Read here. Map source here. As new research is indicating, the majority of scientists now believe that global warming does not cause an increase in forest fires. The latest peer-reviewed study by Wallenius et al. clearly indicates that forest fire incidents in Siberia have declined over past 100+ years.
This finding (and previous ones) contradicts the IPCC and its Climategate scientists' predictions that global warming would cause an increase of forest fires.
"Working in the northern part of the Irkutsk district of central Siberia, in areas "untouched by modern forestry and agriculture," where "population density is low, with less than 0.1 inhabitant per square kilometer," they studied four individual landscapes"...reconstructing their fire histories from fire-scarred Larix and Pinus trees located in 46 different plots...determined that "in the 18th century, on average, 1.9% of the forests burned annually, but in the 20th century, this figure was only 0.6%," while "the fire cycles for these periods were 52 and 164 years, respectively." And they say that "a further analysis of the period before the enhanced fire control program in the 1950s revealed a significant lengthening in the fire cycle between the periods 1650-1799 and 1800-1949, from 61 to 152 years, respectively." And they report that "a similar phenomenon has been observed in Fennoscandia, southern Canada and the western United States, where the annually burned proportions have decreased since the 19th century..." [Tuomo Wallenius, Markku Larjavaara, Juha Heikkinen, Olga Shibistova 2011: International Journal of Wildland Fire]
Additional forest fire, failed-prediction and peer-reviewed postings
