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Comment by JshWright | Hacker News Reader

Anthropogenic climate change is a real and significant threat to the current state of our planet. That being said...

It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

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> It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

Don't want to sound combative, I'm actually very interested. Do do you have any proof of that?

https://youtu.be/Y27lFsPEZ30

Tom Scott made a little 4 minute video about the topic.

Basically by letting the forrest burn more often there would be less fuel available for the next fire.

And when the fires got smaller the biggest of trees in the forrest would also be more likely to survive through the fire.

So in some forrests that’s what they do in some forrests now.

It's a fairly firmly established fact and widely understood as a major cause within firefighting and forest management circles, including the Forest Service, who is largely responsible for such practices over the past century. The natural fire regime kept forests thinned and healthy with lots of relatively small and low intensity fires that would remove standing dead and the understory while largely keeping the healthy stands intact, with occasional pockets of higher intensity fire that would open up areas in the forest (creating meadows, etc.) and making for natural buffer zones and breaks in the fuel, which further reduced the spread of bigger fires, as well as keeping the forest healthier and reducing disease. Indigenous peoples in the Americas are very well known to have managed forests with prescribed fires for centuries, if not millennia, too.

Climate change is definitely a factor for fires in the southwest as well, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppressio...

What uptick? A 2016 study by the Royal Society has shown that 'Global burned area have dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years'.

'Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.'

Stefan H. Doerr, Cristina Santín. Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: perceptions versus realities in a changing world. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016; 371 (1696): 20150345

Less fires != good.

If you have less forest fires you build up fuel for the fire and the rare fire that DOES happen will be much more violent and extreme.

Natural forest fires burn away a lot of fuel for the next fires so it's smaller.

That must means more fuel is building up and burning all at once. Fires are an integral part of the forest ecosystem.

it may mean that, it must not.

we should be looking at the full distribution of wildfires year by year, but I'm not a US resident so not very acquainted with looking up what where

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