All those warnings from Smokey Bear and it wasn’t really even our fault.
Rising temperatures throughout the West have stoked an increase in large wildfires over the past 34 years as spring comes earlier, mountain snows melt sooner and forests dry to tinder, scientists reported Thursday.
More than land-use changes or forest management practices, the changing climate was the most important factor driving a four-fold increase in the average number of large wildfires in the Western United States since 1970, the researchers concluded.
…“I think this is the equivalent for the West of what hurricanes are for the Gulf Coast,” said fire ecologist Steven Running at the University of Montana in Missoula, who was not connected with the research. “This is an illustration of a natural disaster that is accelerating in intensity as a result, I feel, of global warming.”
All told, the average fire season has grown more than two months longer, while fires have become more frequent, longer-burning and harder to extinguish. They destroy 6.5 times more land than in the 1970s, the researchers found.