It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Out for my evening walk, I stopped on the crest of a hill and watched the sun's gigantic orange ball slide silently toward the horizon through a haze of smoke from the 400 forest fires raging across British Columbia's tinder-dry landscape.
Scientists from universities in the United States and Argentina who studied fire outbreaks over the last 500 years say wildfires in western North America are likely to increase as the world warms up in coming decades.
Studying tree-ring data from more than 240 sites, they found a link between fires on the western half of this continent and the warming of surface water in the North Atlantic, which corresponded with extended periods of western drought.
Other scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who assembled a database of all large western wildfires back to 1970, found that since 1987, fires have increased in frequency by 400 per cent and consumed 650 per cent more forest. And they found the annual fire season became 78 days longer over the same period.
In the not too distant future, we may all be looking back wistfully at "mild" summers like this one.
About 270 new wildfires have started in drought-plagued Russia over the past 24 hours, state media reported Sunday, citing the country's emergencies ministry.
The polar regions are again proving especially vulnerable to the warming climate. Arctic sea ice extents have been reaching repeated record minimums. And while the Antarctic sea ice was near normal levels this year, the Antarctic Peninsula has been warming at a rate five times the global average. Boreal ecosystems have been hit hard with rising permafrost temperatures and lengthening green seasons, or the time between plant green-up and senescence.