodgepole pine and spruce-fir forests in the Northern Rockies - long-term trends can be hard to pick out from the year-to-year "noise." That was precisely the value of Westerling's research: Zooming out to look at the entire region helped bring the phenomenon into relief.

Usually, blame for the bigger and more frequent fires of the past 20 years is ascribed to the federal government's aggressive firefighting policies, which have left a lot of dead and small-diameter trees in Western forests ready to burn. Westerling's research suggests that rising temperatures, not land-management practices, may play a greater role in driving forest fires.

But, he writes, if warming is the main driver of increased fire activity, "ecological restoration and fuels management alone will not be sufficient to reverse current wildfire trends." Scientists and planners must also plug global climate change into their equations.



BOX:

Name: Tony Westerling

Vocation: Climate scientist

Age: 41

Home Base: Merced, California

Known For: Crunching data to get a clearer picture of how temperature drives forest fires throughout the West

He Says: "I think there was a tendency to think that the overwhelming factor (driving forest fires) was short-term weather. There's this idea that drought matters, and it does. But it's taking time and a lot of research to show that climate plays a big role as well."

[deserth3]

The docs I used to work for had a medicle term that applys real well here. FOS!

Fact 1800's and earlier the earth was slowly comming out of an Ice age. In the mid 1800's an astroid or something hit Siberia. That sent us into a "mini ice age". Now these yahoo's look at numbers and say we are having global warming.
Maybe we are... Fact is they don't know how warm the earth is supposed to be.
Intensity of forest fires increases in 1980's.... Here again they don't look at the facts.
In ancient times to when the white man came the American Indian used to manage the forest by doing controled burns. (What a concept). Two of the reasons for this are; It made hunting easier, and it cleared out the underbrush which has been proven to intesify a forest fire. Whic wouuld be a bad thing if all you can do is run away from a fire. American Indians didn't get horses until the white man started showing up.

From the late 1800's to about 1946. The west is pretty much empty. Nature takes care of the forests. But after WWII the Americans prosper and spread. Some naturalists see forest fires and decide that a burning forest is not natural. So we using our supperior intelect start sending fire fighters in to stop the fires.
The undregrowth becomes thick has years to clog the forests. Things become dry. In the 1980 forest fires become worse. In the late 90's the forest service finaly figure out that the underbrush doesn't halp matters. Why? Because the forest that burned several years ago and doesn't have much underbrush doesn't burn as fierce as the forest that has more underbrush. So that's why they let Yellowstoone burn several years ago. Guess what, the forests are in better shape along with the wildlife.
It has been known for manay years that cities are warmer than the country, forest, open land with no concrete. Now it's the year 2000 and something. Americans are doing really well. Something new occurs. Urban sprawl. Tempurature goes up in these areas. Not as bad as the city but it still occurs. So some scientist says we have global warming.
Why? Because the forest fires have gotten worse. Huricanes are getting worse. Gee they didn't say much when the predictions for this year have been lowered and the early promised hurricanes didn't arrive.

I think I've ranted enough. Global warming? posibly, Probubly... Have they given any reasonable choices? I'm still waiting.

[f5fstop]

And, Europe had one of their coldest winters on record last year; now they are having one of their warmist summers.
Like one scientiest on Fox News said one day, we are headed toward another ice age, and prior to that we will have a very hot spell. (The hot spell causes heavy clouds, which in turn will turn the earth colder, so he said.) Possibly, man (and woman), will make this happen a few hundred years sooner, but it will happen anyway.

[deserth3]

f5fstop; Now that I can believe. Things change and the earth grows in cycles.

[Aubs]

I always find it interesting if you extrapolate from ice core data:

It would be a little colder than it is today. Maybe devastatingly cold, if their .5C difference makes any effect.

The scale on this chart makes things look extremely dire. But it's only 1C.

[31_bandits]

i remember in grade school, probably 20 years ago or so, i got my first panic-thing about how the world was going to end, new york and LA were going to go underwater, blah blah blah. And soon.

I went home and asked my dad about it, and he produced news clippings showing discussion of global cooling and how the world was going to end, blah blah blah.

i think the lesson he hoped to teach a young man was what the artist "Beck" once phrased as

"don't believe everything that you read or you'll get a parking violation and a stain on your sleeve"

[31_bandits]

i just think its a shame that so much misinformation, probably from both sides, is spouted out here and there.

it makes it hard for a normal taxpaying chap like me to really sit down and try to assess the situation. i have no access to facts, only to extremist rantings. "we'll all be dead in 10 years". "people have no effect at all". Somewhere in the middle lies the truth, but i'll never get to know it until all comes to pass.