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Paul Hessberg did a talk at TEDxBend a few years bask that helps sum it up visually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas https://www.youtube.com/watch?
by kayfox 3y ago
Paul Hessberg did a talk at TEDxBend a few years bask that helps sum it up visually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas
There are a lot of reasons fires are more and more common and more and more devastating, but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.
A lot more effort needs to be undertaken to build fire breaks and conduct controlled burns in the forests of North America to mitigate this problem and provide the fire the ecosystem evolved around and nutrients for new trees. It would also help beat back the various fungal and beetle pandemics in the western forests. We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.
- graemep 3y agoThe same around the world. Happening in Europe from Scotland to Greece. The media attribute it to global warming which means noting gets done about it.
- mjhay 3y agoIt isn't mutually exclusive. Warming is a major cause of increased wildfires, and poor land use and overgrowth due to fire suppression make it worse.
- graemep 3y agoThe point is that the focus on global warming means no one will do anything about poor land management because that problem is not made public. You can see what happens right here in the downvotes I have got. Just because I shift blame for something away from global warming to another cause, people feel they most downvote me. Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed. I partly made that comment to see how much a rational and reasonable comment would get downvoted for that reason. I think the experiment proved something.
- davidw 3y agoThe problem is extremely public here in the western US.
- wongarsu 3y agoIt's a matter of framing. We just have to move the discussion from "global warming increases wildfires, buy more EVs" to "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- graemep 3y ago> "global warming increases wildfires, buy more EVs" There is a profit to be made from selling EVs. > "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)" Better forest management IS fighting climate change. Well managed land can be a carbon sink whereas fires release huge amounts of CO2 and are damaging in many other says. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27353-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27353-x bout just one region of the world But doing this is costly and there is not much to be sold to do it. There is always a lobby for doing something that that means someone can sell something. For things that do not increase sales, particularly things that involve not doing things (e.g. no cutting down forests) there is no equivalent lobby.
- arrowleaf 3y agoFighting wildfires is expensive, which means it's big business. There's absolutely business interests in keeping wildfires raging. Fire suppression means the government gets to purchase planes and helicopters, 3M can supply countless brand new sets of fire resistant gear every year considering how high wildland fire employee turnover is, Perimeter Solutions gets to sell Phos-Chek faster than they can produce it, etc.
- adrianN 3y agoThe forest ecosystems in Europe have not evolved in the presence of regular fires afaik. Large parts of Germany for example used to be an impassable swamp before they were clear cut and drained for agriculture a few hundred years ago.
- polski-g 3y agoClimate change is the skeleton key of doing nothing. "Climate change means there is a drought" Nothing we can do about it, not build desalination plants, or raise the cost of water, or eminent domain farmers' property who refuse to relinquish their century old "water rights". Literally just complain about climate change is all we can do.
- XorNot 3y agoAll those things are incredibly expensive and/or unpopular. That's why no one does them.
- lazide 3y agoYup. Also, they aren’t clearly actually needed right now (in the way, say, a road is needed somewhere, or a fire truck). When there is a clear causal connection, it will be easier. By then, it will be a pretty crazy mess.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago[flagged]
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago> for thousands of years before they were colonized had this figured out Yes, it is outrageous that we can't directly apply the same policies and methods considering we have the same level of urbanization, population, industrial and economic requirements and private property laws /s
- davidw 3y agoIDK about 'outrageous', but it is kind of frustrating it has taken us so long to figure out that the people who lived here knew what they were doing, and adapting their methods to our current society.
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoOn the ranking of frustrations regarding wildfires and climate change, not doing controlled burns (like the native peoples were doing) is really really low for me, especially considering all the things I just listed.
- davidw 3y agoI live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west, so for me it is a real concern. The speed with which this fire ripped through was no joke, as an example: https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/awbrey-hall-fire-20-years-later/article_f1870f2b-cc50-5ec1-9795-97157101623f.html https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/awbrey-hall-fire-20-... And the city got lucky because the wind was out of the NW, rather than from the west, which might have driven it straight into the city.
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoSo do you believe that the lack of controlled burning is the issue here or is it > I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west ? I think the urban sprawl is more to blame here. It's not that we as a society have forgotten about controlled burning or we've become so 'weak' and 'librul' that we don't do what needs to be done. There is a risk here (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire) and nobody wants to take responsibility over something which may cause immediate deaths or loses of property vs something which may or may not happen in the future. Sure, it's kicking the can down the road but who exactly is to blame for cities built right next to forests? I have a huge issue with bringing up controlled burning as it is ALWAYS used as an argument against the obvious human created climate change. 'Hey, just burn the forest fuel from time to time, no big deal', etc..
- jeffbee 3y agoWhat are we to make of the photographs taken from fire lookouts that are used as evidence in this talk? Consider the Thorp Mountain photo from the 1930s. Prior to that, loggers had come in and largely wrecked that forest. The USFS GIS indicates that the area around Thorp Mountain is between 20-30% old growth, is mostly mature replacement forest. So a photo from the 1930s showing patchy forests would have been a reflection of the fact that industrial era Americans had already come through and taken most of the trees.
- davidw 3y agoWhat's your source on even high, rugged country like that being logged out by the 1930ies at an industrial scale?
- jeffbee 3y agoI am looking at the USDA Old Growth and Mature Forests GIS. Why do you doubt it? The Northern Pacific Railroad went right through that area, and Congress granted them lands 40 miles on either side of their route.
- davidw 3y agoThey could have easily stripped the lower areas fairly thoroughly, and left higher peaks alone. I'm not saying "I doubt it happened", just that I'm not convinced either way.
- davidw 3y agoHis research looks pretty interesting: https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/about/people/phessburg https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/about/people/phessburg
- Izkata 3y ago> but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire. So to go off on a bit of a tangent, in a fantasy book from 1998* there was a fire mage who had been preventing wildfires for decades. When green mage (plants/trees/etc) finds out about this she chews him out about the dangerous conditions he's creating by not letting the buildup on the ground burn away. By the end of the book the wildfires have reached the forest and the fire mage dies trying to stop the resulting firestorm. Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up. * Circle of Magic #3, Daja's Book
- throwup238 3y ago> Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up. It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices. The problem has always been the people who live in and around fire prone areas. They've used public pressure, bureaucracy, and litigation to prevent State and Federal agencies from properly managing the forests since the post-war boom. In California, for example, permits are managed by 35 different "Air Districts" created in 1947 each with their own local leadership that are easily lobbied. Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board. It's coming up now because the situation is so dire we need a concerted effort to sway public opinion towards the realistic solution. Now that insurance companies are giving up on these fire prone markets, the residents have no choice but to get with the program.
- fakedang 3y ago>It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices. Actually, the Native Americans historically started the practice.
- pvaldes 3y agoMore than 90% of forests are provoked by humans. Some are accidents. Other not. Starting in multiple locations at the same time; at night. The same pattern seen again and again and again In Chile, Canada, USA, Spain, Portugal, Greece... Coordinated and deliberated. > the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor Yeah, sure man. 123 killed in Chile and everybody is avoiding to see the huge elephant in the middle of the room painted with the word terrorism in uppercase letters. We could remove every single leaf in the soil of the forest, and gasoline cans would still grow in the trees.
- pvaldes 3y ago> More than 90% of forests must say -> More than 90% of forest wildfires
- zamfi 3y agoIsn’t the simple explanation the fact that non-human causes of wildfires are likely to start more than one in a given area? - Lightning? - Hot, dry winds + sparks from nearby power lines? (Debatably non-human, but usually not terrorists.) At least in California we have forest ecosystems that practically require periodic fire for regeneration — seeds that require fire to germinate — suggesting forest fires have been common even on evolutionary timescales, long predating humans.
- pvaldes 3y agoThere is a even simpler explanation. Follow the patterns Starting multiple fire outbreaks (aiming to overpower the firefighters) is the standard procedure of every "professional" arsonist. Arsonists also do fire "tours". They drive, lights off, a secondary road without traffic and stop each few minutes to start outbreaks. This would easily mimick a chain of fire sparks starting from power lines in the road, but we know better because night-vision drones of the Spanish police videotaped some people red-handed doing exactly this. And this idiots had a surprise waiting at the end of the road. The problem is that most [1] of this people just are sent and paid for doing the job. When caught they fake mental issues and claim to act alone, but then you see that every single one of they follow exactly the same procedures, and know all the tricks to maximize the effect. [1] Arsonists searching revenge is the other category. They are strongly focused on smaller areas owned by the target
- runarberg 3y agoI’m not an expert, so I could be wrong about this, but this sounds like a case of not addressing the elephant in the room. Isn’t the number one reason the changing climates as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Sure there are bad forest management, alien species, build up of vegetation on the forest floor etc. But are these actually the number one reason when the climate is a whole degree warmer on average, with prolonged droughts, with native species dying from said heat and droughts, etc. This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.
- unnamed76ri 3y agoWhat is the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how much has that changed in the past 100 years? Something worth looking into.
- runarberg 3y agoI can look it up (and so can you) but it is irrelevant for this conversation. This matters if you are a climate scientist and are constructing a model to make predictions or shape policy. But for this conversation, all we need to know is that the percentage has increased because of human activity (specifically as a result of fossil fuel extraction and usage for energy consumption) and this increase is enough to cause significant warming, shaping the climate, and escalating wild fire intensity and frequency.
- jprival 3y agoAbout 420 ppm, an increase of about 120 ppm in the past 100 years? This is a strange question since it is obvious that it’s heavily “looked into” and easy to look up, and simultaneously hard to figure out what rhetorical point is being made in asking people to cite it out of context.
- unnamed76ri 3y ago0.04% vs 0.03% Illustrates how silly the comment is that I was replying to.
- bcrosby95 3y agoWe probably need different solutions for the pacific northwest and the southwest. From everything I've read, Chaparral tends to turn into grasslands if it burns too often. And Chaparral is the wildfire problem in the LA region.
- andrei_says_ 3y agoGoing back in time and not clear cutting all old forest on a whole continent would be a big improvement, too. The new growth is much more likely to be devastated by fires. Trees are smaller, branches are lower, brush is thicker etc.
- plorg 3y agoAnd in many places the trees that grow back are not the same species that were cut to begin with, and don't necessarily function in the same fire ecology, either because they have evolutionary advantages in clean cut environments or because they were planted for their supposely greater economic value.
- sbohacek 3y agoThe 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico was caused by controlled burns that got out of control. One part of the fire was from a controlled burn that was completed in January and then "reignited" in April! In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a hundred years ago are no longer useful.
- gadders 3y agoLot another dollar in the Trump was right jar. https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/trump-blames-california-for-wildfires-tells-state-you-gotta-clean-your-floors-1311059 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...
- tasty_freeze 3y agoTrump was being Trump: simplify complex issues and claim there is an easy answer, blame everyone else and boost yourself. It has long been recognized that overreaching burn prevention has led to the situation we are in. There are often "controlled" burns that get out of control. There are inhabited/developed areas within and next to the forests that don't want to deal with the smoke of the burn and the chance that it gets out of control. The total area is immense and so the costs of burning 30% of the state which is forest would also be immense. The point is: it is complicated and there are practical considerations why it isn't an easy fix. The next thing is Trump said they should "rake" the forests, which is asinine. Finally, much of California's forests are federal land ... which Trump was responsible for. How many people did he send out to rake the forest?
- gadders 3y agoGod forbid people simplify complex issues. Your cognitive dissonance is real. He proposed what the parent comment said. Either Trump and the parent comment were both wrong or they were both right.
- tasty_freeze 3y agoTrump blamed California for not raking their forest, and presented it as a simple solution. Trump was not right, for three reasons. One doesn't rake the forest to solve the problem, there are reasons (political and financial) why doing a controlled burn on 1/3 of the state hasn't happened, and finally, most of that is federal land -- Trump's responsibility. BTW, I lived in California from 1985-2003; this issue existed then, and for decades before my time, and it continues to this day. It was there when California had Republican governors, Democratic governors, Republican presidents, and Democratic presidents. Complex issues have multiple layers, often on opposition to each other. When you claim it is a black and white issue, you (like Trump) demonstrate you don't understand the topic.
- JacobThreeThree 3y ago>fires are more and more common and more and more devastating Maybe some individual fires are more devastating, but the statistics don't really bear out the "more and more common" narrative. According to the US forest service, the 5 year average for both number of fires and acreage burned is lower than the 10 and 15 year averages. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wofambrief/firestats https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wofambrief/firest... Same story in Canada where the number of fires and total burned acreage has been decreasing slightly over the past four decades. https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb
- mistrial9 3y agothis is amazingly wrong. Fires occurred in California since 2017 of voracious nature. It made world headlines.
- Kamq 3y agoAccording to more up to date reports I got to from that website, none of those years were exceptionally bad. The worst one recently (2020), was slightly worse than 2017, and approximately equal to 2015. It seems to be a trend of more moderately bad years (and, probably just them happening in California when they normally happen elsewhere, so more headlines). Not particularly large individual years. It does look like the 10 year average has come up a bit, as 2010s report lists the 10 year average at ~6.8 million acres and our current 10 year average is ~7.2 million. Full report (PDF warning), page 13 for what I'm looking at: https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/NICC/2-Predictive%20Services/Intelligence/Annual%20Reports/2023/annual_report_2023_0.pdf https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/NICC/2-Predictive%2... Link to more reports for other years: https://www.nifc.gov/nicc/predictive-services/intelligence https://www.nifc.gov/nicc/predictive-services/intelligence
- lazyasciiart 3y agoThese numbers seem to support the grandparent comment that the absence of controlled burns was causing more fires that covered more area. 2023 was a ridiculously low fire year, and at least one reason for that is the last few years of destructive fires finally kicked in the political will to do controlled burning. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2023 https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2023
- nortonham 3y ago>We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy. Correct. But we can blame PG&E for whatever negligence lead played its part in a forest fire, and enact legislation to make combat it. Along with that, we can use controlled burns to mitigate the problem as well. It's well known that different indigenous tribes in North America did controlled burns for the positive effect it had.