6 ms·

Very little to do with climate change. Mostly to do with lousy forest management.

by pbreit 6y ago

missedthecue 6y ago
Of all the takes out there, this one seems most reasonable. There are plenty of areas with much more forest per square km that are not up in flames year after year, but they're just as impacted by the global climate. No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA, and why it has nothing to do with the decades and decades of fire suppression they've been doing that have built up a huge tinder box in a drought-prone area.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  I guess it'll take some more reading to understand this. Upshot: due to unprecedented warming and drying, California had tens of millions of dead trees. No amount of 'forest management' would have prevented this. And it was due to large regional climate changes. This 'whistling in the dark' about simple explanations for climate change is not helping anybody. <edit> Yes there was lots of thrashing around, and not all of it helped. But the last decade of drought created simultaneously 150 Million dead trees. It might have taken the combined industrial output of California for a decade to get them all cut, hauled and disposed. There was no time, most of the trees were in impassable terrain, and heck that activity would inevitably have created a few unintentional fires. What was done or not done, couldn't have blunted the tsunami of dead wood that inundated the state. Arguing over a teacup in a tempest is fun but not informative.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem?
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      150 million dead trees. The problem is larger than any civil activity can encompass.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        Not sure about that. We already harvest half a billion trees every year. Those mechanized harvester-loaders are almost disturbingly effective. It doesn't seem like it would take very long to thin all those snags, if we made it a real policy goal.
        JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Not sure of those numbers. 3-4B board feet. 100 ft per tree? We're talking 30M trees. With the combined effort of all the equipment in every state, and usually in groomed tree farms. Not the mountains and wild places of California. And with an end result of millions of trash trees, not good lumber. It would arguably have cost more than the entire US lumber industry earns.
    - pvaldes 6y ago
      Thinning the tree population would not achieve anything. Many insects can fly several Km routinely. Bees do it constantly. The beetles probably could do it also. So either you remove all trees in a radius of lets say "4 km" or beetles just keep growint. But if you remove all trees in a few Km, then you don't have a forest anymore (neither water, wood, or the other environmental services that the forest provides). More pesticides equal to less birds and bats. Not having birds and bats plus sucking all the water that trees need equal to more beetles. The disdain of politicians (and their voters) for this themes is the root of this problem.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        So, you didn't read the article? It doesn't say that making the trees further apart prevents the movement of the beetles, it's saying that the tree density is so high that the individual trees can't draw enough water to produce the sap that protects them from the beetles.
        pvaldes 6y ago
        In reply to: >> Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem? Thinning the tree population wouldn't solve it. Removing part of the dead trees could mitigate it but those trees are essential to beetle predators like woodpeckers. Things in ecology are complex and always connected. The real problem here is the lack of water.
        jeffbee 6y ago
        A snag doesn't draw any water, though, so it seems like you could leave them standing while culling live trees to reduce the areal water demand, right?
        pvaldes 6y ago
        > A snag doesn't draw any water I had seen this narrative lots of times before. "Fix it for me for free whereas I take the money" because you like the trees, don't you?. Not. Sorry. Is nor is my mission, neither I have the private resources to "draw any water" or fix the consequences of the greed of others. I assume that US government could fix the problem if they wanted, so don't blame on the messenger, please. The current narrative seems to be "forests are expensive so lets remove them and problem solved". Will not work.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    There is a direct correlation between fire suppressive actions carried out over the last hundred or so years, and the increase of more devastating wildfires in California. The state government made it a practice to stifle any potential wildfire for so long that a significant overgrowth and buildup of flammable materials has occurred, which otherwise would have burned in minor incidents over the years. Mother Jones had a great piece on this - https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of-fire-suppression-is-why-california-is-in-flames/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of...
    - bcrosby95 6y ago
      Maybe for far Northern California and the Sierras. But Southern California doesn't have much in the way of flammable materials other than grass and shrubs. And they grow back very quickly. One of my in-laws had to be evacuated 2 times in 3 years due to a fire in the same area.
    - abernard1 6y ago
      > There is a direct correlation between fire suppressive actions carried out over the last hundred or so years, and the increase of more devastating wildfires in California. And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. It's only been the last 20 years--when underbrush management was prohibited because of environmental concerns--that we've had this problem.
      - missedthecue 6y ago
        Because the consequences of fire suppression take a fair bit of time to accumulate. You don't get 30 years of overgrown dry forest 1 year into fire suppression policies.
        abernard1 6y ago
        But you do when those policies _began_ in the 70s. California's prohibiting underbrush removal due to environmentalism was just the preview of Delta Smelt Dust Bowls last decade. (The Dust Bowl, also being something that humans fixed with industrial policy, and the reason Oklahoma, despite no natural lakes, has more lakefront property per capita than anywhere in the U.S.)
- abernard1 6y ago
  > There are plenty of areas with much more forest per square km that are not up in flames year after year, but they're just as impacted by the global climate. And not only that, but California didn't use to have this problem. It used to be that as a condition for allowing loggers to harvest trees (1 out of 200), they'd have to clear the underbrush. It is zero cost to fix this problem. There would be more trees and fewer fires if CA just allowed the policies they had in the 90s. Unbelievable incompetence.
- tims33 6y ago
  What are those areas? And do any of them have a similar climate to CA?
- morsch 6y ago
  I don't know anything about forestry practices in California, but these are record breaking years for wildfires around the world: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/wildfires-globally.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/wildfires-globall...
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I don't disagree with your main point, but Oregon and Washington has had similar fire development.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  California exists in a weird transition zone, especially in the South of the state, between the Mediterranean coastal zone and the Eastern deserts. As a result, its forests can get real hot and dry. A drive from the San Bernardino basin up highway 38 to Big Bear either in real life, or on Google StreetView will show how dry, hot areas very gradually transition into forest. This is how a stupid gender-reveal party ignited 23,000 acres of hot, dry transition zone between hot desert, and alpine forest, resulting in me not being able to see across the street. https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7148/ https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7148/
- jmcqk6 6y ago
  >No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA Well for one thing, let's start with the fact that this is wrong. CA is not the only state experiencing dangerous and widespread forest fires. It just seems to be the only state that is actually being discussed here.
- detaro 6y ago
  Last I checked Portland isn't in CA, and they've been quite unhappy this year.
nyghtly 6y ago
Yes, forest management is an important factor. No, it does not have "very little" to do with climate change. We just had the worst heat wave in the recorded history of CA. To suggest that climate change is an insignificant factor is just plain wrong. > In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147256/california-heatwave-fits-a-trend https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147256/california-h...
- jointpdf 6y ago
  Another factor is the indirect effects of climate change that can cause nonlinear impacts. E.g. a single unusually warm winter could cause the population of bark beetles to swell, weakening or wiping out large swaths of trees (this has happened in Yosemite for example). Source: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/8/602/305152 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/8/602/305152
ehnto 6y ago
I'm in agreeance that it's mostly forest management, but it's poor management in part due to a lack of response to the increased risk of fire climate change is introducing. Many regions are experiencing prolonged, record breaking dry spells. Some of the same regions also experienced well above average catastrophic fire seasons these past 12 months or so. I don't think it would be bold of me to link the two.
carabiner 6y ago
Isn't this basically what Trump has been saying? Hot weather (which isn't the same as climate) + overzealous suppression = tinder box forests that lead to explosive wildfires we cannot control.

Very little to do with climate change. Mostly to do with lousy forest management.

by pbreit 6y ago

Very little to do with climate change. Mostly to do with lousy forest management.

Of all the takes out there, this one seems most reasonable. There are plenty of areas with much more forest per square km that are not up in flames year after year, but they're just as impacted by the global climate. No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA, and why it has nothing to do with the decades and decades of fire suppression they've been doing that have built up a huge tinder box in a drought-prone area.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
I guess it'll take some more reading to understand this. Upshot: due to unprecedented warming and drying, California had tens of millions of dead trees. No amount of 'forest management' would have prevented this. And it was due to large regional climate changes. This 'whistling in the dark' about simple explanations for climate change is not helping anybody. <edit> Yes there was lots of thrashing around, and not all of it helped. But the last decade of drought created simultaneously 150 Million dead trees. It might have taken the combined industrial output of California for a decade to get them all cut, hauled and disposed. There was no time, most of the trees were in impassable terrain, and heck that activity would inevitably have created a few unintentional fires. What was done or not done, couldn't have blunted the tsunami of dead wood that inundated the state. Arguing over a teacup in a tempest is fun but not informative.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem?
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    150 million dead trees. The problem is larger than any civil activity can encompass.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Not sure about that. We already harvest half a billion trees every year. Those mechanized harvester-loaders are almost disturbingly effective. It doesn't seem like it would take very long to thin all those snags, if we made it a real policy goal.
      - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Not sure of those numbers. 3-4B board feet. 100 ft per tree? We're talking 30M trees. With the combined effort of all the equipment in every state, and usually in groomed tree farms. Not the mountains and wild places of California. And with an end result of millions of trash trees, not good lumber. It would arguably have cost more than the entire US lumber industry earns.
  - pvaldes 6y ago
    Thinning the tree population would not achieve anything. Many insects can fly several Km routinely. Bees do it constantly. The beetles probably could do it also. So either you remove all trees in a radius of lets say "4 km" or beetles just keep growint. But if you remove all trees in a few Km, then you don't have a forest anymore (neither water, wood, or the other environmental services that the forest provides). More pesticides equal to less birds and bats. Not having birds and bats plus sucking all the water that trees need equal to more beetles. The disdain of politicians (and their voters) for this themes is the root of this problem.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      So, you didn't read the article? It doesn't say that making the trees further apart prevents the movement of the beetles, it's saying that the tree density is so high that the individual trees can't draw enough water to produce the sap that protects them from the beetles.
      - pvaldes 6y ago
        In reply to: >> Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem? Thinning the tree population wouldn't solve it. Removing part of the dead trees could mitigate it but those trees are essential to beetle predators like woodpeckers. Things in ecology are complex and always connected. The real problem here is the lack of water.
        jeffbee 6y ago
        A snag doesn't draw any water, though, so it seems like you could leave them standing while culling live trees to reduce the areal water demand, right?
        pvaldes 6y ago
        > A snag doesn't draw any water I had seen this narrative lots of times before. "Fix it for me for free whereas I take the money" because you like the trees, don't you?. Not. Sorry. Is nor is my mission, neither I have the private resources to "draw any water" or fix the consequences of the greed of others. I assume that US government could fix the problem if they wanted, so don't blame on the messenger, please. The current narrative seems to be "forests are expensive so lets remove them and problem solved". Will not work.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  There is a direct correlation between fire suppressive actions carried out over the last hundred or so years, and the increase of more devastating wildfires in California. The state government made it a practice to stifle any potential wildfire for so long that a significant overgrowth and buildup of flammable materials has occurred, which otherwise would have burned in minor incidents over the years. Mother Jones had a great piece on this - https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of-fire-suppression-is-why-california-is-in-flames/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of...
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    Maybe for far Northern California and the Sierras. But Southern California doesn't have much in the way of flammable materials other than grass and shrubs. And they grow back very quickly. One of my in-laws had to be evacuated 2 times in 3 years due to a fire in the same area.
  - abernard1 6y ago
    > There is a direct correlation between fire suppressive actions carried out over the last hundred or so years, and the increase of more devastating wildfires in California. And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. It's only been the last 20 years--when underbrush management was prohibited because of environmental concerns--that we've had this problem.
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      Because the consequences of fire suppression take a fair bit of time to accumulate. You don't get 30 years of overgrown dry forest 1 year into fire suppression policies.
      - abernard1 6y ago
        But you do when those policies _began_ in the 70s. California's prohibiting underbrush removal due to environmentalism was just the preview of Delta Smelt Dust Bowls last decade. (The Dust Bowl, also being something that humans fixed with industrial policy, and the reason Oklahoma, despite no natural lakes, has more lakefront property per capita than anywhere in the U.S.)
abernard1 6y ago
> There are plenty of areas with much more forest per square km that are not up in flames year after year, but they're just as impacted by the global climate. And not only that, but California didn't use to have this problem. It used to be that as a condition for allowing loggers to harvest trees (1 out of 200), they'd have to clear the underbrush. It is zero cost to fix this problem. There would be more trees and fewer fires if CA just allowed the policies they had in the 90s. Unbelievable incompetence.
tims33 6y ago
What are those areas? And do any of them have a similar climate to CA?
morsch 6y ago
I don't know anything about forestry practices in California, but these are record breaking years for wildfires around the world: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/wildfires-globally.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/wildfires-globall...
BurningFrog 6y ago
I don't disagree with your main point, but Oregon and Washington has had similar fire development.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
California exists in a weird transition zone, especially in the South of the state, between the Mediterranean coastal zone and the Eastern deserts. As a result, its forests can get real hot and dry. A drive from the San Bernardino basin up highway 38 to Big Bear either in real life, or on Google StreetView will show how dry, hot areas very gradually transition into forest. This is how a stupid gender-reveal party ignited 23,000 acres of hot, dry transition zone between hot desert, and alpine forest, resulting in me not being able to see across the street. https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7148/ https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7148/
jmcqk6 6y ago
>No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA Well for one thing, let's start with the fact that this is wrong. CA is not the only state experiencing dangerous and widespread forest fires. It just seems to be the only state that is actually being discussed here.
detaro 6y ago
Last I checked Portland isn't in CA, and they've been quite unhappy this year.

nyghtly 6y ago

Yes, forest management is an important factor. No, it does not have "very little" to do with climate change. We just had the worst heat wave in the recorded history of CA. To suggest that climate change is an insignificant factor is just plain wrong. > In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147256/california-heatwave-fits-a-trend https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147256/california-h...

jointpdf 6y ago
Another factor is the indirect effects of climate change that can cause nonlinear impacts. E.g. a single unusually warm winter could cause the population of bark beetles to swell, weakening or wiping out large swaths of trees (this has happened in Yosemite for example). Source: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/8/602/305152 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/8/602/305152

ehnto 6y ago

I'm in agreeance that it's mostly forest management, but it's poor management in part due to a lack of response to the increased risk of fire climate change is introducing. Many regions are experiencing prolonged, record breaking dry spells. Some of the same regions also experienced well above average catastrophic fire seasons these past 12 months or so. I don't think it would be bold of me to link the two.

carabiner 6y ago

Isn't this basically what Trump has been saying? Hot weather (which isn't the same as climate) + overzealous suppression = tinder box forests that lead to explosive wildfires we cannot control.