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Fires!
We've all been following the recent stories of fires in New Mexico and California in Western United States. However, one of the serious problems with global warming is increased fire activity world-wide such as the ring of fire the encircled the planet during the summer of 1998. With NASA's Earth Observatory, we'll be able to monitor such fires from space. For a fascinating look at recent fire activity in Russia and China, check out this webpage on the Earth Observatory site.
There's a wonderful analysis of all this put out several years ago called "The Carbon Bomb," and what it points out is not that the Northern forests (the boreal forests) are burning, but that they are burning at unprecedented high rates--often ten times what we have seen in historical records.
[Editors Note: The Carbon Bomb: Climate Change and the Fate of the Northern Boreal Forests by Greenpeace International. 1994. This report, an extremely through analysis of the Boreal ecosystem under stress. At one time it was available online at Greenpeace but we weren't able to find a link today. We have permission to reprint it for the book Dead Mars, Dying Earth, so we may be able to excerpt it under Forest and Farm in the future.]
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