The winter that wasn’t is bleeding into a spring of fire, with freakish warmth and dry ground breeding a disturbingly early start to wildfire season across the nation:

ALABAMA: A wildfire burned 70 to 100 acres of land in Tuscaloosa County before being contained. [WBRC]

Firefighters are still fighting a forest fire that has blackened more than 350 acres north of Waterloo in Lauderdale County since Monday. [Florence Times-Daily]

ARIZONA: Emergency personnel said a wildfire that broke out in eastern Santa Cruz County burned close to 450 acres Saturday night. [Nogales International]

COLORADO: Residents on Colorado’s eastern plains are trying to determine the extent of damage and the number of farm animals killed following a wildfire that charred more than 37 square miles, destroyed two farmsteads, and forced 1000 people to evacuate. Three firefighters were injured, one with critical burns, while trying to escape from a stranded fire truck after the fire broke out last Sunday. [AP]

FLORIDA: Statewide, the dry conditions and the lack of tropical systems last year have helped cause 986 wildfires that have burned more than 16,000 acres since Jan. 1. [Palatka Daily]

The Florida Forest Service is working to contain a 50-acre wildfire northwest of Baldwin in Baldwin Bay. [News 4 Jacksonville]

GEORGIA: A wildfire forced officials to evacuate four homes and shut down one road for a couple of hours Tuesday evening in Cook County. [WALB]

MICHIGAN: Wildfire season has descended upon Michigan early this year, as unseasonable temperatures combined with low snowfall this winter have dried out grass and wood earlier than usual. [Arenac County Independent]

The remains of a bonfire left unattended in Tuesday’s high winds and heat caused a 40-acre wildfire in a swampy section of Custer Township bounded by Johnson, Stephens, Hansen and Reek roads. [Ludington Daily News]

MINNESOTA: Wildfire activity has picked up significantly, and people are reminded to obtain burn permits and keep an eye on weather conditions. [Grand Forks Herald]

VIRGINIA: U.S. Forestry Service and Virginia Department of Forestry crews are responding to a wildfire that began in the Wise County side of High Knob Tuesday afternoon. [Kingsport TImes News]

WISCONSIN: As of Tuesday morning firefighters had responded to 160 wildfires over roughly 300 acres on state-protected lands. Two people were killed in grass fires in the last week. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]

Meanwhile, wildfires are burning in Costa Rica and ravaging northern Kenya, including a fire on the slopes of Mount Kenya, the nations’s tallest mountain, which “is sending big game animals like elephants fleeing for their lives.”

Scientists have warned for decades that the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution added to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels would bring these disasters. The states that are now burning are now also polluted by dozens of politicians who claim the science is a lie.

As carbon pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, our weather is growing more intense and unpredictable, threatening the health of the union. Following the freakishly warm and dry start of this January, extreme storms then pummeled the nation:

WASHINGTON ICE STORM: “A monster Pacific Northwest storm coated the Seattle area in a thick layer of ice Thursday and brought much of the state to a standstill, sending hundreds of cars spinning out of control, temporarily shutting down the airport and knocking down so many trees that members of the Washington State Patrol brought chain saws to work. East of Seattle, a man was killed by a falling tree as he was backing an all-terrain vehicle out of a backyard shed, authorities said.” 90,000 customers of Puget Sound Energy lost power.

OREGON FLOODS: With a persistent flow of Pacific moisture targeting the Pacific Northwest, several inches of rain have fallen across the western third of Oregon. Widespread flooding has developed with Salem, Corvallis and Philomath just some of the cities that have dealt with the worst of the rising waters. Torrential rain swept away a car from a grocery store parking lot, killing a mother and her one-year-old son.

NEVADA WILDFIRE: A destructive wildfire erupted shortly after noon on Thursday and raced quickly through the dry countryside surrounding Reno, NV, propelled by wind gusts of 82 mph. At its height, the fire forced evacuation calls for some 10,000 people. The fire destroyed 29 homes over six square miles before a storm on Saturday brought precipitation after the region’s driest winter in recorded history. Reno had no precipitation at all in December.

JANUARY TORNADOES: Last Tuesday, a powerful storm front spawned one EF-1 tornado in metropolitan Louisville, Kentucky, and a second hit near Madison, Indiana. At least 10 tornadoes struck the South overnight Sunday as a powerful storm system moved across the Great Lakes and into southern Canada, killing two in Alabama. The tornadoes were spawned along the southern end of a front that arced through the eastern US like a comma’s tail, bringing severe thunderstorms, hail, and twisters to Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee before moving into Georgia later Monday morning.

Extreme weather is wreaking increasing damage on the people of the United States. With cutbacks in local, state, and federal government services, continued inaction on fighting greenhouse pollution, and ideological opposition to preparing for the ravages of unchecked climate change, the state of our union is under threat.

Last year, Colorado saw a record snowfall, with 525 inches falling during ski season. But this year, while massive snowfalls in Alaska have collapsed roofs, the state is suffering from the worst snow drought since the early 1980s. “For the first time in 30 years, a lack of snow has not allowed us to open the back bowls in Vail as of January 6, 2012, and, for the first time since the late 1800s, it did not snow at all in Tahoe in December,” said Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz.

The state’s ski industry is hurting, but a coming water shortage caused by the lack of snow could be worse, according to the Colorado Independent:

Ski industry woes aside, state water watchers and firefighters are nervously eyeing the miniscule mountain snowpack, which supplies so much of the water used by Front Range cities. As of Dec. 30, snowpack in the Colorado River basin was 44 percent of last year’s record level and just 63 percent of the annual average.

“[The drought] will make the beetle epidemic even more severe,” said state Sen. Gail Schwartz, a Snowmass Democrat who’s introducing a bill in the legislative session starting Wednesday that’s aimed at reducing the fire danger from a mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed millions of acres of Colorado lodgepole pines. “What doesn’t burn down will blow down.” [...]

The last time Colorado’s high country was even close to this dry in mid-winter was during the 2001-02 ski season, which was followed by the worst wildfire season in the state’s history. June of 2002 saw the massive Hayman Fire scorch nearly 138,000 acres of land in the mountains southwest of Denver, darkening Front Range skies and loading key water storage facilities with debris from subsequent erosion.

Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, points out that the NASA global temperature anomaly maps show that December just keeps getting warmer, which creates the extreme swings. “It’s key to remember that warming might actually bring bigger storms to the Rockies due to there being more moisture in the air,” Schendler said. “At the same time, because the atmosphere can hold more water, it can suck the land dry of more water than before.”

And as greenhouse gas pollution continues to warm the planet, people will continue to face — and have to prepare for — unseasonably warm weather in January in one area and extreme amounts of snow in another.

by Sarah Laskow, reposted from Grist

Last summer, wildfires sped by drought turned large chunks of Texas into a moonscape. Nationally, 2011 saw the third worst wildfire season in the United States since 1960: More than 8.7 million acres of land burned.

It’s the job of congressional staffers working on energy and natural resources issues to know facts like this. But some of them have a more urgent and perverse interest in this particular statistic: they’re participants in a macabre annual office pool in which they try to predict how many acres of U.S. land will burn in wildfires.

Frank Gladics, a professional staffer on the Republican side of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, runs the contest. On Tuesday he sent out 2011’s results in an email that was perhaps forwarded a little too widely. (Grist managed to obtain a copy, after all.) Participants in 2011 ranged from lowly legislative aides to powerful staffers, like Bruce Evans, the Republican staff director for the Senate Appropriations Committee. The entrants Grist identified all worked on the Senate side of the Hill.

A morbid version of a jellybean-counting contest, the pool asks staffers to guess the number of acres that will burn each year; guesses that exceed the actual number, as reported in the National Interagency Fire Center Situation Report (PDF), are disqualified.

At best, this little stunt could be excused as gallows humor — a peculiar inside-the-Beltway bonding ritual for disaster wonks. Since wildfires level people’s homes, imperil both residents and firefighters, and serve as a barometer for climate-change-driven havoc, the annual game might also simply be tone-deaf, tasteless, and heartless.

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The headlines of 2011 were driven by global warming disasters and the popular uprising against the powers-that-be who have accumulated profit at the expense of the future of humanity. The United States faced the most billion-dollar climate disasters ever, with 14 distinct disasters costing at least $53 billion to the U.S. economy. Stymied by the election of the science-denying Tea Party Congress, the Obama administration failed to pass climate pollution or oil and coal safety legislation in response to the disasters of 2010. The administration fought back attacks on investment in renewable energy and stopped the rush to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, spurred by mass protests.

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JR:  In February, a major study in Science that found the second ’100-year’ Amazon drought in 5 years caused huge CO2 emissions. If this pattern continues, the forest would become a warming source.  A new study in Science adds important insight (video below, original study here).

Cross-posted from the NASA website

By analyzing nearly a decade of satellite data, a team of scientists led by researchers from the University of California, Irvine and funded by NASA has created a model that can successfully predict the severity and geographic distribution of fires in the Amazon rain forest and the rest of South America months in advance.

Though previous research has shown that human settlement patterns are the primary factor that drives the distribution of fires in the Amazon, the new research demonstrates that environmental factors – specifically small variations in ocean temperatures – amplify human impacts and underpin much of the variability in the number of fires the region experiences from one year to the next.

“Higher than normal sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and the Pacific proved to be red flags that a severe fire season was on its way in four to six months,” said Yang Chen, the University of California, Irvine, scientist who led the research. Chen and his colleagues found temperature changes of as little as .25°C (.45°F) in the North Atlantic and 1°C (1.8 °F) in the Central Pacific can be used to forecast the severity of the fire season across much of the Amazon.

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The morning after the GOP debate, the nation and the world woke up to the reality that an unabashed climate science denier could be the next president of the United States.  The UK’s Guardian warns its readers of Rick Perry:

The world needs to prepare for a climate sceptic defeating Obama

A year or so ago, the very idea that the most powerful person on the planet could, within just a couple of years, be someone who refuses to accept the science that underpins our knowledge of anthropogenic climate change was almost laughable.

They discuss Gov. Rick Perry’s debate performance and conclude:

Sadly, it now appears that Obama’s brief window for action is over and he is unlikely to ever regain the political capital he needs to implement any serious climate policies. But, most alarming of all, the whole world – not just the US – needs to start seriously preparing for the very real possibility that a staunch climate sceptic could, within 16 months, have his cowboy boots under the desk in the Oval Office.

Perry is indeed a hard-core climate science denier and a Tea Party extremist.  It is hard to know how bad the Texas climate would have to get before he would concede that climate scientists were right:

This year’s scorching Texas summer heat, in a dubious honor, broke a national record once held by Oklahoma that had stood since the Dust Bowl changed the face of the country in the 1930s.

The Texas months of June through August were the hottest three months ever recorded in the history of the United States…..

“It has been scary hot from one end of Texas to the other,” [state climatologist John] Nielson-Gammon said….  “The dryer it is, the hotter the ground gets during the summer, and it becomes a cycle that feeds on itself….”

The 12 months ending on August 31 were the driest 12 months in Texas history.

Heck, it’s hard to know how bad the climate would have to get before Perry would even take even the most basic adaptation measures, like, say, adequately funding firefighters, rather than, so, just praying for rain.

Climate Progress has noted that the Texas Drought Now Far, Far Worse Than When Gov. Rick Perry Issued his April Proclamation Calling on All Texans to Pray for Rain.  And the month after adopting that futile adaptation strategy, Perry signed a budget that devastated the state’s ability to fight fires:

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This week, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) left the campaign trail to respond to wildfires in Texas that he described as “surreal” and “as mean-looking as I’ve ever seen.” The fires, fed by a summer of heat and drought far beyond anything Texas has ever experienced before, have destroyed over 1,000 homes.

“The science is not settled on this,” Perry said at last night’s GOP debate, rejecting the fact of manmade global warming. “Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact,” comparing himself to Galileo, who was persecuted by religious leaders. Perry responded earlier this year to the Texas drought — then much weaker — by issuing an official proclamation to pray for rain.

ThinkProgress reporter Scott Keyes questioned the Perry campaign about whether the extreme heat, drought, and fires in his state have influenced Perry’s belief that global warming is a hoax concocted by scientists to get money. Mark Miner, Perry’s national press secretary affirmed that the “natural disaster” “doesn’t change his position”:

No, I mean this is a natural disaster going on in Texas right now. It’s a terrible situation. It doesn’t change his position. There are differing views. As president, you shouldn’t listen to one group and change all of our policies that are going to kill jobs just for the sake of one group.

Watch it:

Asked again if he sees a connection between global warming and the types of droughts and wildfires we’ve seen, Miner said that he thought the fires might have been started by arson, completely ignoring the question of how Texas got so dry and hot that its fires have become overwhelming.

Texan climate scientists do not agree with the Perry campaign, unsurprisingly. “We can be confident we’ve made this hellish summer worse than it would have been,” Texas A&M’s Dr. Andrew Dessler told NPR News about the effect of greenhouse pollution on Texas. Because of global warming pollution, Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told ThinkProgress, “evaporation has been enhanced, soils and plants dried out faster, streamflow declined faster, and temperature records were easier to break.”

Here is irony befitting a Shakespearean tragedy.  Gov. Rick Perry finally got what he called on all Texans to pray for — some rain – but it was almost entirely dumped elsewhere and the winds of Tropical Storm Lee merely served to stoke the most brutal wildfires anyone had ever seen.

This unprecedented climate impact is, indeed, Hell and High Water.  Time‘s headline is, “Texas Burns as the Rest of the Country Drowns.”  But, of course, they have no mention of climate change whatsoever.

How bad is it in Texas?  CBS reported this morning:

Since December, wildfires have consumed 3.6 million acres of Texas — an area the size of the state of Connecticut.

Unfortunately, there is no rainfall in the forecast for the foreseeable future.

The Texas Forest Service put out statement saying, “This is unprecedented fire behavior. No one on the face of this Earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions”….

Tom Boggus, director of the Texas Forest Service:  ”It’s historic. We’ve never seen fire seasons like this. We’ve never seen drought like this. This is  that we’re living in, and so people know and understand they’ve got to be extremely careful.”

So much for the standard denier claim that the weather extremes we’ve been experiencing now are nothing special.

Mr. Boggus obviously has one of the hardest jobs in the country, particularly working for a governor whose dual adaptation strategy is prayer coupled with cutting the budget of the Texas Forest Service.  So I hate to be the one to disappoint him — BUT this is going to be the briefest ”historic time” in history.  In a few decades, assuming we keep listening to people like his Governor, this will be a pretty average summer for Texas (see here).  Heck, next summer could be worse!

If only scientists had warned us decades ago it would get hotter and drier with ever worse heat waves, droughts, and wildfires if we kept burning all that Texas Tea…..

Actually Andrew Freedman of the WashPost‘s Capital Weather Gang has a nice run through of the climate science.  But first Freedman directs us to yet more jaw-dropping statistics of just how grim things are down in Perry-land, courtesy of state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon on his too-aptly named Climate Abyss blog:

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Central Russia is under its second year of extreme heat, with temperatures above 30°C (86°F) for an entire month. “The central city of Volgograd was Russia’s hottest city with temperatures hovering above 40° Celsius (104 F) for the past few days, hotter than Cairo, Tashkent, Tehran and New Delhi.” The extreme heat is causing the former permafrost tundra to smolder and burn. Across Russia, “the emergencies ministry used 18 planes and 38 helicopters in an effort to douse a total of 220 wildfires, including 28 major blazes covering nearly 12,000 hectares,” a Moscow-based spokeswoman told AFP. “A major fire started in the southern Rostov region on Tuesday causing two days of explosions of World War II-era shells embedded in a local forest.” However, Russian officials may be downplaying the true extent of the fires, Radio Free Europe reports:

Already, fires are ravaging the Far East region of Yakutia, where Nikolai Shmatkov of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says satellite images show officials are again underreporting their extent.

“Greenpeace estimates 4 million hectares are burning in Yakutia,” he says, “but the official figures show only 1 million hectares on fire in the entire country.”

Fires are also raging in the northern Arkhangelsk region and in peat bogs surrounding Moscow. Greenpeace’s Kuksin, who spoke from a blaze outside Moscow where he is organizing volunteer firefighters, says the government is increasing the danger by denying the fires. “It’s trying to hide the problem instead of solving it,” he says, “and that leads to human casualties.”

The catastrophic rise in wildfires as Russia heats up from greenhouse pollution threatens the planet with feedback loops that accelerate global warming.