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National Climate Assessment (No. 4), May 2014. "Climate change is contributing to increases in wildfires across the western US and Alaska." US Forest Facts an

by kls 7y ago

National Climate Assessment (No. 4), May 2014. "Climate change is contributing to increases in wildfires across the western US and Alaska." US Forest Facts and Historical Trends "the U.S. forest area has decreased by less than 1.4 percent over the 90 years from 1907 to 1997" https://file.scirp.org/Html/1-8601410_67248.htm?utm_campaign=8504943975_93629807025&utm_source=lixiaofang&utm_medium=adwords&gclid=Cj0KCQiAnL7yBRD3ARIsAJp_oLbjip4C5uRfMvG58DZBmRDVtokXIUMLTSZRcnd2X9PU8E2VmsbFUYAaAlp9EALw_wcB https://file.scirp.org/Html/1-8601410_67248.htm?utm_campaign... There are also countless predictions on the intensity of hurricanes by scientist related to climate change. But one has to ignore almost 100 years of research on the natural 9 to 13 year cycles of hurricanes to make the models work.

stonogo 7y ago
Unforested land burns too. It burns frequently, in fact. And it tends to destroy crops and kill people. The scirp.org paper you linked, which was published in 'iBusiness,' a journal "dedicated to the latest advancement of Internet and Business," spent a bit of time railing against single-variable studies and then proceeded to make claims based on Google searches for statistics, then evaluating them in context of a single variable. For instance, he measures the slope of the fit-line of the number of wildfires, but completely ignores the size of those fires -- which has increased measurably since the 1980s. It's an easy mistake to make, especially since the author is not a climate expert, a wildfire expert, or any other kind of physical scientist -- he's an economist. I'm hoping it was a mistake, despite his footnotes being a stream of angry ranting about unnamed malpracticioners and assumptions about other people's motives. This kind of surface-skimming faux-literature-review is extremely harmful. I'm confident in that assessment of your selection of this paper because you left the adwords UTM tag in your link. A better paper to support your position would have been this one: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9858-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9858-... which posits with some evidence that some forms of climate change may reduce burn fuel, via killing off vegetation that is sensitive to temperature change. Here is an example of the other side, which focuses on a specific bioregion and does consider both incidence rate and size of fires: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13165 https://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13165 Both of these papers, incidentally, were referred in the very same fourth National Climate Assessment. Please evaluate the qualifications of the people whose papers you read to inform your opinions.
pwinnski 7y ago
How do stats the end in 1997 relate to an assessment from 2014? Is it possible that the 17-year gap is a factor? I'm also not sure this is a doomsday prediction, so it doesn't really address the request.
- kls 7y ago
  It is evidence of a prediction, there are plenty of them out there. I used the first one I found as I have several threads going on, on HN so I was trying to provide a quick link that supported the claim that, there have indeed been predictions by academia and that it is not just journalism engaging in it. These predictions have been going on for decades and they are not getting them right.

by kls 7y ago

stonogo 7y ago

Unforested land burns too. It burns frequently, in fact. And it tends to destroy crops and kill people. The scirp.org paper you linked, which was published in 'iBusiness,' a journal "dedicated to the latest advancement of Internet and Business," spent a bit of time railing against single-variable studies and then proceeded to make claims based on Google searches for statistics, then evaluating them in context of a single variable. For instance, he measures the slope of the fit-line of the number of wildfires, but completely ignores the size of those fires -- which has increased measurably since the 1980s. It's an easy mistake to make, especially since the author is not a climate expert, a wildfire expert, or any other kind of physical scientist -- he's an economist. I'm hoping it was a mistake, despite his footnotes being a stream of angry ranting about unnamed malpracticioners and assumptions about other people's motives. This kind of surface-skimming faux-literature-review is extremely harmful. I'm confident in that assessment of your selection of this paper because you left the adwords UTM tag in your link. A better paper to support your position would have been this one: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9858-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9858-... which posits with some evidence that some forms of climate change may reduce burn fuel, via killing off vegetation that is sensitive to temperature change. Here is an example of the other side, which focuses on a specific bioregion and does consider both incidence rate and size of fires: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13165 https://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13165 Both of these papers, incidentally, were referred in the very same fourth National Climate Assessment. Please evaluate the qualifications of the people whose papers you read to inform your opinions.

pwinnski 7y ago

How do stats the end in 1997 relate to an assessment from 2014? Is it possible that the 17-year gap is a factor? I'm also not sure this is a doomsday prediction, so it doesn't really address the request.

kls 7y ago
It is evidence of a prediction, there are plenty of them out there. I used the first one I found as I have several threads going on, on HN so I was trying to provide a quick link that supported the claim that, there have indeed been predictions by academia and that it is not just journalism engaging in it. These predictions have been going on for decades and they are not getting them right.