Climate change and Western wildfires: gonna get hotter

Science Progress looks at the discouraging feedback loop between climate change and Western wildfires:

New research investigating the impact of climate change on western wildfires presents a bleak picture. CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy covers the latest science in an American Progress column this week, explaining the problematic feedback cycle: higher temperatures from global warming increase the risks of wildfires, and increased fires release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere:

A new paper in the April 24 issue of the journal Science, for example, concludes that scientists have greatly underestimated the impact that deforestation brought on by fires has on climate change. On a global scale, fires release into the atmosphere about half of the carbon dioxide that is contributed by the use of fossil fuels.

Also mentioned:

An earlier post by Steve Woodruff on \ research on trends in western fires

A 2007 post by Chris Mooney on the Bush administration's years of delay on producing national assessments of the impact of climate change around the country.

An interactive Human Toll of Climate Change map.