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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

> "I think climate change is no more than 20 to 25% responsible for our current fire problems in the state, and most of it is due to the way our forests are,”

It's refreshing to hear that. Human driven climate change is real and I'm not denying it, but we have to understand CA's climate for what it is.

CA plants are uniquely adapted to fire and they serve as a testament to the history of fires in CA. Las Pilitas Nursery, which specializes in CA natives, has a nice writeup here: https://www.laspilitas.com/advanced/advecology.htm

I find it especially interesting how the droughts typically preceding a fire suppress herbivore levels so that post-fire seedlings are protected from predators. It's really amazing how our ecosystem has adapted to the challenges of our historical climate.

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When this comes up I always recommend this lecture by Stephen Pyne at the Long Now Foundation a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zP7MD2y7T8

He goes into the very interesting history of fire in the Western U.S. and California and how the Native Americans used fire to transform the landscape over centuries. When Europeans took over, they did not understand these practices or the reasons for them. It was as if they had acquired a complex machine that required regular maintenance, but had no instruction manual to perform it.

Instead, they imported European (specifically German) fire/forest management practices, which do not work in the Western U.S. In Europe, when a tree falls, moisture allows the tree to rot and release its energy slowly. This makes suppression a long-term viable strategy. In much of the Western U.S. though, when a tree falls, it just sits there until it burns. Here, the suppression strategy is just putting off an inevitable release of energy, and every year the amount of energy increases.

The real tragedy in this is that this situation is leading to the loss of trees that are over a thousand years old, that could survive countless smaller fires, but not one enormous one.

It's the same in Australia and the indigenous here are nomadic and still use wildfire to their advantage and to the betterment of the land.

The western settlers here also use fire regularly to cut down on fuel load in the forests, we call them controlled burns and they're mostly done by volunteer firefighters. They essentially have a slow burning firefront walk through the forest floor to burn up the brush which emulates a natural wildfire.

Big wildfires like we are seeing take out huge swaths of land in Aus and California are the consequence of excessive fuel load build up thanks to human intervention. Of course climate change will contribute by making the conditions required for wildfire more common but the root of the severity lies elsewhere for now.

Australia is nuts. You even have birds that deliberately spread wildfire.

https://blog.nature.org/science/2018/01/12/australian-fireha...

It seems like such a waste of energy. Is it possible to harvest the dry brush material and burn it for power generation?

I've thought quite a few times that some sort of robotic or semi-automated brush clearing system could be an interesting startup. In principle I don't see why you couldn't cut stuff, grab it, throw it in a wood chipper, and haul it out of the forest.

The devil is always in the details though and I have no idea what all is involved in operating in the forest or the economics, legality, and politics of it.

20-25% is an awful lot of influence though. 6 of the last 7 largest fires in recorded California history have been in the last 2 years. That wouldn't be the case if fires were 20-25% smaller and less frequent.

The policy of aggressive suppression and few prescribed burns started around a century ago in CA, allowing fuel to build up and fires to become that much less controllable.

Addressed in more detail here: https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...

Thanks for linking this article! I loved reading it. I'm curious to hear any counterpoints from experts to the main ideas presented here.

This is definitely a narrative I hear a lot, but the question is if it’s so clear why haven’t they started doing more prescribed burns?

Because people hate the smoke they cause, particularly in parks during peak vacation season.

Also because environmentalists in CA see any destruction of the environment as a bad thing, even if it is an overall net gain for the system.

That’s not very meaningful. We had an unusually wet last century, and now that we have major droughts for the first time in a while, our practice of suppressing fires has caught up to us. Recorded history doesn’t go back very far.

not everything in nature is linear. that 20% can be enough to push something into an exponential portion of the curve. Markedly if their proposal is true then there is far more underbrush and detritus than there was when there wasn't thousands of firefighters rushing out to stop the fires. Some people like to attribute everything to global warming because they're freaked out, but this article is describing why that -might- not be the case and this is a hybrid problem of global warming and over protection of the forests.

> That wouldn't be the case if fires were 20-25% smaller and less frequent.

until the small fire grows out of control [1]. Then it should have been put out earlier [2][3].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/us/california-tamarack-fire-b...

[2] https://mcclintock.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/rep-mcc...

[3] https://twitter.com/Wheeler4Nevada/status/141831383122321817...

There are many places across the globe where climate change has intensified the results of local bad management of the ecology.

The frustrating thing is that this allows finger pointing between the different causes. Putting it as percentages can be deceptive. Global Warming 100% needs to be dealt with and California's suppression-based approach to fire 100% needs to change.

Yep here in CO when I go hiking there are layers and layers of downed trees waiting to be lit up like a tinderbox. It WILL start on fire, this isn't going to be stopped. The trees aren't piling up from climate change, it's from years of stopping fires. Unfortunately, now there's going to be a massive fire at some point instead of small recurring fires like there should be.

Just a heads up you are double double shadow banned, even though the troll was the one in violation. Only down points count for you now. Keep up the fight. No sarcasm.

it's much easier for leaders to blame climate change than to acknowledge that decades of poor leadership contributed to the problems

shifting blame is like politics 101

The damage to ecosystems by fire suppression and wolf elimination is obscured by latency.

Long-term, the planet will be fine. Maybe not us.

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