Scientists Link Climate Warming, Increased Western Wildfires - LA Times

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The raging Western wildfires of recent years have often been blamed on management practices that promoted dense, overpacked forests. But a new study indicates global warming may be the main culprit.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that today's severe wildfires are unnatural and unprecedented, researchers have found that parts of the West experienced destructive blazes during a warm, drought-plagued period in the Middle Ages.

The linkage suggests that as the climate warms, damaging wildfires will continue to strike the West. "If we are just at the beginning of dramatic warming … we can simply expect larger, more severe fires," said Grant A. Meyer, a co-author of the study, published in today's journal Nature. Meyer and two other researchers sifted through soil deposits as old as 8,000 years in ponderosa pine forests in central Idaho, finding a record of severe fire activity during the 400-year-long Medieval Warm Period from about 950 to 1350.

The sediments contained charcoal as well as landslide and mudflow debris washed into mountain basins following severe burns. To the east, in Yellowstone National Park, the researchers also found records of greater fire activity during the same period. Occasionally you do have these big fires and you get a lot of erosion with them and that's part of the system," said Meyer, a University of New Mexico associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences. The study greatly expands the record of fire in western ponderosa pine forests, suggesting it is more varied and extreme than often thought. Much of the earlier research, based on 500-year-old tree ring data, points to a pattern of frequent, low-intensity burns that cleared out small growth and maintained more open forest conditions than prevail today."

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drought4nov04,1,7556560.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

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