Scientists Link Fires to Global Warming

CLIMATE CONTROVERSY

Scientists worldwide are watching temperatures rise, the land turn dry, and vast forests go up in flames.

In the Siberian taiga and Canadian Rockies, in southern California and Australia, researchers find growing evidence tying an upsurge in wildfires to climate change, an impact long predicted by global-warming forecasters.

A team at California’s Scripps Institution, in a headline-making report this month, found that warmer temperatures, causing earlier snow runoff and consequently drier summer conditions, were the key factor in an explosion of big wildfires in the U.S. West during three decades, including fires now rampaging east of Los Angeles.

Researchers previously reached similar conclusions in Canada, where fire is destroying an average 6.4 million acres a year, compared with 2.5 million in the early 1970s.

And an upcoming U.S.-Russian-Canadian scientific paper points to links between warming and wildfires in Siberia, where 2006 already qualifies as an extreme fire season, the sixth in the past eight years.

Far to the south in drought-stricken Australia, meanwhile, 2005 was the hottest year on record, and the dangerous bushfire season is growing longer.

“Temperature increases are intimately linked with increases in area burned in Canada, and I would expect the same worldwide,” said Mike Flannigan, a veteran Canadian Forest Service researcher.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authoritative U.N.-sponsored network of scientists, has long predicted that summer drying and droughts would worsen forest fires, which in many regions are primarily set by humans.

A nonhuman cause also might be on the rise. Warming in high northern latitudes is expected to generate more lightning, igniting more forest fires.

Forest and peat fires release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, adding to climate warming, which in turn will intensify forest fires, worsening warming in a planetary feedback loop.

“This is a carbon bomb,” Johann Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at Germany’s Freiburg University, said of the northern forest. “It’s sitting there waiting to be ignited, and there is already ignition going on.”

Europe swelters in heatwave, 20 dead in France

Saturday July 22, 2006

PARIS - A heatwave in France has probably killed more than 20 people, including a 15-month-old baby, and the rest of Europe also sweltered with no sign of temperatures dropping.

Temperatures were not as high as they had been on previous days but authorities warned people to take precautions. "Desert London", a headline in Britain's Evening Standard newspaper said over a photo of a parched Hyde Park on Friday.

"This is not the Sahara or Serengeti - these remarkable pictures show how London's parks have been turned dry, brown and dusty by the drought," the newspaper said.

A severe drought, said to be the worst in a century in the south of England, is making itself felt and temperatures hit a July record of 36.3degC earlier this week.

British farmers have begun harvesting wheat fields early because of the dry weather.

In Spain, a sunbather died in Barcelona from the heat and a 37-year-old man died in hospital on Friday after collapsing from heat exhaustion while working in a greenhouse in Almeria on the south coast the day before.

Six people were reported dead from heat-related problems so far this Spanish summer.

As in the last major heatwave in 2003, which in France lasted less than a month but killed around 15,000 people, most of the victims were elderly people or the infirm.

A health ministry official said a baby died in Paris where temperatures hit 37 Celsius earlier this week, but provided no further details.

Of the other victims, 10 were aged 80 or over, four collapsed at their workplace, two died while playing sport, two were homeless and one was an obese youth "in poor physical condition".

Temperatures well above 30degC have been registered across France over the past week and weather forecasters say the heatwave looks set to continue well into next week.

The high death toll stunned health authorities and local officials have worked hard to try to improve their response to heatwaves, supplying air conditioning to retirement homes and broadcasting constant information on how to cope in the heat.

In Italy, temperatures pushed higher on Friday, reaching nearly 39degC in Florence, and were expected to increase throughout the weekend. Many cities raised their alert levels to avoid a repeat of 2003, when the heatwave killed 20,000 people. Emergency workers in Rome said they were handing out water to people standing in queues outside museums and art galleries or waiting in the sun to catch their bus.

A worker collapsed and died of heat-related causes in the island of Sardinia on Thursday, while health services received thousands of calls from elderly people asking for help.

Southern and western Bosnia have been hit by a series of fires as temperatures reached as high as 41 degrees, prompting local fire fighters to ask the army for helicopter assistance.

- REUTERS

Vegetables Fight Global Warming

It turns out there's something anyone can do right now to make a big impact on global warming, says one climate researcher: Eat more veggies.

A new study of how much greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere by the production of food shows that the difference between a meat-based and plant-based diet amounts to the same as driving an SUV versus a small sedan.

The calculations are based on data and a basic ecological concept that have been around for decades, but no one had actually done the math.

"It's just never been done," said climate researcher Gidon Eshel of the University of Chicago. "The data is simply there to mine."

Eshel and colleague Pamela Martin have published their study in the current issue of the scientific journal Earth Interactions.

The ecological concept has been taught in biology classes for decades: As energy moves up a food web — from plants to grazing animals to predators — only about 10 percent survives each step. In other words, 100 calories worth of beef patty require about 1,000 calories of grain which, in turn, require 10,000 calories of sunlight.

So if you choose to cut out the middleman (the cow) and get your 100 calories directly from the grain, you only have to grow one-tenth as much grain.

Eshel and Martin gathered U.S. food statistics, along with other data on fossil fuel use by agricultural and personal transportation. Then they looked at how much greenhouse gas was generated by the production of food.

Among the ways food generates greenhouses gases is simply by the burning of fossil fuels to power all the farming equipment, trucking and processing plants. Eshel cites the U.S. Department of Energy, which reports that food production consumes more than 10 percent of all energy use in the United States.

More specifically, 17 percent of all fossil fuels went to food production in 2002, he reported. These numbers, plus information on other agricultural greenhouse gas sources, like methane from cows and animal wastes, helped the researchers hone their numbers to something they could fairly compare to auto use.

They found that an average animal-based American diet generates about 1.6 tons more carbon dioxide per person, per year, than an all plant-based diet with the same number of calories. And that, as it turns out, is about the same greenhouse gas difference between driving a Toyota Camry and a Chevrolet Suburban, said Eshel.

"If you are interested in doing something about global warming," said Eshel, "here is an excellent example."

"There is a real issue here," agreed climate researcher David Battisti of the University of Washington. "There's a huge issue."

The amount of carbon emissions at stake in the United States alone is approximately the same as that at the center of the hotly contested federal auto fuel efficiency standards, said Battisti. Worldwide, the stakes are even higher. The people of China, for instance, are steadily shifting to an animal product diet, he points out.

"Shifting all those people to an animal protein diet will have a cost," Battisti said. In fact in most places on Earth, when people can afford it, they prefer to eat more meat, he said. But we need to study and prepare for the environmental impacts, just as we've already done for automobiles.

"Don't look at only one term in the equation," said Battisti. "You have to look at the whole impact of humans on the environment."