THREE CONTINENTS FEELING THE HEAT

The Californian summer wildfires were supposed to have been started by lightening and the Athens fire were apparently sparked by human beings.

But what has become more apparent is the uncontrollable nature of the blazes on their of the world's most developed continents.

Both the American and European fire outbreaks have proved extremely difficult to control. Evidently, the green earth is not so green anymore due to the accelerated burning of fossil fuels that have produced enormous amounts of carbon dioxide fuelling Earth's greenhouse effect.

Life threatening fires are causing billions of dollars losses. Rising temperatures are causing water to evaporate from woods leaving only the leaves with oil that can be easily ignited.

Evaporation of water lowers the combustion point the temperature where trees and leaves catch on fire. The greenhouse effect traps the heat within earth's environment. If the woods had sufficient water in the trees wildfires can be controlled with relative ease

But the he overall lowering of the combustion point means that fires are primed for a spring and summer outbreak.

The extension of scorching summers have been a significant feature of weather conditions in the Americas, European and Australian continents over the last few years.

Shorter winters, a scorching and longer summer indicate are the sure fire signs of global warming. People are witnessing the worst wild fires of recent times.

The fire seasons appear to be ongoing. They can now start anywhere, anytime.. The environmental pressure has reached the tipping point.

Droughts also creates jungles where the moisture in the trees and shrubs is at a minimum. After all the food for tree has to move up to the tips of leaves a continuous drought means that a tinder box ready to be set on fire with lowered combustion point.

Dousing of wildfires requires a lot of equipment and large financial resources which is the price humans have to pay for enjoying a luxurious life based on fossil fuel.

What's needed is a much greener Earth there are sufficient number of trees to absorb the carbon dioxide gas to the prevent the climate changing greenhouse effect.

From mid July to early August 2006, a heat wave swept through the southwestern United States. Temperature records were broken at many locations and unusually high humidity levels for this typically arid region led to the deaths of more than 600 people, 25,000 cattle and 70,000 poultry in California alone.

An analysis of this extreme episode carried out by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, put this heat wave in the context of six decades of observed heat waves. Their results suggest that such regional extremes are becoming more and more likely as climate change trends continue.

The team, led by climate scientist Alexander Gershunov, examined meteorological conditions that lead to this and other recorded heat waves, when temperatures rose into the hottest one percent of historical summertime daily and nightly temperatures recorded in California and Nevada since 1948.

The scientists found that heat waves in the region often fall into either of two types: the typical "daytime" events characterized by dry daytime heat and rejuvenating nighttime cooling, or the less typical "nighttime" heat waves characterized additionally by high humidity and hot muggy days and nights.

Since the early 1990s, nighttime heat wave events in California, which historically had been less common, have become more prevalent, increasing in both frequency and intensity. The pinnacle of nighttime heat waves occurred in a 17-day episode during July 2006 when a persistent warm pattern was aggravated by unusually humid conditions, associated with warm ocean waters off Baja California, Mexico.

The 2006 pattern of extreme muggy heat is actually part of a trend of increasing nighttime heat wave activity observed over the last six decades. This trend has accelerated since the 1980s and has become especially prevalent in this decade.

The nighttime heat waves of 2001, 2003 and 2006 were each unprecedented on record when they occurred. The source of the moisture that propelled the heat wave was an area of the eastern Pacific Ocean where a strong increase in sea surface temperatures has been observed and linked to global-scale trends of human-induced warming of the upper oceans.

Humidity is the key ingredient forming muggy nighttime heat waves. That same humidity usually provides some daytime relief by stoking afternoon cloud formation. The authors note that in the 2006 event, however, and to a lesser degree in the next largest 2003 event, the convection that usually triggers afternoon cooling was stifled.

"This conspicuous relative absence of convection in the presence of so much moisture led to intense daytime warming which in turn promoted more intense and extensive nighttime heat, without any observed precedent," the researchers wrote.

While mechanisms driving this regional anomaly are still under investigation, the researchers concluded that the trend towards more frequent and larger-scale muggy heat waves should be expected to continue in the region as climate change evolves over the next decades.