Editorial: We must heed the warning

Wednesday, July 19, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.

Western wildfire season arrived this year with more than just the usual TV images of heroic firefighters battling the blazes and the blotting smoke that can be seen and smelled over huge expanses of sky, including that above Southern Nevada.

This season we have reports from many sources that the wildfires are almost certainly linked to global warming.

New research, as reported in Tuesday's Las Vegas Sun, shows that as the climate gets hotter, wildfires are becoming both more frequent and more ravaging.

Scientists with the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Arizona, working together, traced the increased intensity of Western wildfires to 1987. Seven times more forested land burned in the Western United States from 1987 to 2003 than from 1970 to 1987, the researchers found.

Their finding was consistent with that of independent research by a science professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno.

The scientific community, including the American Meteorological Society and the National Academies of Science, believes global warming is man-made, that it is real and that such findings are all related to it.

And so far there is evidence that global warming, mostly caused by burning fossil fuels, will get worse if nothing is done. The federal Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects temperature increases of 3 to 9 degrees in the West by 2069, coinciding with a 15 percent drop in precipitation.

Wildfires this year are on a pace to burn more acreage than any year since records began in 1960, and this record is likely to keep being broken. Forty-five percent of the country is experiencing severe to moderate drought, and worldwide average temperatures continue to rise, according to the National Climactic Data Center.

The only chance to rescue the future from the disastrous environmental effects of earlier springs, hotter summers, more and bigger wildfires and melting icebergs is to move more quickly on replacing fossil fuels. It is up to us, and our governments and industries, to heed the mounting warnings that scientists are sounding.