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It isn’t clear that forest management would prevent bushfires. The consensus amongst the experts and royal commissions seems to be that there is no effective pr

by Gatsky 7y ago

It isn’t clear that forest management would prevent bushfires. The consensus amongst the experts and royal commissions seems to be that there is no effective prevention. There are harm minimisation strategies, but that would largely involve telling people where to live and some major restructuring of small urban centres. I can conceive of a very expensive prevention strategy, with a real time detection system based on satellite imagery and distributed sensors, and then finding a way to put out early fires with minimum latency, maybe with advanced drones or some other very capable and numerous aerial vehicles. But that would cost billions.

anon463637 7y ago
The weather was getting increasingly too dry to conduct controlled-/back-burns and the burns that were set were growing more and more out-of-control. So the burns decreased and the fuel loads increased until a massive fire tore through, making this season far, far worse. In Paradise before the Camp Fire, there hadn't been rain for 200+ days. You can't put out every fire instantly as was tried in the past because that would build up fuels to devastating wildfire amounts. Many species evolved with fire... heck, my mom's oleanders in her front yard look even healthier than before the fire a year and change ago even though they were burned to blackened crisps. Much like smoking cigarettes, it's difficult to point to which one caused lung cancer, but surely the sum of enough of them did cause it as much as the hockey-stick CO2 and temperature increases, coral bleaching, insect/bird apocalypse and Arctic sea ice declining to an imminent blue ocean event are caused by the sum total of human activities polluting GHGs into the environment over decades.
- Gatsky 7y ago
  Well I don’t think it is one or the other. Fuel reduction is important, but it doesn’t seem sufficient. My understanding is that controlled burning had been done close to the prescribed cap.

by Gatsky 7y ago

anon463637 7y ago

The weather was getting increasingly too dry to conduct controlled-/back-burns and the burns that were set were growing more and more out-of-control. So the burns decreased and the fuel loads increased until a massive fire tore through, making this season far, far worse. In Paradise before the Camp Fire, there hadn't been rain for 200+ days. You can't put out every fire instantly as was tried in the past because that would build up fuels to devastating wildfire amounts. Many species evolved with fire... heck, my mom's oleanders in her front yard look even healthier than before the fire a year and change ago even though they were burned to blackened crisps. Much like smoking cigarettes, it's difficult to point to which one caused lung cancer, but surely the sum of enough of them did cause it as much as the hockey-stick CO2 and temperature increases, coral bleaching, insect/bird apocalypse and Arctic sea ice declining to an imminent blue ocean event are caused by the sum total of human activities polluting GHGs into the environment over decades.

Gatsky 7y ago
Well I don’t think it is one or the other. Fuel reduction is important, but it doesn’t seem sufficient. My understanding is that controlled burning had been done close to the prescribed cap.