Planet’s Weather More Conducive to Wildfire Says Scientists

Even as wildfire season rages – particularly in Alaska and Canada, where over 11 million combined acres have burned so far this year – a new scientific study says that fire risks across the Earth are rising, in tandem with a changing climate.What’s more, the research also finds that these increasing wildfire risks may be linked to a declining ability of the world’s lands, trees and plants to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, and thus partly offset human greenhouse gas emissions. If so, wildfires may be acting as a so-called “positive feedback” in the climate system – both worsened by warming, and also making warming worse.