Scherzer worked into the seventh inning to become the first pitcher in 27 years to get off to a 13-0 start, leading the Detroit Tigers to a 6-2 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays on Wednesday night.

Alex Avila hit a three-run homer and Victor Martinez belted a solo shot as Detroit beat Toronto for the eighth time in 10 meetings.

The Tigers were angry at Colby Rasmus after he knocked Detroit second baseman Omar Infante out of the game with a hard slide in the fourth.

"We're really mad about that slide," Scherzer said. "That's a very dirty play in my book. When you watch it on replay, his spikes are up, he's sliding late."

After he was hit by a pitch from Scherzer, Rasmus slid hard into Infante on Rajai Davis' grounder to shortstop, breaking up the potential double play. Rasmus' right leg caught Infante on the left shin, sending him to the ground in pain.

Infante, who was replaced by Ramon Santiago, needed help walking off the field but X-rays were negative. Tigers manager Jim Leyland said Infante would not play Thursday.

Scherzer said Rasmus deserved to be suspended for injuring Infante, whom he called "a critical reason why we've been good this year."

"That's something where, if we were to retaliate on him, we get suspended but it's really him who should be suspended for making a slide like that," Scherzer said. "He slid way too late. I understand him playing the game hard but that's not a clean play and we didn't like that."

Blue Jays manager John Gibbons declined to comment, saying he didn't want to "inflame" the situation. As for Rasmus, he denied sliding any differently than normal.

"I go in hard every time," Rasmus said. "My intention is never to hurt anybody or nothing like that. I was taught that early in this game and that's how I play it. I didn't mean for nothing bad to happen. But it's no different than any time I ever come in."

Then both benches and bullpens emptied after Tigers outfielder Torii Hunter took exception to being hit by a high pitch from reliever Todd Redmond in the sixth.

"Trust me, it's nothing against Redmond," Hunter said. "It was all Rasmus sliding late with his spikes up."

Hunter took a few steps toward the mound and gestured at Redmond after being hit on the left shoulder. Plate umpire Mike Estabrook quickly steered Hunter away and he was wrapped up by teammate Prince Fielder.

"That's the only way I can vent and I wanted to vent," Hunter said.

No punches were thrown, and the relievers from both teams were pointed back to their bullpens before reaching the infield.

All four umpires huddled and, before play resumed, Estabrook warned both benches.

Scherzer (13-0) allowed two runs and seven hits, struck out eight and walked one in 6 1-3 innings. He's the first pitcher to begin the season with 13 wins and no losses since Roger Clemens won his first 14 decisions for the Boston Red Sox in 1986.

"It might not have been vintage Max but he was really good," Leyland said.

Scherzer also improved to 4-0 with a 1.78 ERA in six career starts against the Blue Jays. He has 139 strikeouts this season, second only to Texas' Yu Darvish among AL starters.

"We're confident when he's on the mound and we're excited to see him get this 13th win," Hunter said.

Bruce Rondon got two outs in the seventh, Drew Smyly pitched the eighth and Joaquin Benoit finished for the Tigers.

The Blue Jays dropped to 3-7 since matching a team record with an 11-game winning streak.

Detroit slugger Miguel Cabrera, who left Tuesday's game in the ninth with a sore lower back, started and batted third but was replaced by Don Kelly in the ninth. Cabrera, who came in with a major league-leading .368 batting average, went 1 for 4 with a walk.

Leyland said Cabrera's back was still bothering him, possibly because of consecutive road series on turf in Tampa Bay and Toronto. He also said Cabrera would get the day off Thursday.

"We've been on turf now for six straight days," Leyland said. "Guys aren't used to that."

The Tigers took advantage of two miscues to score four runs in the second. Fielder was credited with a single when pitcher Josh Johnson couldn't handle his comebacker and Martinez reached on an error by second baseman Emilio Bonifacio before Jhonny Peralta hit an RBI single.

With two outs, Avila drove a 3-2 pitch over the wall in left for his sixth homer.

"We definitely didn't help ourselves there," Gibbons said. "Against the better pitchers, you fall behind like that, it's an uphill battle."

Hunter reached on an error by Johnson to begin the third and scored on a base hit by Martinez, who made it 6-0 when he connected for his seventh homer leading off the fifth.

Johnson (1-3) allowed six runs, one earned, and seven hits in five innings.

Toronto's Mark DeRosa hit a two-out triple in the second but was stranded when center fielder Austin Jackson made a leaping catch at the wall to retire J.P. Arencibia.

"Austin had the opportunity to go up like Michael Jordan and he got up," an appreciative Hunter said.

The Blue Jays broke through against Scherzer in the sixth when Rasmus and Maicer Izturis hit RBI singles.

"They hit some balls hard but I was able to keep it on the ground and keep them to singles and minimize the damage," Scherzer said.

Adam Lind returned to Toronto's lineup after missing two games with a sore back, while catcher Arencibia started after sitting out Tuesday's game with a sore right shoulder.

NOTES: Scherzer threw 113 pitches, 79 strikes. ... Toronto slugger Edwin Encarnacion (left hamstring) missed his third straight game. ... Blue Jays RHP Sergio Santos (right triceps) began a rehab assignment in the Gulf Coast League, giving up one hit and striking out two in one scoreless inning. ... Tigers OF Matt Tuiasosopo (strained left rib cage muscle) began a rehab assignment at Triple-A Toledo. Starting at DH, he went 1 for 1 with two walks and was hit by a pitch. ... Rock star Alice Cooper threw out the first pitch.

Experts are reluctant to paint a broad picture of future fire risk because fires vary so drastically among regions ain high-elevation Colorado, for example, is vastly different than coastal, chaparral-fed flames in California. But many fire scientists agree the doomsday scenario of massive fires that wreak death and destruction can be quashed through smarter development.

"Fire is usually coupled in withlike there's an equal sign between them, but it's much more complicated and interesting than that," said Max Moritz, who directs a fire research and outreach lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's a lot we can learn about the science of fire and climate, but how and where we build on the landscape is a huge, huge part of why we have a problem in this country to begin with."

There are three important types of factors controlling . The first are climate-controlled fire triggers, such as drought, scorching temperatures and winds. The second are shifts in plant communities, including desertification. Lastly, and perhaps most important, is the human factor.

"Although there is evidence to say fires might get worse with climate change, the bigger problem is that the fire impacts are getting worse," said Alexandra Syphard, an ecologist at the Conservation Biology Institute in La Mesa, Calif. "It's really because of development patterns and the increasing number of homes that are placed in wildland vegetation." []

Warmer, drier, more tinder

Climate change has already brought drought and higher temperatures to the western U.S., thus increasing fire frequency by drying and warming landscapes. Currently, more than 44 percent of the contiguous United States is in moderate to exceptional drought conditions. Theis partly due to a climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which also triggered severe droughts in the 1930s and the 1950s.

But global warming means the West is also experiencing warmer, earlier springs and . With less snow to melt, the sun bakes the ground and heats the air making the mountain forests hotter and drier, and raising the risk of wildfires, reported a 2006 study in the journal Science. It also leads to a longer fire season 2.5 months longer, according to a 2010 report by the National Research Council.

More fires will also increase the speed at which plant communities respond to changing temperatures and precipitation, by opening up space for new vegetation to grow, Moritz said.

But not all areas of the West will see more wildfires, Moritz said. In California, a 1.8-degree Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) increase in average temperature will cause more fires in the mountains, such as the Sierra Nevada. But the fire frequency in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts is projected to decrease, according to a 2012 report Moritz prepared for the California Energy Commission. That's because the deserts could become even drier, with less biomass to burn.

Decades of fire suppression also plays a role in the severity of some forest fires, but is less clear in other types of ecosystems. This includes California's chaparral, where research indicates that prescribed burns are not necessary, and may leave the landscape vulnerable to takeover by incredibly flammable, invasive species such as cheatgrass. [Related: ]

Into the wildfire

One of the biggest reasons wildfires are becoming more severe in the West is that more people are moving into the "wildland-urban interface," Syphard said. Many of the new developments feature scattered homes that are hard to reach and difficult for firefighters to defend against encroaching flames. This focuses money and time on saving homes, not preventing fires.

"One of the things that keeps coming out of my studies is that fire frequency tends to be highest when there's low to medium housing density and when homes are scattered in isolated clusters of development," Syphard said. "Something like climate change can really only add insult to injury and make the problem worse."

But with better planning, such asand building codes, the country could lower its risks and its fire losses, experts say.

"The notion of flood plains has been wildly successful, and we keep hoping that something like that could be put into place with fire as well," Syphard said.

Understanding wind

In California, researchers hope local planners will prevent new homes from crawling up canyons in severe wind corridors. The state's seasonal hurricane-force winds, such as the , carry fire embers for miles. Recent studies found the gusts race through narrowly defined zones, which means developers could avoid building on these hazardous slopes.

Fierce winds also caused many of the terrible fire losses in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona in recent years. The investigation continues into the June 30 deaths of 19 firefighters in Yarnell, Ariz., but the fire was spread by gusting winds. Learning how to predict these chaotic winds could prevent loss of life and property.

"Winds are one of the missing pieces of the puzzle," Moritz said. "We focus on climate, temperature and precipitation, but actually, the biggest losses we see are during these days was when there were these horrendous wind gusts. We have major gaps in our knowledge about wind-driven fire weather patterns."

Emailor follow her . Follow us, & . Original article on .

No one ever should die from heat. But every year, about 650 Americans do a death toll greater than tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightning combined. And, in a deadly harbinger of what is worse to come, a new study shows that heat deaths are on the rise.

An(CDC) released this week reported that between June 30 and July 13 of last year the hottest year on record killed 32 people in four states: Maryland, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia. That statistic was four times what has been typical for those states (when compared to the same two-week period averaged over the decade beginning in 1999).

Most of those who perished were at home and alone, and lacked air-conditioning.

From June 30 to July 13 of last year, temperaturesin Maryland, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia ranged from 83 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius) to 104 F (40 C), an average of9.5 F warmer than normal.The heat wave followed a series of powerful thunderstorms, with wind gusts up to 80 miles per hour, that caused widespread damage across parts of the Ohio Valley and the Mid-Atlantic regions. Power outages affected about3.8 million people, and in some areas,lastedas long as eight days. []

The samesaid that a total of 7,233 heat-related deaths occurred in the United States between 1999 and 2009, with three states California, Arizona and Texas accounting for about 40 percent of them.

Since the beginning of civilization, it has not been unusual for a population in a given part of the world to have an occasional. But thanks to climate change, the world is hotter than it's ever been and getting hotter.

"A [killer] heat wave was a rare event in earlier times," says Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. "It's still a rare event, but much less so. In the future, it becomes a common event. It becomes the norm by the end of the century."

Studies suggest that if global warming continues unabated, excess heat-related deaths in the nation could climb to between 3,000 and 5,000 annually by 2050, according to the CDC. Ultimately, about 150,000 or more additional Americans could die in heat waves by the end of the century, according to an analysis of peer-reviewed scientific literature conducted by experts at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In warmer months, heat waves often defined as four or more consecutive days with temperatures higher than what is typical for a particular region stress the human body. They can lead to excessively high body temperatures, and with extended exposure, brain and organ damage, and death. Everyone is at risk, but the elderly, children, the poor or homeless, those who work or exercise outdoors, and people with chronic medical conditions are the most vulnerable.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects a 3.6 F (2 C) warming globally by the middle of the century, regardless of any actions to curb greenhouse gases. By the end of the century, that could grow to an increase of 9 to 11 F (5 to 6 C), under higher emissions, "so if its five degrees warmer normally, and you have a heat wave on top of that, it's going to break records," says Michael Wehner, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The nation is experiencing "almost three record highs for every record low," says Gerald "Jerry" Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "As the climate continues to warm, we can expect more intense, longer lasting and more frequent heat waves in the future. We will still have cold snaps, but fewer of them."

Heat waves have increased globally since 1950, and individual heat waves have become more frequent, longer and hotter. In July 1995, for example, Chicago and Milwaukee both had sweltering heat waves, with more than 700 deaths in Chicago and nearly 100 in Milwaukee. In the summer of 2011, Texas endured a historic string of record-shattering hot days and in 2010 western Russia experienced its hottest July since 1880.

In 2003, tens of thousands of people perished in Europe, where air-conditioning is rare, when during a period of 10 days, temperatures regularly rose above 104 F (40 C). About 35,000 people died, according to the Earth Policy Institute, including nearly 15,000 in France.

"The European, Russian andwere unprecedented events, but still had a certain risk of occurring, even if humans hadn't changed the atmospheric composition," Wehner says. "But humans have changed the atmosphere and the odds have changed."

Dith Stone, now a research scientist in the Berkeley lab, took part in a climate modeling study of the 2003 European heat wave when he was at the University of Oxford, along with colleagues Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre and Myles Allen, also of the University of Oxford.

"We compared the chances of a summer over southern Europe warmer than the previous record, in 2001, between simulations of climate models run under the world we have experienced, with greenhouse gas emissions, changes in the brightness of sun, and such other drivers, against simulations under 'a world that might have been' if human activities had never interfered with the climate," Stone says.

He and his colleagues concluded that human activities that increase greenhouse gases "at least doubled the chance of this happening," Stone says, adding, "by our estimates, the 2003 summer in Europe is about what you can expect to be exceeded every second year by the middle of the century."

In the aftermath of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, city planners asked Donald Wuebbles, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to analyze the futureon the city. Wuebbles used special statistical approaches to predict what would happen under both high and low emissions scenarios.

"If we continue heavily using fossil fuels to the end of the century, we might have three such heat waves every single year," Wuebbles says. "With the low scenario, we'd still get one every other year."

This week, the CDC urged local governments to warn their residents about heat dangers, and increase access to air-conditioning, cooling stations and other public locations. Chicago launched such a plan in the aftermath of the 1995 heat wave, and it paid off.

"In July, 2011, we had another heat wave of comparable size, but instead of 739 deaths, there were only 20 deaths," Wuebbles says. "So we learned that the best response to a heat wave was to prepare for it."

For more information on how to prepare for heat waves, the following information was made available by the CDC:

Extreme Heat and Your Health Website: This new page collects CDC resources on extreme heat in one place and provides information on how to prevent heat-related illnesses and deaths for a variety of audiences. The site can be accessed at

Environmental Public Health Tracking Data: CDC's Environmental Public Health Tracking Network introduces new data on heat-stress hospitalizations and emergency room visits from 2000-2011. This adds to the records already available on extreme temperatures, heat-related deaths and social and environmental conditions that make people vulnerable to extreme heat. Decision makers can use these data to plan how and where to focus efforts to protect the public from extreme heat. The Tracking Network can be accessed at .

Climate Change and Extreme Heat Events Guidebook: This recently released guidebook for state and local health departments describes how to prepare for and respond to extreme heat events and explains how the frequency, duration, and severity of these events are increasing as a result of climate change. An audio file for the recent CDC extreme heat event webinar is also available for tips and guidance. The guidebook is available at

The webinar archive can be accessed at:

Workplace Solutions Bulletin: This recently released NIOSH bulletin provides updated statistics, case studies and recommendations for workers and employers to follow in order to reduce the risk of heat-related illness when working outdoors. The report provides specific guidance, examples and it adds to the available resources that illustrate how extreme heat exposures can lead to occupational illnesses and injuries and possible death. The NIOSH resources are available at:

Read Cimons' most recent Op-Ed:

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This article was originally published on