Flames from the Las Conchas fire burn in Los Alamos, NM.  AP Photo

Climate change is creating the ideal conditions for wildfires — drought and heat.  And while only a secondary effect, it is ruining July 4 celebrations around the country, since in many places the risk posed by fireworks is simply too great.

Grant Meyer, a University of New Mexico geologist who studies “what relationships exist between fire, climate and erosion over Holocene timescales” tells the Christian Science Monitor that while severe wildfires have always occurred:

… recent experience down here suggests that what we’re looking at in the last few decades is at least as severe and maybe more so than anything we’ve seen since the last Ice Age,” he adds.

A build-up of fuels from forestry practices that emphasized fire suppression is partly responsible, he says.

“But part of it as well – and the data are very good on this – it’s climatic warming” as human industrial activity and land-use changes have pumped increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, he says.

[For more on the relative contribution of forest management practices and climate change to the recent soaring wildfire trend, see Wildfires in a Globally-Warmed World.]

A long-term average decline in annual snow pack, which provides the bulk of the region’s water, along with rising average temperatures have lengthened the fire season and dried out the fuel.

New Mexico, along with much of Texas (which has had a record fire season), and the southeastern US is in the throes of extreme to exceptional drought conditions

Jerome McDonald of the Southwest Area Incident Management Team said, “As firefighters we’re seeing extreme fire behavior and the kind of growth we haven’t seen in our careers.”  Los Alamos fire chief Donald Tucker, “We have seen fire behavior we’ve never seen down here, and it’s really aggressive.”

In past years, Independence Day fireworks fizzled out for many thanks to ever worsening droughts.  Now, as TP Green’s Brad Johnson reports, that is happening this year around the country:

Read more

Peter Gleick, water and climate scientist, in a HuffPost repost.  Gleick is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forbes, which regularly publishes biased, misleading, and distorted opinion pieces on climate issues, has just published a remarkable one by Patrick Michaels. Michaels is well known for his regular misleading statements about climate. And while his statements are mostly worth ignoring, this one contains a particularly remarkable combination of errors and falsehoods. He accuses a variety of other people (including Justin Gillis of the New York Times) of misrepresenting data on food production and climate risks while simultaneously doing exactly that.

In this case, his misstatements are easily checked (though not, apparently, by Forbes fact-checkers) by actually looking up the real data on world food production. Here are Michaels’ most grossly misleading or simply false statements:

Read more

A jury of one’s peers should assess scientific claims.

Here are two, related pieces from The Conversation, “Who’s your expert? The difference between peer review and rhetoric” and “Climate change denial and the abuse of peer review.”

First, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute, submits some climate “sceptics” to peer-review and finds them wanting.

Peer review is the basis of modern scientific endeavour. It underpins research and validates findings, theories and data.

Submitting scientists’ claims to peer review is a straightforward way to assess their credibility.

The Climate Commission was established by the Australian government to help build consensus around climate change.

Chief Commissioner Professor Tim Flannery handed the first major report, The Critical Decade to Julia Gillard on May 23.

[Joe Romm:  See Australian Climate Commission says act now or “the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life.”]

Peer-reviewed by internationally respected scientists, the report summarises key evidence and conclusions regarding climate change for Australia and the world.

Rising temperatures, changing rainfall, threats to human health and agriculture, and deteriorating ecosystems are carefully documented from the scientific literature. The report makes compelling reading and a solid case for rapid action on greenhouse gases such as CO2.

But are all experts really in agreement with the Climate Commission’s report?

Enter an alternative group of experts.

Read more