Global Warming And Forest Fires

They're bad and they'll get worse (h/t Stuart Staniford)

Our analysis of 42 years of U.S. Forest Service records for 11 Western states shows that:
The number of large and very large fires on Forest Service land is increasingly dramatically. Compared to
the average year in the 1970’s, in the past decade there were:
• 7 times more fires greater than 10,000 acres each year
• Nearly 5 times more fires larger than 25,000 acres each year
• Twice as many fires over 1,000 acres each year, with an average of more than 100 per year from 2002
through 2011, compared with less than 50 during the 1970’s.
In some states the increase in wildfires is even more dramatic. Since the 1970’s the average number of
fires over 1,000 acres each year has nearly quadrupled in Arizona and Idaho, and has doubled in California,
Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.
On average, wildfires burn twice as much land area each year as they did 40 years ago. In the past decade,
the average annual burn area on Forest Service land in the West has exceeded 2 million acres – more than
all of Yellowstone National Park.
The burn season is two and a half months longer than in the 1970s. Across the West, the first wildfires of
the year are starting earlier and the last fires of the year are starting later, making typical fire years 75 days
longer now than they were 40 years ago.

Wow.  That is not good.