FIRES
Fires are much easier to relate to global warming than tornadoes and hurricanes. Whereas hurricanes and tornadoes rely on more obscure facts, fires can be directly related to global warming, and what's more, they can each cause each other; fires can cause global warming and global warming can cause fires.
Forest fires are some of the deadliest fires around; they can be much harder to put out than ordinary fires because they spread so quickly. And what's worse, they result in what is known as "biomass burning". Biomass is generally defined as trees or plant life. When it's burned, whether it be by man or by natural causes, it releases methane into the air. Methane prevents heat from leaving the atmosphere, thus "trapping" it on earth. And once "trapped", the heat causes a temperature increase, thus resulting in better conditions for fires. It's not a pleasant cycle.
This is a drawing of the infamous Chicago Fire of 1871. Though the fire was not exactly biomass burning, it accurately depicts the potentially devastating effects of fires.
Recently, a fire at Yellowstone National Park produced a healthy amount of data about biomass burning. The responsibility of our Bellarmine correspondents,
Altec Lancing, was to analyze this data. But they haven't gotten back to us yet, so the data remains absent.