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Issue 12
, 2009
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Fired!

Source: ENN, Date: , 2009

A recent report published in ENN states that although Earth is intrinsically a flammable planet due to its cover of carbon-rich vegetation, seasonally dry climates, atmospheric oxygen, widespread lightning and volcano ignitions, the global scope of fire has been revealed only recently by satellite observations available beginning in the 1980s.

The report follows -up on an article published in the April 24 issue of the journal Science. According to the report by this group of 22 experts intentional deforestation fires alone contribute up to one-fifth of the human-caused increase in emissions of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that increases global temperature.

The report further staes that the authors have called on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to fully integrate
fire into their assessments of global climate change, and consider fire-climate feedbacks, which have been so-long absent in global models.

On the other hand, in a similar report published earlier this month in Science Daily states :"Climate change will bring about major shifts in worldwide fire patterns, and those changes are coming fast, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with scientists at Texas Tech University."

The report further reveals the methodology.Researchers used thermal-infrared sensor data obtained between 1996 and 2006 from European Space Agency satellites in their study of pyrogeography – the distribution and behavior of wildfire – on a global scale. They not only got a global view of where wildfires occur, but they determined the common environmental characteristics associated with the risk of those fires. They then incorporated those variables into projections for how future climate scenarios will impact wildfire occurrence worldwide.

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