YES VIRGINIA, THERE IS AN EFFECT OF GLOBAL WARMING

Energy Smart has a great post that gathers up the evidence that global warming had a causal role in the California wildfires. I especially liked this part but the whole post is worth reading:

Tom Setnam, a University of Arizona Professor and a leading ‘fire ecologist’, notes that

“The fire season in the last 15 years or so has increased more than two months over the whole Western U.S. So actually 78 days of average longer fire season in the last 15 years compared to the previous 15 or 20 years …”

Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Univ of Arizona combiend work looked at the forest fires from 11 Western states over a 34 year period “and found the number of fires increased in size and severity since 1987, the same year that spring and summer temperatures began to rise.” They examined every forest fire that burned at least 1000 acres from 1970 through 2003. Of 1166 fires in that period, nearly 900 occurred after 1987 — e.g, 80% after the mid-point in time. And, well, “they also found that air temperatures from 1987 to 2003 were 1.6 degrees higher than during the previous 17 years; that 6.5 times more acreage burned during that warmer period.”