7 ms·

California Is Built to Burn

81 points by tomohawk 6y ago

dredmorbius 6y ago
Two particularly notable insights, beyond the wildfire history and science, stand out. I'd just been discussing the general failure of moralisingpathologies (disease, mental health, personal failings, and more, when I saw the same attitute had been applied to wildfire and forestry management: [F]ire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. [Bernhard Eduard] Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.” You don't solve systems problems by punishing or torturing them. You address specific mechanisms, risk factors, transmmission vectors, and feedbacks. The other is thinking of wildfire as similar to an epidemic: To me, Fire is the other contagion. Wildfires can be described as a kind of infection! But fire is a lot like a virus. It's not alive, but it depends on the living world to spread. Both seem useful models to apply elsewhere.
- dkarl 6y ago
  [F]ire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. [Bernhard Eduard] Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.” You left out the part where the person whose attitude is described in that quote came from a climate where "the only fires that occur in your part of the world are ones set by people." So, the problem wasn't necessarily driven by a bad moral habit of ascribing all problems to bad moral habits. He applied an idea that made sense in one context in a different context where it didn't make sense, because "he and his colleagues were smart, committed people, but they had no sense of how fire actually functioned outside of Europe." You don't solve systems problems by punishing or torturing them Unless you have more information that this guy had a sadistic authoritarian streak that influenced his policies, I think this is a harsh interpretation.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Context: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e506 https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e...
Fnoord 6y ago
https://archive.is/okkeX https://archive.is/okkeX
01100011 6y ago
In addition to everything that's already been said about fires in CA, one thing I like to bring up is the obliviousness of many people living in the 'wildland interface'. I go hiking a lot at the old mercury mine near San Jose. On my way, I pass through the town of New Almaden. Cute town. 25 mph speed limit signs every 20' reminding you to slow down. The town has a single, two-lane road for access, and nearly every house sits in the shade of oak trees and dry vegetation. I understand the aesthetics, but that sort of naivete is absolutely irresponsible. CA is filled with towns like this. Fortunately it looks like the state might start enforcing fire codes, but I suspect the blowback from people living in these towns will effectively kill the enforcement.
- eplanit 6y ago
  Precisely true. For a state so prescient about the effects of climate change, it's downright hypocritical to foresee droughts and fires but then allow that zoning (it's the same to worse in Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt). All the towns built flush to or into ther forest, little access, and no buffer. They're big on the dramatic things like establishing a carbon exchange or banning gas cars 15 years from now, but obvious and pragmatic preparedness escapes them. Time to balance "heads in the clouds" with "feet on the ground".
  - sjtindell 6y ago
    That definitely comes down to the simple fact that those changes being made to address climate change fears are new. Building all the communities was done a while ago.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    Those towns are quite old. Once a town exists, in a non-totalitarian country, it is virtually impossible to get rid of it, no matter how impractical.
    - clairity 6y ago
      folks shouldn't be trying to get rid of those towns wholesale, just price in the risk and the externalized costs appropriately. easier said than done of course, as our legislative and regulatory apparatus has been broadly subjugated to real estate interests.
Retric 6y ago
Yea, Wildfires don’t need to be a serious issue. Surround a town with pasture as mentioned and it rarely jumps the gap. California is in the odd situation of building next to high risk areas that burn without a buffer. It then adds a lot of ignition sources, like old high voltage power lines, into the mix. If you think of wildfires as a denial of service attack, you realize firefighters simply can’t solve the issue. Controlled burns don’t work well in California for the exact reasons wildfires are such so dangerous. What’s left is infrastructure of one type or another.
- unsrsly 6y ago
  Fire burning through grass and vineyards has been a feature of the latest fire season in northern CA. Given how dry and hot the climate is, only dirt is a sure thing. However with high enough winds, embers can carry long distances and cross fire breaks. For example in 2017, the Tubbs fire crossed highway 101. But I still agree that living close to trees is worse.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Grass burns, yes, but quickly and generally not in conflagrations. Trees are often (though not always, and increasingly less so) largely untouched by grass fire. Back-burning is highly effective on grassfire. Scrub burns ferociously, far more violently than one might expect, thanks to the volatile oils. For much of Southern California, this is a poorly-manageable threat. An entrenched crown fire is a true fury, not to be trifled with. The main fire can burn in a location for hours (rather than minutes), and individual trees or roots for days, even months. The heat from even a modest forest fire is ferocious. I found myself a 1/2--1/4 mile or so from a relatively small burn (an acre or so), and could feel the radiant heat from inside a car. A hillside on fire, or a fire-front overtaking a position, is like a blast furnace, with temps over 1,500°F. Plus choking, blinding smoke, poisonous fumes, low oxygen, and flying and falling flaming debris. A 1km deforested buffer might help, along with building codes.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Last year, many of the houses that burned down in Malibu were miles from the nearest wildfires. It turns out that burning embers can travel miles in the right wind conditions. And pasture land is the worst type of buffer, since dry grass burns easily, and quite hot. NorCal, for example, has lots of pasture land, especially in wine country, and that is one of the reasons that Santa Rosa and Napa have been hit with major fires every year for the past 3 years. There are existing ways to protect a town from burning down, largely related to building designs and materials. The problem is that these all cost money, and the type of people that live in these high-risk mountain towns generally don't have the money to incorporate those features into their buildings.
cameldrv 6y ago
Pyne gave a great talk at the Long Now foundation a few years ago. Highly recommended. https://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fast-fire-deep/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fas...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Oh, nice!
blendo 6y ago
Stephen Pyne is a treasure. More writings here: http://www.stephenpyne.com/ http://www.stephenpyne.com/
boogies 6y ago
> And here's where a turn to renewables, solar and others would be helpful because you can afford to turn off the long-range transmission and rely on locally generated power. Isn’t California actually relying increasingly on buying power from other states⁰ (even all the way from Utah) because of the inherent unreliability of renewables (which caused blackouts recently when they and their fossil fuel backups¹ failed in hot weather)? Edits: Sources: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California says "2018 Total System Electric Generation". California Energy Commission. Retrieved 2020-08-27. "Source: CEC-1304 Power Plant Owners Reporting Form and SB 1305 Reporting Regulations. In-state generation is reported generation from units one megawatt and larger. Data as of June 24, 2019 ... In 2018, total generation for California was 285,488 gigawatt-hours (GWh), ... in-state generation dropped by 6 percent (11,494 GWh) to 194,842 GWh. ... Net imports increased by 6 percent (4,944 GWh) to 90,648 GWh," (emphasis added), and the change seems to have been happening for a while: https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/californias-growing-imported-electricity-problem/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/califor... https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal/californias-hidden-coal-use/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal... [1] Which seem likely to be less robust in the future: “Policymakers also started closing natural gas plants because they produce more CO2 emissions than wind and solar, ignoring warnings that doing so would lead to energy shortages. On Wednesday, California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order asking the state legislature to ban fracking oil and gas, the latter of which provided a majority of the state's energy during the recent blackouts.” https://reason.com/video/how-californias-environmental-mandates-led-to-blackouts/ https://reason.com/video/how-californias-environmental-manda...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  California has relied on out-of-state generation, notably from the Pacific Northwest (Bonneville Power Administration and others) since the mid-20th century if not earlier.
  - boogies 6y ago
    How much usage does “relied” mean? Has it always imported 2-3 times as much as the next state https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2019.04.04/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2019.04.04/main.svg, and is the increase italicized in my earlier comment an exception and not a trend?
woeirua 6y ago
The only way out of the current predicament is to burn your way out. California needs to have massive controlled burns before the wet season every year, especially in non-drought years, to prevent this kind of uncontained fire from ever happening again. Will some of these towns burn to the ground from "controlled" burns getting out of control? Yes. But the alternative is that they simply burn some other time down the road when less can be done to stop it. The simplest way to get people to take wildfire management more seriously is to raise their insurance premiums unless they mitigate the risk. I see tons of homes across the west in the exact same situation as the homes that are burning in CA,OR,WA right now. No one takes it seriously until the fire is bearing down on your town. At that point, it's far too late.
- onezerozeroone 6y ago
  The Federal government manages 57% of California forests. Another 33% are under private control. Very little of the parts of CA that are ablaze are managed by the State. Forest management alone at any level cannot prevent these massive fires from happening. There is this deep, visceral resistance to acknowledging the impact of global climate change and humanity's role in causing it. It certainly feels trite having to repeat it ad nauseam: global climate change is and will continue to cause extreme and unusual weather events including blizzards, hurricanes, droughts, floods, famines, and wildfires. And yes, it will still get "cold" in the winter -- that does not disprove global warming and the resulting climate changes.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    > Forest management alone at any level cannot prevent these massive fires from happening. Do you have a source for that? Even with climate change, surely there are ways to mitigate it with the better forest management everyone is talking about? So that they're no longer "massive" but merely "regular"? Why does it have to be either/or? Climate change is a global issue, California fires are a local one. And Californians seem to be the most climate-conscious of people in any state.
    - 6y ago
bigbubba 6y ago
Food for thought: > Paleoclimatological studies indicate that the last 150 years of California's history have been unusually wet compared to the previous 2000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California
- 01100011 6y ago
  I try to bring this up whenever people are surprised that CA is being CA, but it's just not at sexy as stories of impending doom brought on by AGW. I'm not denying the seriousness of AGW, I just don't think it's the reason my clothes are wrinkled or my dog ran away. The standard CA marketing package doesn't really talk about our normal climatic variations. I think newcomers to the state are surprised at some of the slightly unusual but not unheard of weather and disasters and seek to blame some new, ominous force.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Well, the one thing anti-AWG try to say is that it's just climate, we don't need to change our behaviour. When where long cycle climate change is going to force us to change our behaviour anyway. People thing AWG is just carbon reduction, but it will demand far more change than that.
- jaaron 6y ago
  I think we're seeing more awareness that the situation due to a number of factors: climate change, yes, but overzealous fire suppression and public policy too. Yet when the topic turns to historical California, I'm surprised there isn't more acknowledgement of just how much of the California ecosystem has changed in the last couple hundred years, making comparisons not quite as apt. Invasive grasses, as just one example, have completely changed the landscape.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    Between AGW trends, California's historically hot and dry climate, and invasive grasses/trees, it seems like there isn't much hope on the horizon for California. All signs seem to point to a drier more flammable California continuing to develop.
olivermarks 6y ago
i live in northern California. This article describes the reality on the ground: https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-... The winter months used to be spent executing forestry management, 'raking' with bulldozers and diggers designed to clear the fuel that builds up on the ground and becomes a major fire hazard in the summer and fall months. (You can easily find video of forestry raking and controlled burns online, the same term is used in the UK). Controlled burns to clear fire roads and areas in order to prevent fie spread complete the winter cycle. We are now years behind in clearing the undergrowth that are a major cause of fires. Whether it is federal or state land the environmental lobbyists have been highly effective in challenging these ancient practices, believing they harm our planet. Always keen to cut costs, the state now spends far more seasonally on fire fighting, a hugely lucrative business, than preventative investment in land management. We are at a crisis point but the governor choses to claim it is 'global warming' that is causing these massive fires, when in reality the far greater issue, which could be quickly rectified, is lack of forestry and vegetation management. We are now in a situation where logging mills have burnt in Oregon, making it even harder to keep up with processing wood and adding to the cost of housing. While California burns we are importing construction timber from Canada.
- mistrial9 6y ago
  this is factually flawed -- most forest lands in California are owned and managed by Federal Department of Interior and/or large timber interests
  - olivermarks 6y ago
    Correct. The reality is it doesn't matter who 'owns' land if you're not allowed to manage it for fire prevention because of endless legal challenges. 'major disinfo with an agenda' is not appropriate language on HN. i live in Cal, I am extremely interested in solving the fire crisis and I have no business or political beliefs associated with the timber industry.
    - 6y ago
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/okkeX https://archive.is/okkeX
ElijahLynn 6y ago
About 20 years ago, when I was 17ish, I used to work for an arborist in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, west of Denver, his name was Joey (something like Arbor One tree care if I recall correctly). We performed fire mitigation and forest thinning so that if a fire happened near a structure then the fire fighters might actually have a chance to save it. If no fire mitigation was performed then they would definitely not even try. He told me that by not letting burning take its course, the forest floor accumulates a massive amount of fuel and then when it does burn, it burns much hotter than it normally would and effectively sanitizes the forest floor and regrowth takes years instead of weeks/months because it got too hot and killed everything. As mentioned in the article, we civilized humans really should be letting things burn, at a lower temperature and more frequently and avoid the fuel build up that scorches our land for years on end. This is the way forward.

81 points by tomohawk 6y ago

Two particularly notable insights, beyond the wildfire history and science, stand out. I'd just been discussing the general failure of moralisingpathologies (disease, mental health, personal failings, and more, when I saw the same attitute had been applied to wildfire and forestry management: [F]ire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. [Bernhard Eduard] Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.” You don't solve systems problems by punishing or torturing them. You address specific mechanisms, risk factors, transmmission vectors, and feedbacks. The other is thinking of wildfire as similar to an epidemic: To me, Fire is the other contagion. Wildfires can be described as a kind of infection! But fire is a lot like a virus. It's not alive, but it depends on the living world to spread. Both seem useful models to apply elsewhere.

dkarl 6y ago
[F]ire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. [Bernhard Eduard] Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.” You left out the part where the person whose attitude is described in that quote came from a climate where "the only fires that occur in your part of the world are ones set by people." So, the problem wasn't necessarily driven by a bad moral habit of ascribing all problems to bad moral habits. He applied an idea that made sense in one context in a different context where it didn't make sense, because "he and his colleagues were smart, committed people, but they had no sense of how fire actually functioned outside of Europe." You don't solve systems problems by punishing or torturing them Unless you have more information that this guy had a sadistic authoritarian streak that influenced his policies, I think this is a harsh interpretation.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Context: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e506 https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e...

Fnoord 6y ago

https://archive.is/okkeX https://archive.is/okkeX

01100011 6y ago

In addition to everything that's already been said about fires in CA, one thing I like to bring up is the obliviousness of many people living in the 'wildland interface'. I go hiking a lot at the old mercury mine near San Jose. On my way, I pass through the town of New Almaden. Cute town. 25 mph speed limit signs every 20' reminding you to slow down. The town has a single, two-lane road for access, and nearly every house sits in the shade of oak trees and dry vegetation. I understand the aesthetics, but that sort of naivete is absolutely irresponsible. CA is filled with towns like this. Fortunately it looks like the state might start enforcing fire codes, but I suspect the blowback from people living in these towns will effectively kill the enforcement.

eplanit 6y ago
Precisely true. For a state so prescient about the effects of climate change, it's downright hypocritical to foresee droughts and fires but then allow that zoning (it's the same to worse in Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt). All the towns built flush to or into ther forest, little access, and no buffer. They're big on the dramatic things like establishing a carbon exchange or banning gas cars 15 years from now, but obvious and pragmatic preparedness escapes them. Time to balance "heads in the clouds" with "feet on the ground".
- sjtindell 6y ago
  That definitely comes down to the simple fact that those changes being made to address climate change fears are new. Building all the communities was done a while ago.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Those towns are quite old. Once a town exists, in a non-totalitarian country, it is virtually impossible to get rid of it, no matter how impractical.
  - clairity 6y ago
    folks shouldn't be trying to get rid of those towns wholesale, just price in the risk and the externalized costs appropriately. easier said than done of course, as our legislative and regulatory apparatus has been broadly subjugated to real estate interests.

Retric 6y ago

Yea, Wildfires don’t need to be a serious issue. Surround a town with pasture as mentioned and it rarely jumps the gap. California is in the odd situation of building next to high risk areas that burn without a buffer. It then adds a lot of ignition sources, like old high voltage power lines, into the mix. If you think of wildfires as a denial of service attack, you realize firefighters simply can’t solve the issue. Controlled burns don’t work well in California for the exact reasons wildfires are such so dangerous. What’s left is infrastructure of one type or another.

unsrsly 6y ago
Fire burning through grass and vineyards has been a feature of the latest fire season in northern CA. Given how dry and hot the climate is, only dirt is a sure thing. However with high enough winds, embers can carry long distances and cross fire breaks. For example in 2017, the Tubbs fire crossed highway 101. But I still agree that living close to trees is worse.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Grass burns, yes, but quickly and generally not in conflagrations. Trees are often (though not always, and increasingly less so) largely untouched by grass fire. Back-burning is highly effective on grassfire. Scrub burns ferociously, far more violently than one might expect, thanks to the volatile oils. For much of Southern California, this is a poorly-manageable threat. An entrenched crown fire is a true fury, not to be trifled with. The main fire can burn in a location for hours (rather than minutes), and individual trees or roots for days, even months. The heat from even a modest forest fire is ferocious. I found myself a 1/2--1/4 mile or so from a relatively small burn (an acre or so), and could feel the radiant heat from inside a car. A hillside on fire, or a fire-front overtaking a position, is like a blast furnace, with temps over 1,500°F. Plus choking, blinding smoke, poisonous fumes, low oxygen, and flying and falling flaming debris. A 1km deforested buffer might help, along with building codes.
gamblor956 6y ago
Last year, many of the houses that burned down in Malibu were miles from the nearest wildfires. It turns out that burning embers can travel miles in the right wind conditions. And pasture land is the worst type of buffer, since dry grass burns easily, and quite hot. NorCal, for example, has lots of pasture land, especially in wine country, and that is one of the reasons that Santa Rosa and Napa have been hit with major fires every year for the past 3 years. There are existing ways to protect a town from burning down, largely related to building designs and materials. The problem is that these all cost money, and the type of people that live in these high-risk mountain towns generally don't have the money to incorporate those features into their buildings.

cameldrv 6y ago

Pyne gave a great talk at the Long Now foundation a few years ago. Highly recommended. https://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fast-fire-deep/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fas...

dredmorbius 6y ago
Oh, nice!

blendo 6y ago

Stephen Pyne is a treasure. More writings here: http://www.stephenpyne.com/ http://www.stephenpyne.com/

boogies 6y ago

> And here's where a turn to renewables, solar and others would be helpful because you can afford to turn off the long-range transmission and rely on locally generated power. Isn’t California actually relying increasingly on buying power from other states⁰ (even all the way from Utah) because of the inherent unreliability of renewables (which caused blackouts recently when they and their fossil fuel backups¹ failed in hot weather)? Edits: Sources: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California says "2018 Total System Electric Generation". California Energy Commission. Retrieved 2020-08-27. "Source: CEC-1304 Power Plant Owners Reporting Form and SB 1305 Reporting Regulations. In-state generation is reported generation from units one megawatt and larger. Data as of June 24, 2019 ... In 2018, total generation for California was 285,488 gigawatt-hours (GWh), ... in-state generation dropped by 6 percent (11,494 GWh) to 194,842 GWh. ... Net imports increased by 6 percent (4,944 GWh) to 90,648 GWh," (emphasis added), and the change seems to have been happening for a while: https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/californias-growing-imported-electricity-problem/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/califor... https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal/californias-hidden-coal-use/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal... [1] Which seem likely to be less robust in the future: “Policymakers also started closing natural gas plants because they produce more CO2 emissions than wind and solar, ignoring warnings that doing so would lead to energy shortages. On Wednesday, California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order asking the state legislature to ban fracking oil and gas, the latter of which provided a majority of the state's energy during the recent blackouts.” https://reason.com/video/how-californias-environmental-mandates-led-to-blackouts/ https://reason.com/video/how-californias-environmental-manda...

dredmorbius 6y ago
California has relied on out-of-state generation, notably from the Pacific Northwest (Bonneville Power Administration and others) since the mid-20th century if not earlier.
- boogies 6y ago
  How much usage does “relied” mean? Has it always imported 2-3 times as much as the next state https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2019.04.04/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2019.04.04/main.svg, and is the increase italicized in my earlier comment an exception and not a trend?

woeirua 6y ago

The only way out of the current predicament is to burn your way out. California needs to have massive controlled burns before the wet season every year, especially in non-drought years, to prevent this kind of uncontained fire from ever happening again. Will some of these towns burn to the ground from "controlled" burns getting out of control? Yes. But the alternative is that they simply burn some other time down the road when less can be done to stop it. The simplest way to get people to take wildfire management more seriously is to raise their insurance premiums unless they mitigate the risk. I see tons of homes across the west in the exact same situation as the homes that are burning in CA,OR,WA right now. No one takes it seriously until the fire is bearing down on your town. At that point, it's far too late.

onezerozeroone 6y ago
The Federal government manages 57% of California forests. Another 33% are under private control. Very little of the parts of CA that are ablaze are managed by the State. Forest management alone at any level cannot prevent these massive fires from happening. There is this deep, visceral resistance to acknowledging the impact of global climate change and humanity's role in causing it. It certainly feels trite having to repeat it ad nauseam: global climate change is and will continue to cause extreme and unusual weather events including blizzards, hurricanes, droughts, floods, famines, and wildfires. And yes, it will still get "cold" in the winter -- that does not disprove global warming and the resulting climate changes.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  > Forest management alone at any level cannot prevent these massive fires from happening. Do you have a source for that? Even with climate change, surely there are ways to mitigate it with the better forest management everyone is talking about? So that they're no longer "massive" but merely "regular"? Why does it have to be either/or? Climate change is a global issue, California fires are a local one. And Californians seem to be the most climate-conscious of people in any state.
  - 6y ago

bigbubba 6y ago

Food for thought: > Paleoclimatological studies indicate that the last 150 years of California's history have been unusually wet compared to the previous 2000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California

01100011 6y ago
I try to bring this up whenever people are surprised that CA is being CA, but it's just not at sexy as stories of impending doom brought on by AGW. I'm not denying the seriousness of AGW, I just don't think it's the reason my clothes are wrinkled or my dog ran away. The standard CA marketing package doesn't really talk about our normal climatic variations. I think newcomers to the state are surprised at some of the slightly unusual but not unheard of weather and disasters and seek to blame some new, ominous force.
- pixl97 6y ago
  Well, the one thing anti-AWG try to say is that it's just climate, we don't need to change our behaviour. When where long cycle climate change is going to force us to change our behaviour anyway. People thing AWG is just carbon reduction, but it will demand far more change than that.
jaaron 6y ago
I think we're seeing more awareness that the situation due to a number of factors: climate change, yes, but overzealous fire suppression and public policy too. Yet when the topic turns to historical California, I'm surprised there isn't more acknowledgement of just how much of the California ecosystem has changed in the last couple hundred years, making comparisons not quite as apt. Invasive grasses, as just one example, have completely changed the landscape.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Between AGW trends, California's historically hot and dry climate, and invasive grasses/trees, it seems like there isn't much hope on the horizon for California. All signs seem to point to a drier more flammable California continuing to develop.

olivermarks 6y ago

i live in northern California. This article describes the reality on the ground: https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-... The winter months used to be spent executing forestry management, 'raking' with bulldozers and diggers designed to clear the fuel that builds up on the ground and becomes a major fire hazard in the summer and fall months. (You can easily find video of forestry raking and controlled burns online, the same term is used in the UK). Controlled burns to clear fire roads and areas in order to prevent fie spread complete the winter cycle. We are now years behind in clearing the undergrowth that are a major cause of fires. Whether it is federal or state land the environmental lobbyists have been highly effective in challenging these ancient practices, believing they harm our planet. Always keen to cut costs, the state now spends far more seasonally on fire fighting, a hugely lucrative business, than preventative investment in land management. We are at a crisis point but the governor choses to claim it is 'global warming' that is causing these massive fires, when in reality the far greater issue, which could be quickly rectified, is lack of forestry and vegetation management. We are now in a situation where logging mills have burnt in Oregon, making it even harder to keep up with processing wood and adding to the cost of housing. While California burns we are importing construction timber from Canada.

mistrial9 6y ago
this is factually flawed -- most forest lands in California are owned and managed by Federal Department of Interior and/or large timber interests
- olivermarks 6y ago
  Correct. The reality is it doesn't matter who 'owns' land if you're not allowed to manage it for fire prevention because of endless legal challenges. 'major disinfo with an agenda' is not appropriate language on HN. i live in Cal, I am extremely interested in solving the fire crisis and I have no business or political beliefs associated with the timber industry.
  - 6y ago

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/okkeX https://archive.is/okkeX

ElijahLynn 6y ago

About 20 years ago, when I was 17ish, I used to work for an arborist in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, west of Denver, his name was Joey (something like Arbor One tree care if I recall correctly). We performed fire mitigation and forest thinning so that if a fire happened near a structure then the fire fighters might actually have a chance to save it. If no fire mitigation was performed then they would definitely not even try. He told me that by not letting burning take its course, the forest floor accumulates a massive amount of fuel and then when it does burn, it burns much hotter than it normally would and effectively sanitizes the forest floor and regrowth takes years instead of weeks/months because it got too hot and killed everything. As mentioned in the article, we civilized humans really should be letting things burn, at a lower temperature and more frequently and avoid the fuel build up that scorches our land for years on end. This is the way forward.