The largest wildfire in the US is only 7% contained
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Around the farmhouse we’ve torn out a ton of shrubs and flammable trees to create a more defensible fire zone. We’ve replaced them with stone, more fire resistant species like maple, etc.
It’s time consuming and expensive. And this is on a property that’s about 80 acres. Small by farm standards. People have no concept of the scale of federal forest land. Nor do people have a concept of the scale of modern firestorms.
Yes, the 20th century policy of suppressing fires has led to hazardous fuel loads. Yes, wildfires are a part of the ecosystem. Yes, building right up to the wilderness’s edge makes the destructiveness of these fires ever greater.
But climate change is real, yo. You can see the trees drying out. The Douglas Fir which are so iconic to the state of Oregon are more stressed every year — and dead trees are more flammable. Greater heatwaves, longer and deeper droughts — they have very obvious consequences in regards to fire. You have essentially rain forests in a lot of regions drying out, creating massive fuel sources. How do you even begin to deal with that through forest management?
Controlled Burns are great — but they’re not always feasible. Nor are they without risk — in this climate they’re getting harder to do safely, in ever-shrinking seasonal windows. And again, the scale of land we’re talking about is hard for people to comprehend.
If you want to wait for the peer reviewed study that links every specific fire to climate change, you do you. But these events are exactly what the science has predicted, and despite the armchair quarterbacking, there is no easy solution.
The NFPA has a handy guide for protecting the structures on one's property:
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...
* https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
It's broken down into three zones (0-5', 0-2m; 5-30', 2-10m; 30-100', 10-30m), and what best practices are for each.
This is NOT the time to be clever by thinking out of the box. We are very much firmly stuck in a box we need to sort out. The solutions are obvious, painful and difficult, but they need to be taken.
On the topic itself - Global Warming should be part of middle or high school syllabus. I know they talk about effects of it - but not sure they talk about prevention that seriously.
I concur, but I think it is almost 30 years too late. The decisions need to be made now - like today - in order to have a chance of solving anything. Waiting for these middle and high schoolers to graduate and get into positions to change anything will be waiting until it is too late.
This is a boomer created problem, a boomer ignored problem, and now needs to be a boomer enabled solution.
Check out "controlled burning" - it effectively achieves the same thing.
And cutting down trees at enough scale to make a difference would likely exacerbate the drought that makes such fires more likely.
Honestly, try to use decomposing wood in a fire sometime. It's not flammable.
CO2 from a forest isn't really something we need to worry about. A 25 year old maple will sequester 400 pounds of co2 in it's lifetime. It can't emit more than that over the years that it decomposes. An average commuter car will emit that in 2 weeks. That's what we need to worry about.
Evacuate everyone in the area, divert firefighting resources to home the evacuees, and let it burn out. The silver lining is that the area won’t be hospitable for a large forest fire for a while.
BTW, I'm not dismissing climate change as a major factor here for the prevalence and seriousness of seasonal fires. It's just that the idea of forest management as a remedy to these issues is a nonsense. Forests have managed themselves for millions of years, if we left them to it, they'd probably do alright now.
Using the Klamath lakes as a visual guide really gives reference as to just how large an area of forest this is...
Edit: They posted another update, Firefighters pulled off sections of the Bootleg Fire: https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/07/16/firefighters-pulled-off...
And for completeness, here's their front page for further updates: https://wildfiretoday.com/
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Per google, 200,000 acres = 312.5 square miles. Per GHCI, the square root of that is 17.7. That is, the fire covers area equivalent to a square less than 18 miles on a side.
Speaking practically, our forestry policies are zombies from a knee-jerk era of “protect everything” in response to a previous industrial perspective of “cut it all down.”
You’d be surprised - or sickened - how much forest coverage in the US is replanted. We’ve already made our mark on the environment, so why freeze our policies in place while the situation continues to evolve?
One approach often left unmentioned every fire season is clearing brush and trees for biofuels. Trump caught a lot of flack a while ago for blaming California wildfires on a lack of raking the forest, but he wasn’t entirely wrong there either. Forests need to be maintained. The native Americans understood this and had all kinds of forestry techniques like controlled burns. So why not turn a cost center into a profit center?
You can make quality pellets out of crap wood. I’ve seen it. Wood pellets are a fairly renewable resource too, since most of the growth necessary to sustain them happens in the very early parts of a tree’s lifecycle. That could gradually replace fuel oil and propane for rural areas (where nat gas pipes are uneconomical). And investing in forestry would be a good economic basis for long-neglected areas, such as New York State’s Southern Tier and North Country.
But for the love of God, if you’re going to take the time to complain, DO SOMETHING.
I completely agree on that. The government needs money to affront this challenges. In the 40s tax was around 90% to pay for all the needed infrastructure and other projects. It is time that the USA stop thinking that everything comes for free and start getting money to survive to the new century challenges. I see an Asian future otherwise were Western countries are under funded and lack infrastructure.
I think this applied to the highest tax bracket which only covered a few people.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/21/572305828/what-does-containin...
> That means that [x] percent of the fire is surrounded by containment lines — any physical barrier that stops the fire from passing a certain point. Those lines can be trenches, natural barriers like rivers, or even already-burned patches of land. Most often, the containment line is a shallow, 10- to 12-feet wide trench firefighters dig into the dirt.
That's the very high level, skipping loads of important details overview of how they tend to fight fires.
It's baffling that here we are in the full motions of global warming, and we can find all manner of distractions to take our mind off it, and divert attention. Yes, there is a movement to halt global warming or slow it down, but it needs more traction. The topic needs to be the frontpage of every newspaper. The world is burning before our eyes.
Trying to jump into these huge, world-scale theories comes with the risk of blinding us to alternative explanations that might be more valid.
That is a beautiful analogy.
How much could also be other human factors, like building up levees and flood control systems that aren't up to snuff and/or shift worse flooding problems downstream (this has been the case in many parts of the US for decades now; can we presume Europe is better in flood control management than the Army Corps and thousands of small river towns?).
Germany has had "once in century" floods every decade for a while now. It's a densely populated country, meaning people can't just move somewhere else and there are not large swaths of unpopulated/unused lands that could be repurposed for massive flood control systems.
It's also not like we are talking about towns that have been built recently in risk-areas, we are talking about towns that have been in those places for centuries, sometimes over a millennia, which is a testament to how out of the ordinary these floods are.
The cause for the failures have been unprecedented rainfall. There are a million possible factors that can influence the situation, climate change is the leading one. Let's fix it instead of discussing if climate change represents a 90% of the problem or just a 78%.
Let's also spend trillions adding more safety for a worsening and more hostile climate. We could have saved that by taking action earlier, now we need to pay to keep ourselves safe. Let's act before it costs more money and more lives.
I'd be all for attributing it to not sweeping forests well enough if that actually got the funding to start seriously combating the issue, it’s a positive feedback loop that needs to be mitigated
Secondly, after crazy disasterous, world-headlines fires three years ago, Calif. Governor Gavin "perfect hairgel" Newsom appointed a blue-ribbon committee on tracking and dealing with these fires from a forestry point of view.. that committee publishes online and in fact as a Github repo. That committee has to work with aggressive, self-serving entities well entrenched in govt money and commercial licenses, which benefit from "us-vs-them" language and tactics.
In this writers opinion, these are truly historic events, not in the good way.
What kills me is An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006 and we've chosen to ignore the issue until it radically changes the planet.
Why would you trust a politician on science when he has a political agenda (allegedly) and isn't a scientist to begin with?
If it had been made by the head of NASA or similar, that might have done better. Even if that doesn't mean people would believe it more, it's just the principle of the thing. It made the issue come out the gate as more partisan than it had to be.
I'm saying it was a bad choice in principle. If I was funding a movie about climate change or trying to convince the world... I'd get some PhDs and scientists of notable standing. A politician is the last, worst choice I would have done.
That movie happened, and the public is aware of it, largely due to the fact that Al Gore — whether you hate his politics or not — was in a position where he was exposed to the science, cared deeply about the issue, and dedicated himself to getting the message out. Public messaging being kind of a big part of being a politician.
If I had to make a movie about Climate Change, out of principle, I wouldn't choose a politician and I would choose someone with a scientific degree. That's what I'm saying.
There's also the issue that some countries (the US) are a lot more concerned about it than other countries (not naming names). Those other countries have every incentive to watch us flail around making the lives of our citizens harder (through taxation, meat reduction, other proposals) trying to cut emissions while they sit back and egg us on, and maybe pay lip service once in a while with the occasional inconsequential project.
Concerned ? Maybe, doing something about it, not so sure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The scary thing with theories is that reality doesn't change whether your theory is considered proven or not. We might have no evidence that "global dimming" would be a thing, but then it absolutely could happen. Or, admittedly, vice versa, where we thought it could happen but it doesn't. We need more research as usual...
This is just denialism of prediction as a concept. A universal excuse to not do anything. After all, why work to extinguish the fire when it could go out all by itself?
We're playing with the world here. If scientists mess up and their reaction to climate change causes other problems, nobody will listen to a scientist ever again on this issue, and that comes with its own risks.
I don't know where that person got their idea from but it's clearly a very bad source.
IIRC a significant drop did occur over the past year or so due to covid.
And honestly it's not even fully correct to say "climate change is not the spark" - having stronger storms with more lightning results in more chances for ignition as well. But afaik most fires are attributable to human causes - the problem is that climate change is making the fires much larger and more destructive than they otherwise would be.
> This fire is going to continue to grow -- the extremely dry vegetation and weather are not in our favor," said Joe Hessel, an incident commander for the Oregon Department of Forestry.
So clearly they acknowledge that the weather is a factor, and that seems pretty related to climate change.
Why does it have to be an either/or thing? If a fire magnitude becomes newsworthy because several factors aligned to make it that way, it seems silly to point fingers at scapegoats as an excuse for continuing to do nothing on any front.
Oh sure, but climate change deniers also like to say temperature changes have existed since the dawn of time (while conveniently ignoring magnitude[0]).
The thing is forest management people have been warning about increasing risks of large fires for years and fires have been consistently getting bigger and worse (just off the top of my head, there was big basin last year, lytton, yakutia, dozens of others, and now this). There's literally hundreds of peer reviewed studies showing correlation between our polluting ways and ice cap melting and correlation between that and extreme weather events.
Besides, climate change is a symptom of a larger problem. Depletion of water sources for example is also related to dryness and is also a byproduct of human activities. I think it's shortsighted to say "onoes climate change, throw carbon offsets at it, problem solved!" just as it is to say "onoes forest fires, do better forest management, problem solved!"
Solving eco problems is going to require a lot more than cherrypicking and addressing only darling themes. Ignoring whichever factor you don't understand the underlying data for is pretty much the same as inaction where there should be action.