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> And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were. 100 years ago wa

> And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were. 100 years ago was during an unusually wet period of Californian history.

abernard1 6y ago
> Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were. Which is my point. Modern industrial forest management figured out how to fix this problem. There were economic incentives for lumber, and cooperative regulation allowing controlled burns + underbrush clearing by loggers solved the problem. Industrial humans allowed there to be more trees, not fewer. Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control. There are direct policy consequences of disallowing controlled burns and underbrush management. And it's California's fault. People in the southern Central Valley have been complaining about these policies for decades. And it's because once all the Bay Area's pollution and fires get swept downwind, those people have the luxury of breathing it as it stays in the basin.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  > Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control. Californian climate is relevant, not just global climate. Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. This is for California, not the whole world. 100 years ago, when you say California's fire management was working well, California's climate was unusually wet. California is naturally more inclined to burn than most other parts of the world, up there with Australia and Siberia. Most of the rest of the world is not nearly so imperilled as California and it's not because everybody is is better at managing forests.
- abernard1 6y ago
  to bigbubba: > Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. And the last 20 have not been. These patterns also have not shown up in other places with the same climate patterns but different policies. Australia, for instance, has had nightmare fires forever. It's only been the last few decades that underbrush removal has been made more difficult or illegal in many cases.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    The past 20 years has seen California returning to it's more typical dry and hot climate. California has had huge fires every year 'since forever' just like Australia, but awareness of this is low because living memory of the past hundred years is of an aberrantly wet period. Being hot, dry and on fire has been California's typical climate for two thousand years at least and the past 20 are a return to that. If anything, California is still wetter than usual, not dryer. Clear all the brush you want, California will almost certainly continue to get hotter and dryer than it was a century ago, and the fires will continue. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for California, only an orange glow on the horizon. Fire management strategies that worked a century ago for wet California will not continue to work. That was never maintainable.

abernard1 6y ago

> Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were. Which is my point. Modern industrial forest management figured out how to fix this problem. There were economic incentives for lumber, and cooperative regulation allowing controlled burns + underbrush clearing by loggers solved the problem. Industrial humans allowed there to be more trees, not fewer. Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control. There are direct policy consequences of disallowing controlled burns and underbrush management. And it's California's fault. People in the southern Central Valley have been complaining about these policies for decades. And it's because once all the Bay Area's pollution and fires get swept downwind, those people have the luxury of breathing it as it stays in the basin.

bigbubba 6y ago
> Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control. Californian climate is relevant, not just global climate. Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. This is for California, not the whole world. 100 years ago, when you say California's fire management was working well, California's climate was unusually wet. California is naturally more inclined to burn than most other parts of the world, up there with Australia and Siberia. Most of the rest of the world is not nearly so imperilled as California and it's not because everybody is is better at managing forests.
abernard1 6y ago
to bigbubba: > Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. And the last 20 have not been. These patterns also have not shown up in other places with the same climate patterns but different policies. Australia, for instance, has had nightmare fires forever. It's only been the last few decades that underbrush removal has been made more difficult or illegal in many cases.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  The past 20 years has seen California returning to it's more typical dry and hot climate. California has had huge fires every year 'since forever' just like Australia, but awareness of this is low because living memory of the past hundred years is of an aberrantly wet period. Being hot, dry and on fire has been California's typical climate for two thousand years at least and the past 20 are a return to that. If anything, California is still wetter than usual, not dryer. Clear all the brush you want, California will almost certainly continue to get hotter and dryer than it was a century ago, and the fires will continue. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for California, only an orange glow on the horizon. Fire management strategies that worked a century ago for wet California will not continue to work. That was never maintainable.