Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> Now let's look at the source for their graphic and look back further at earlier dates from the same source. [3] - kind of paints a different picture, no?

Yes, but not in the way you're portraying it. The big shift downwards comes in a major shift in strategy in dealing with forest fires in the early to mid 1900s; it doesn't tell you much about the climate at the time. https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...

> In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.

View on HN

I'm curious in how you interpret my comment here - in what way am I portraying this issue? What I mean to show is that forest fires have gotten immensely better, likely because of technology over the years. Which is exactly what I hear many climate change skeptics suggest - that technology will solve the problems, like we appear to be seeing here.

But solutions don't just fall out of the sky. Saying that technology will solve the problem risks a bystander effect, where nobody is packing, reducing emissions, or working on clean energy because of a belief that such effort is wasteful as a the technology will appear out of nowhere.

And saying that technology won't solve the problem risks a discouraging effect, where people might avoid working on climate-resistant crops or efficient AC or improved fire control strategies because they believe their efforts can't help with climate change. It's not obvious to me that either of these hypotheticals are strong enough to justify shaping the public discourse around them.

> where people might avoid working on climate-resistant crops or efficient AC or improved fire control strategies because they believe their efforts can't help with climate change.

No. People will keep working on it. But being unrealistic and continuing to live and consume like you did in the 00's because "anyway, tech will save us" is the worst comportment anybody can have.

> What I mean to show is that forest fires have gotten immensely better, likely because of technology over the years.

I'm saying they haven't gotten better.

The drop in the 1930s-1950s shown in the wider chart has nothing to do with climate, and little to do with technology. It reflects a misguided change in fire management strategy (put out every fire ASAP), one that is now understood as a bad approach, because it causes build ups of unburnt brush that cause more dangerous, more intense fires.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com