Official: Climate changes create more intense wildfires
By Jeff Delong, Reno Gazette-Journal
With a warming climate making for longer fire seasons and more intense wildfires, an ongoing effort to revamp the nation’s firefighting strategy is gaining increasing importance, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service said.
Tom Tidwell, in Reno last week as part of a coalition of officials discussing fire policy, said a changing climate is adding urgency to an already extensive danger posed by fire.
“Fires are burning hotter, and they are more intense,” Tidwell said. “We see it both in the forests and on the rangeland habitat.”
Mountain snowpacks are melting earlier, and fire seasons are lasting 30 to 45 days longer across many areas of the West, Tidwell said.
“The type of fire behavior is very different from what we had even 10 years ago,” Tidwell said.
Let’s cut the crap. This is not official or science but political
BS. The ongoing mismanagement of our forests is the cause of more and larger fires, not a maybe slight temperature change. Of course the managers could never blame themselves or their masters. Find the bogey man to take the heat off (pun intended) so the political hacks making big money off the taxpayers can continue their bungling ways.
Tell me again the Angora Fire had anything to do with climate change.
Dense stands of old trees, a little wind, and a source of ignition and the rest of Tahoe can also burn.
Did I forget to mention using the straw man of climate change can mean more money and great excuses for the inept political fools who rose to their maximun level of incompetence in the forest service.
Bottom line for them is to get more of your money so they can build bigger and bigger empires. Remember, 10,000 years ago Tahoe was ice and I didn’t even have a gas hog Hummer to warn Tahoe up.