Scientists say that the catastrophic wildfires in the US West offer a preview of the kind of disasters that human-caused climate change could bring. Apocalyptic like fires have been raging across Colorado, Montana and Utah for weeks, and scientists say are a damaging impact of global warming.

Reuter’s reported on a telephone press conferance with four scientists, one of them, Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer, said

What we’re seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like. It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster … This provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future.

The high temperatures that are helping drive these fires are consistent with projections by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said this kind of extreme heat, with little cooling overnight, is one kind of damaging impact of global warming. Others include more severe storms, floods and droughts.

How far reaching and complex the effects of global warming are can be seen by examining the fires in the American west. t. For example,  Steven Running, a forest ecologist at the University of Montana explained that:

Mountain snows melted an average of two weeks earlier than normal this year. That just sets us up for a longer, dryer summer. Then all you need is an ignition source and wind.

More than that, warmer-than-usual winters also allow tree-killing mountain pine beetles to survive the winter and attack Western forests, leaving behind dry wood to fuel wildfires earlier in the season.

While the report and discussion is focused on North America, it is important to see the dramatic and costly – wild fires cost the USA $11 billion in 2011 – nature of climate change, and the vast and complex effects it has, and seemingly will have on the future.

[Source: Reuters]