>>> The increase in wildfires can be largely attributed >>> to the increase in droughts in some areas. > >> Among many other possible explanations. >

>>> The increase in wildfires can be largely attributed >>> to the increase in droughts in some areas. > >> Among many other possible explanations. > > Like what? Drought certainly plays a role, but I think a changing strategy of fire suppression will make it difficult to prove causation from the statistics. A gigantic confounding factor is that the approach to handling forest fires changed dramatically in the timeframe you refer to, with a shift from "put it out immediately" to "let it burn", then a backlash leading to somewhere in the middle: Until around 1970, federal land managers remained obsessed with controlling large fires. But during the 1960s, scientific research increasingly demonstrated the positive role fire played in forest ecology. This led in the early 1970s to a radical change in Forest Service policy—to let fires burn when and where appropriate. From this the "let-burn" policy evolved, though it suffered a setback in the wake of the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Since around 1990, fire suppression efforts and policy have had to take into account exurban sprawl in what is called the wildland-urban interface. http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Policy/Fire/Suppression/Suppression.aspx http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Policy/Fire/Suppression/... Of course this doesn't mean that drought has not caused more fires, but it's going to make "total acres burned per year" very hard to use as evidence. Pielke has written about fire in other places: "Influence of Location, Population, and Climate on Building Damage and Fatalities due to Australian Bushfire: 1925–2009" http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/2010.41.pdf http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/20... I only skimmed it quickly, but it seems to claim that once you've normalize for development, the severity of bush fires in Australia has not changed significantly over the century. Given the difficulty of separating policy from climate, I'm not sure I'd ever take it as firm proof, but it probably gives more insight into Pielke's thought process.