Wildfires and climate change go together
By Kate Galbraith, New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — The huge wildfire scorching one of America’s most beloved national parks, Yosemite, has rained ash on San Francisco’s water supply and jolted the nation.
Experts say this is just a foretaste of major fires to come, in the United States and much of the world.
Increasing incursions by humans into forests, coupled with altered forest ecology and climate change, will make fires bigger and more destructive, with implications for air quality as well as homes and infrastructure.
“We face the increased risk of fires almost everywhere,” said Chris Field, director of the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, who is co-chairman of a working group for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There have always been forest fires, of course. But their patterns are changing because of people.