andromeda1023 replied to your link “Stark Evidence: A Warmer World Is Sparking More and Bigger Wildfires”
Here are some interesting facts, and not all is 'climate change'...there are not more fires recently, and there is not more acreage being burned: http://wildfiretoday.com/tag/statistics/
The article that I posted stated that not all of the increase in wildfires is due to climate change. There are other factors such as flammable decaying matter/fire management, the impact of winds, etc. But the thing is that, the effects of climate change exacerbate all of these things. Climate Change doesn’t cause forest fires directly, but indirectly it makes them worse in many ways. This is similar in how climate change tends to make hurricanes more powerful due to the relationship between hurricanes and temperature. Here’s some relevant quotes:
All that makes it hard to pin down why any one given fire happened, or even why any one region might be seeing more fire, though a handful of such attribution studies have been done. Nevertheless, there is still a clear link between general climate trends — in particular warming temperatures — and an increased risk for fire. “If we have higher temps, we have a greater probability of fire starting, fire spreading, and fire intensifying. That’s basic physics,” says Stefan Doerr, a geographer at Swansea University in Wales and a chief editor of the International Journal of Wildland Fire. Warm air holds more water. So as air temperatures climb, the thirsty air sucks more moisture out of vegetation, making it better firewood. Warmer temperatures also lead to more lightning, which sparks some destructive wildfires — each degree of warming is thought to increase strikes by about 12 percent. Earlier snowmelts make fire seasons longer. And a warmer world is a windier world, bringing the potential to further fan flames.
[...]
Last year, John Abatzoglou of the University of Idaho published a paper showing that human-caused warming since the 1970s has been responsible for about half of the increased dryness of western U.S. forests over the last 30 years. And the drier it was, the more forest burned. “It’s a complicated issue,” says Abatzoglou. “But the way we see it, how dry fuels are explains about three-quarters of year-to-year variability [in fires].” By the train of logic followed by Abatzoglou and his colleagues, climate change is to blame for doubling the area that burned in the western U.S. between 1984-2015, adding an extra 10 million acres of charred trees.
[...]
Today, researchers agree the effects of warming temperatures on fire are being felt widely. Even Greenland has had a significant number of fires this year, notes Flannigan, who ticks off the many areas where climate change is having, or will have, an impact: “Alaska and all boreal Canada is already seeing change, and it’s going to continue. Western U.S., for sure. Southeastern U.S., maybe. Mediterranean, yes. Scandinavia, possibly. Sweden had a big fire in 2014 that really blew them away. Chile had the worse fire season on record by far. Australia, definitely. China, in the northern areas, yes.”
But you are actually wrong, in British Columbia, Canada in 2017 hit the record for the most acreage burned in recorded history:
More of B.C. has burned this year than ever before in recorded history
This smashes the record set in 1958.
Also this:
A paper published in Science last year found that “large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons.” The mid-1980s is also when most scientists argue that the effects of global warming began to be broadly felt.
The same team of researchers also found that the area of annual burned forest in the Pacific Northwest has increased by nearly 5000 percent since the early 1970s.
