{"id":12920,"date":"2015-10-02T07:31:07","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T12:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12920"},"modified":"2015-10-02T07:31:07","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T12:31:07","slug":"a-new-global-tinderbox-the-worlds-northern-forests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12920","title":{"rendered":"A New Global Tinderbox: The World\u2019s Northern Forests"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/feature\/a_new_global_tinderbox_the_worlds_boreal_forests\/2916\/\" target=\"_blank\">A New Global Tinderbox:\u00a0The World\u2019s Northern Forests<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"dek\"><strong><em>Rapidly rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, and increased lightning strikes are leading to ever-larger wildfires in the northern forests of Alaska, Canada, and Siberia, with potentially severe ecological consequences.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Ted Schuur has spent the better part of his career making the connection between climate change and wildfires that are burning an increasing amount of land in Alaska and in sub-Arctic and Arctic forests around the world. So the Northern Arizona University scientist wasn\u2019t all that surprised this summer to find his field stations in the interior of Alaska\u00a0surrounded by fires on three sides. At the time, the state was well on track to recording its second-worst fire season ever.<\/p>\n<div class=\"imageleft\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/images\/features\/AK-forest-service-fire-250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250px\" height=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"credit\">Alaska Fire Service<\/div>\n<div class=\"caption\">Alaska experienced its second-worst fire season in recorded history this summer.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>The surprise came in mid-summer when Schuur took a few days off from his research to attend a meeting in Colorado. He had hoped the trip would give him a break from Alaska\u2019s noxious smoke. The smoke in Boulder, however, was so thick that the state\u2019s Department of Public Health and Environment was advising parents with young children and people with heart disease and respiratory problems to limit their outdoor activities.<\/p>\n<p>As Schuur soon learned, the pall of smoke in Denver had actually drifted down from a large number of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.denverpost.com\/news\/ci_28679278\/smoke-from-northwest-wildfires-bring-haze-denver\" target=\"_blank\">forest fires in the Pacific Northwest<\/a>\u00a0and Canada. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything quite like this summer,\u201d says Schuur. \u201cIt seemed like half the continent was on fire at one time or another.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Schuur wasn\u2019t exaggerating. In June, as many as 25,000 men and women were fighting thousands of wildfires that were burning out of control in\u00a0states such as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/feature\/a_new_global_tinderbox_the_worlds_boreal_forests\/2916\/#correction\">Alaska, Washington, California, and Idaho<\/a>, and in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A New Global Tinderbox:\u00a0The World\u2019s Northern Forests Rapidly rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, and increased lightning strikes are leading to ever-larger wildfires in the northern forests of Alaska, Canada, and Siberia, with potentially severe ecological consequences. Ted Schuur has spent the better part of his career making the connection between climate change and wildfires that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,9516,6401,2710,4849,7163],"class_list":["post-12920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-northern-forests","tag-precipitation","tag-rising-temperatures","tag-wildfires","tag-yale-environment-360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12921,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12920\/revisions\/12921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}