Longer Hurricane season, record forest fires, 100 year flooding?

Question

At what point is it okay to say that global warming is likely the cause for these things? I know that the sensible people here don't like to attribute any one event to GW, but taken as a whole it is pretty clear to me at least that GW is the reason for this. Consider the doubling of fires in CA and that Governer Shwarzenegger has said that these record levels of forest fires are no longer to be considered outlier events but to be expected every year. The "100" year flood is happens relatively often. Now research shows hurricane levels have increased with increasing temperature.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080714/sc_livescience/hurricaneseasongettinglonger

Answer 1

Why so many fires, well record rain the last couple of years and very few fires. The main reason for all the fires in the west recently is very poor forest management because of lawsuits filed by environmentalists that have kept all the scrub brush from being cleared. I remember reading books by JF Cooper and Zane Gray as well others that talked about running through the forests or riding horses through the forests. You can not do that today because of all the scrub and trash wood growing there, stuff the Indians used to keep cleared out by using it for cooking or making charcoal.

It is the forests being clogged with this trash wood that causes them to catch fire so easy and burn so hot and fast. All we need to do to reduce forest fires is let people go in there and clear the brush and other scrap wood out and remove the extra trees that cause crowding that leads to disease. With good forest management these problems will soon cease, if we carry on with this broken policy of every stick of wood is sacred and can not be harvested than catastrophic fires will be our legacy to the future. Same as with global warming we need sensible answers and solutions not whining religious rhetoric. The major problem id the National Socialist Democratic Party has made a religious crusade out of this and so truth will be replaced by fiction as it is any time religion rather than scientific evidence is involved.

Answer 2

Do you have any idea how much forested land use to burn prior to man putting the fires out?

100 year flood where? Floods happen. Always have always will.

Longer hurricane season? Says who? The hurricane seasons after Katrina were suppose to get worse and worse. Yet, instead the recent hurricane season have effectively fizzled into non events.

Do us a favor chicken little. Just run away...

Answer 3

To be fair, the fires are happening as badly as they are because of the misguided fire suppression policies that have been in place for decades throughout the West. Most of the Western forests and chapparal regions are supposed to have small fires every few years, but thanks to a combination of human development (ESPECIALLY in California) and our own stupidity, we've been suppressing the natural fire cycles, so many forests throughout the West are basically giant tinderboxes waiting for a dry season to set them off. And you get a lot of dry seasons in the West, especially now that climate change is starting to kick in. I disagree with James that the answer to that is more logging, however. Controlled burns, although difficult and obviously not possible in areas with high levels of development, are more ecologically sound in the long run.

I do, however, believe that climate change is likely contributing to all the issues you mentioned.

Answer 4

Sorry people I am 77 and the weather has always challenged man. The fires is because the environmentalist would not let the under brush be cleared. If we don't do it mother nature will....

Answer 5

Bertha is just the 2nd named storm of the season, when at this point, we usually have about 6 named storms.  This "100  year flooding" is just media hype.  The Midwest gets flooding just about every year.  The Mississippi and Missouri rivers are massive rivers that flood very easily.  Now with people building towns closer to these rivers, the property damage is going to more costly and the media is having a field day with this.  Those California fires happen every year too.  They have been named "California Wildfires" for at least 5 decades.  

The reason these stories are more publicized is because of the advancement of communication technologies.  By simply "jumping on the internet", we can hear stories from Siberia to Antarctica.  

If everyone keeps falling for the rhetoric of the media, we will all be mindless drones within a few years.  The link below shows how even the argument of global warming is.  Some scientists say this current trend is unprecedented, while other dismiss that notion.  

"One expert warned that temperatures in the past had sometimes jumped 5°C in as little as 50 years."

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid...

The discussion has valid points to both sides of the argument.  It is a good read no matter what side of the argument you are on.

Answer 6

Actually, I'm going to side with the skeptics on this one...

One big fire (but only 1.5% of the area of forest fires annually) and a - to me - less than compelling set of statistics on the hurricanes (sample rate is low) is along the same lines as the 2008 summer being cool in N. America and Europe...

it may indicate, it may not.

It is possible that this is "noise", or, in other words, weather.

Sorry guys but I am hesitant to throw every exceptional weather situation / natural disaster on to the pitchfork of AGW.

BUT: Before any eejit jumps on this, please note that my opinion is that the data is equivocal; it neither proves nor disproves the case for AGW.

Answer 7

I am sure that we have contributed to some of the problem with the climate and environment.  There is no doubt about that.  However, how do we know that the Earth is not just going through a cycle like it did before.  There was a time from around 800-1300 AD referred to as the Medieval Warming Period in which the Vikings took advantage of the ice free northern Atlantic to settle Greenland and Iceland.  Then we went into what is called the Little Ice age after that which lasted from around the 13th century to around the early 19th century.  How do we know for sure that we aren't going through another cycle like that one?  There are many scientist that argue over it.  

As for the fires in California and the flooding in the Midwest.  Anyone that lives in or around the Mississippi river knows that flooding is inevitable.  Large flood in the Mississippi flood plain have been happening for thousands of years and helped create Crowley's Ridge in NE Arkansas and other geographical formations.  It isn't that the floods are getting worse but the fact that the population along the river is becoming more densely populated.  The fires in California are more of a man made problem in that the areas are drier due to once wild streams being damned up or completely rerouted altogether.  How many natural rivers and streams are there left flowing west of the Rockies?  There have always been fires but the population is growing so fast that people are spreading further out in the fire areas.  

Of course, I am no expert.  I am just saying it could be a possibility.

Answer 8

That article says its been increasing steadily since 1915.  In 1915 people just werent that big of a factor to influence the earths climate.  Think about it... We still have frozen poles with a world population 3 or 4 times teh size what it was then, and back then only like 1 in 1000 people in the world had a car.  Even in the US only like 1 in 10 families would have had a car before 1920.  So the problem with this article is he is saying things were warming up before people really would have been a cause.  Hurts his own case.  Yah you will hear about floods but thats because in any given year in one of 100 flood plains theyll get a flood and there are more than 100 in our country.  Hey did you hear about that volcano that spewed a bunch of ash up into the atmosphere in Alaska the other day?  That is supposed to have a cooling effect.  It blocks sunlight.  Good luck for the north pole.  How come no one is pointing that out?    I dont mean to say GW is a myth, but all the things youre pointing to arent caused by GW.  Forest fires in Cali are not started by GW.  It would have to get several hundred degrees hotter for that.  And GW creates more rain theoretically, so it ought to have an effect of fighting forest fires.  It is convenient for a politician to blame GW so he doesnt have to take heat dont you think?  No pun intended.  Consider that when water evaporates it takes away heat.  So when the world heats up more water evaporates, cooling us off.  Then if it does get warmer, plants begin to spread to areas where they werent growing, eating mroe CO2, producing O2.  That fights global warming.  Plus extra rain feeds those plants.  What I am saying is that if it is true then it would cause moderating effects instead of snowballing.  It might be happening, probably is but dont get carried away.  Its also a very popular thing to believe in.  25 years ago climatologists were sure we were heading into an ice age.