A consequence of a warming world, more bush/wild fires and a longer wild/bushfire season: the BoM confirmed this in their State of the Climate report. Here is one case, in spring in the US:

Quote:


1. The BoM only reported from 1979 to 1990 odd. It didn't address all the data available. They didn't say the bushfire seasons are worse than they have ever been.

2. The fire in the USA; is it the worst or have there been others worse?

. . .


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-georgia-fire-idUSKBN17X2H2

Increased risk of drought-related wildfires at the heart of the Amazon rainforest adds to vulnerability caused by deforestation at the periphery.

LONDON, 6 May, 2017 – The Amazon rainforest, the greatest and richest of the world’s tropical forests, is vulnerable both from without and within, according to two new studies.

The forested regions in the flood plains at the heart of the Amazon could be more than usually at risk of wildfire that could spread through the rest of the canopy to higher ground. . . .

An international team of researchers reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they matched satellite and field data for the entire Amazon basin, compared forest resilience in those places that were often flooded and never flooded, and analysed the distribution of trees across the river basin.

Rainforest cycles

They found that fire-related savanna dominated the flooded parts when rainfall dropped below 1,500 mm a year. In the upland regions, the forest survived even when rainfall dropped to 1,000 mm a year.

“Our findings suggest that if the Amazonian climate becomes drier, forests will probably collapse first in the seasonally inundated areas,” says Bernardo Flores, a Brazilian scientist now based at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who led the study.

The great rainforest is subject to cycles of drought, and during severe episodes the region is less likely to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and more likely to release it − a process that could only accelerate global warming. And this in turn could only bring further hazard to the rainforest.

It was ravaged by fire after the droughts of 1997 and 2005, and the impact on tree cover and soil fertility was, unexpectedly, more persistent in the floodplains. . . .

Scientists from the University of Maryland in the US looked at data from 2000 to 2013 for the whole vast area of the Legal Amazon Region, an administrative entity that embraces 5 million square kilometres of nine states in Brazil, and is home to 24 million people.

They found that although humans were still invading and clearing primary forest, they were disturbing an even greater area of secondary forest, plantation and woodland.

Altogether, this clearing of regenerated forest and plantation accounted for 53% of gross tree cover loss, the researchers say, and up to 35% of the above-ground carbon released to the atmosphere.

Fire cleared about 9% of the primary forest, with the damage peaking during the droughts of 2005, 2007 and 2010. – Climate News Network

The BoM said that since 1970 the bushfire season had become longer. You are reading things into that that are not there. Do that Elementary Logic course, Lees!

A small but dangerous parasite, the winter tick, is spreading north and west as winters become shorter and now is knocking at Alaska's border.

The winter tick, which has already devastated moose populations in New England and the upper Midwest, has been confirmed in Canada's Yukon Territory and in the Northwest Territories, where it's infecting elk, mule deer and some moose.

"Now that they're moving farther north through Canada, north and west, they're eventually going to arrive here, if they're not here already," said Kimberlee Beckmen, wildlife veterinarian for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "We will be next. It's only a matter of time."

The average tick load on an infested moose is 40,000, and some have been found with 90,000, said Peter Pekins of the University of New Hampshire, one of the lead scientists studying the disastrous impacts of winter ticks on New England moose.

A load of more than 40,000 ticks will use up a calf's entire blood supply in four weeks, Pekins said. "They get anemic, they have declining weight too, and that's just the end of them," he said.

Adult moose are more likely to survive, but reproduction has been affected, with far fewer cows giving birth to twins, he said.

The spread of winter ticks is aided by the warming climate, according to Pekins and other scientists.

Because of the timing of ticks' life events, higher temperatures, earlier springs, later winters — the pattern in a warming world — help them survive, proliferate and attach to moose.

Adults females drop off animals in the spring to lay eggs, Pekins said. For an egg-laying female tick, "Her survival is much higher if it's bare ground than if it's 2 feet of snow," he said.

The resulting larvae climb up vegetation and cluster together in the fall in big balls, which passing moose or deer can pick up — and they are affected by the timing of winter's arrival, Pekins said. "The first snow event is key to killing the larval ticks that are up in the vegetation," he said.

In the Northwest Territories, tick-infected "ghost moose" were first documented in the 1980s, and cases have increased since then.

They have spread as far north as 66 degrees latitude in the territory's Sahtu region, and have also been found on caribou, according to biologists' reports. The Arctic Circle is about 66 degrees north latitude.

Also ominous for Alaska is the result of past research, done by Beckmen's predecessor at Fish and Game, which suggests winter ticks can survive even harsh Fairbanks temperatures.

Randall Zarnke, a former Fish and Game veterinarian, and his research partners tested some captive winter ticks, monitoring adult females and the eggs' hatch success in three Alaska locations, including Fairbanks; many test subjects survived, said the study, published in 1990.

A recent study co-authored by Beckmen analyzed ticks and found 10 different species of ticks had been retrieved from dogs, cats, people, other mammals and wild birds at 29 sites around the state between 2010 and 2016.

Some of the tick species were native, but some were not — and some nonnative species were found on dogs or humans without recent history of travel outside of Alaska, indicating those ticks have already settled in Alaska.

The brown dog tick is one nonnative species that appears to be well-established in the state, Beckmen said.

The study also included the first Alaska record of one species, Ixodes texanus, commonly called the raccoon tick, which was found on a marten.

There is also one tick-borne disease that has long been in Alaska — tularemia. People exposed to tularemia are treated with antibiotics, but those exposures do not always result in formal diagnoses reported to health authorities, Beckmen said.

Other serious tick-borne diseases have yet to be reported in Alaska.

Not so in the European Arctic and subarctic, where tick-borne diseases are rising in a pattern correlated with increasing temperatures.

The shorter winters helps their spread:
Quote:
In the Northwest Territories, tick-infected "ghost moose" were first documented in the 1980s, and cases have increased since then.

They have spread as far north as 66 degrees latitude in the territory's Sahtu region, and have also been found on caribou, according to biologists' reports. The Arctic Circle is about 66 degrees north latitude.

Soaring temperatures in the Arctic have triggered a huge seasonal surge in carbon dioxide emissions from thawing permafrost and may be tipping the region toward becoming a net source of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, a new study shows.

Year-round measurements of CO2 emissions from permafrost have been sparse up to now, and some widely cited studies suggested that rising emissions from thawing permafrost were offset by increased uptake from Arctic forests. But according to the new research, those calculations need to be revised.

A recent report from the Arctic Council found that near-surface permafrost has warmed by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius in the last 10 years,

A study published in April that looked at the impact rising temperatures would have on the permafrost and found that as much as 2.5 million square miles of it could thaw if global temperatures reached 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.

"The important thing in this paper is, it shows where the models fail. They don't capture these cold-season emissions very well," said Donatella Zona of San Diego State University in California, who was not involved in the new research.

Yeah, “just a cycle” eh ’Erbert?

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.

But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.