Wildfires Likely to Worsen as Planet Warms
From Southern California to the French Riviera and beyond, big wildfires have dominated headlines this year — but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Out-of-control blazes are likely to become an even more vexing problem as climate change intensifies, say a number of scientists. Warmer weather, stronger winds, and longer, drier summers would mean more fires and more acreage burned, say researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Forest Service in a study to be published in the journal Climate Change. In a federal report on the expected effects of global warming in California, Robert Wilkinson of the University of California at Santa Barbara wrote, “Fires may be hotter, move faster, and be more difficult to contain under future climate conditions.”
