The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Is Global Warming Causing More, Larger Wildfires?
Abstract
Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier snowmelt are extending the wildfire season and increasing the intensity of wildfires in the western United States. On 3 April 2006, the U.S. weekly news magazine Time ran a report on global warming with the cover title “Be worried, be very worried. ” Similar coverage of global warming has emerged in other general-interest magazines in recent months, triggered by scientific studies that are finding evidence for adverse impacts of global warming occurring today, not merely projected for future decades. These adverse impacts— from higher probabilities of category 4 and 5 hurricanes (1, 2) to higher rates of sea-level rise (3)—are found not in some distant unpopulated region, but rather right in our own back yards. In this week’s Science Express, Westerling et al. (4) come to a similarly discomforting conclusion for wildfires. They show that warmer temperatures appear to be increasing the duration and intensity of the wildfire season in the western United States. Since 1986, longer, warmer summers have resulted in a fourfold increase of major wildfires and a sixfold increase in the area of forest burned, compared to the period from 1970 to 1986. A similar increase in wildfire activity has
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Warming and earlier spring increase western U.S. forest wildfire activity.
Westerling, A. L., Hidalgo, H. G., Cayan, D. R., & Swetnam, T. W. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1128834 · Cited by 5,176
Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years.
Emanuel, K. (2005) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature03906 · Cited by 4,013
Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment
Webster, P. J., Holland, G. J., Curry, J. A., & Chang, H.-R. (2005) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1116448 · Cited by 3,237
DECLINING MOUNTAIN SNOWPACK IN WESTERN NORTH AMERICA*
Mote, P. W., Hamlet, A. F., Clark, M. P., & Lettenmaier, D. P. (2005) · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · doi:10.1175/bams-86-1-39 · Cited by 1,492
Changes toward Earlier Streamflow Timing across Western North America
Stewart, I. T., Cayan, D. R., & Dettinger, M. D. (2005) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/jcli3321.1 · Cited by 1,341
Changes in the Velocity Structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet
Rignot, E., & Kanagaratnam, P. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1121381 · Cited by 1,224
Flannigan, M. D., Logan, K. A., Amiro, B. D., Skinner, W. R., & Stocks, B. J. (2005) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1007/s10584-005-5935-y · Cited by 874
Detecting the effect of climate change on Canadian forest fires
Gillett, N. P., Weaver, A. J., Zwiers, F. W., & Flannigan, M. D. (2004) · Geophysical Research Letters · doi:10.1029/2004gl020876 · Cited by 735
Continental-Scale Partitioning of Fire Emissions During the 1997 to 2001 El Niño/La Niña Period
van der Werf, G. R., Randerson, J. T., Collatz, G. J., Giglio, L., Kasibhatla, P. S., Arellano, A. F., Olsen, S. C., & Kasischke, E. S. (2004) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1090753 · Cited by 581
Cited by
Bowman, D. M. J. S., Balch, J. K., Artaxo, P., Bond, W. J., Carlson, J. M., Cochrane, M. A., D’Antonio, C. M., DeFries, R. S., Doyle, J. C., Harrison, S. P., et al. (2009) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1163886 · Cited by 3,351
Lal, R. (2008) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2185 · Cited by 1,413
Miller, J. D., Safford, H. D., Crimmins, M., & Thode, A. E. (2009) · Ecosystems · doi:10.1007/s10021-008-9201-9 · Cited by 747
Vegetation Greening and Climate Change Promote Multidecadal Rises of Global Land Evapotranspiration
Zhang, K., Kimball, J. S., Nemani, R. R., Running, S. W., Hong, Y., Gourley, J. J., & Yu, Z. (2015) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/srep15956 · Cited by 445
Self-citationClimate change and wildfire in California
Westerling, A. L., & Bryant, B. P. (2008) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1007/s10584-007-9363-z · Cited by 432
Metadata
- Authors
- Running, S. W.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2006-08-18
- Volume
- 313
- Issue
- 5789
- Pages
- 927-928
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W1543616905
- Cited by
- 362
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 17.04
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Is Global Warming Causing More, Larger Wildfires? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1130370
- The paper
- Running, S. W. (2006). Is Global Warming Causing More, Larger Wildfires? Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1130370
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.