California’s greenhouse gas reductions could be wiped out by 2020 wildfires

Fire is a natural part of the landscape. We are seeing today the consequence of 100 years of aggressive suppression combined with forty years of failed management. There are those arguing today that we should accommodate fire, harden our homes, and live with the consequences, including terrible air quality. But there's another way. We can actively manage our forests. Mechanical thinning combined with fire in the shoulder seasons can return our overstocked forests to healthy condition. While we could let nature run its course, it will take decades of catastrophic wildfire to get there, with the attendant loss of life and livability. We should support active management of our federal forests to produce better outcomes more quickly.

The title's use of "undid" takes away from the point which is that one year of wildfires created A LOT of emissions.

Earning $300 and having to buy food for $300 is a lot better than having to buy the food without earning any money.

I worry that this is the beginning of something more troubling in terms of the climate crisis. We've been lucky so far that most of the carbon budget has been spent by human activities, lucky that is because we can change that

However, this is the start of a worrying global trend. We're currently seeing the West Coast ecosystems shift into something new, maybe grasslands maybe deserts. The Amazon Rainforest is next. Currently it's started emitting more CO2 than it takes in. We've been warned by scientists that if no land use policies change we can expect it flip from being a rain forest to a savannah. What that means in concrete terms are megafires and mass species die off for most of the amazon.

What's next? Cold and rainy England is expected to have the climate of Spain by 2050. Nothing native in England can adapt to that. So much of the world is going through rapid climate shifts that are devastating ecosystems. We're on the verge of flipping to a hot house earth and we're doing less than the bare minimum to stop it

the fires would have happened irrelevant of CA doing emissions control so the fires didn't undo anything.

Meanwhile, onerous California forestry regulation is reducing the management of wildfire through the virtue of not culling (thinning) the forest often enough, either in form of firelines or lumberjacking.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-88131-9

Also could be thought of that the emissions aren't somewhere around double, thanks to CA's efforts.

"California's emissions" is a vanity metric of in-state emissions, not emissions elsewhere performed in service of Californians' consumption, right?

My stupid question is, shouldn’t plants grow back relatively quickly (within a few years) and lock up the same quantity of carbon?

It most certainly did not undo it. If that policy were not there, California would have far far more emissions.

Curious: will the regrowth of the burned forests have an opposite effect? It will take a while, but it should be capable of growing just as large, right?

Western forests burn and regrow regularly... so much so that some species of plants rely on or optimize for the fire cycle. Things like having seeds that only open after a fire, fire-resistant bark, and so on.

Unless we pave over the locations the carbon released by the fires will be re-captured when those areas re-grow. It is nothing like digging up buried carbon and spewing it into the air.

the title is not the information here -- a read over the papers show that one year of wildfires in California emitted more greenhouse gases than were saved by concerted means, over about 17 years.

The paper is meant to get attention. Unfortunately, the wildfires situation is quite a bit worse, since 2017, 2019 and 2020 were all record years for wildfire in California, not just 2020.

People who measure such things knew this quite some time ago, and the Elsevier-version of this had an egregious typo in the plain language summary section, suggesting a hasty edit job somewhere. Also notable is that yesterday was the California State Summit on Extreme Heat Events, led by presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom.

Here at YNews, maybe the angle ought to be the quantitative aspects of the measurement. I suggest that California is not the worst of it, worldwide, and that the science and data handling in California can serve as a lab of sorts, for less-able places around the globe facing new wildfires going into the future.

Don't get confused by this. The takeaway isn't "See how useless our efforts are; greenhouse gas is a load of bunk!"

The takeaway is "We're doing a shit job of reducing greenhouse gasses."

Did the wildfires burn more than a "natural" amount in total, or just did a bunch of years of burn all at once?

Sensationalized title

The gardeners with their leaf blowers and 20 year old unmaintained pickup trucks are not helping either. Every one I pass by has a bunch of empty oil jugs in the bed. I’m sure all of that isn’t helping…

Mismanagement of forests.

I have written about this and other climate change realities often on HN. It is always met with what I usually refer to as violent rejection. Of course, I understand why this is so. With so many players in this game seeking to benefit from selling a narrative (be it political or financial) it is nearly impossible to counter the carpet-bombing of distorted information that hits the masses on this topic day after day. It's the old adage about about what happens if you repeat something enough times.

The actual headline from the linked page is, one could say, somewhat deceiving. You have to at least read the first paragraph, quoted below, to understand the gravity of what is being reported:

"A new analysis led by researchers with the University of California has found the 2020 wildfires in the state, the most disastrous wildfire year on record, put twice as much greenhouse gas emissions into the Earth’s atmosphere as the total reduction in such pollutants in California between 2003-2019."

A few sentences later, further driving the point home:

"Wildfire emissions in 2020 essentially negate 18 years of reductions in greenhouse gas emission."

Even simpler:

    1 year of forest fires >= 18 years of GHG emission reductions

And that, to a greater or lesser degree, happens here in CA every year. For some who don't live here I think what's missing is to actually experience the awesome scale of these events. Some simply can't understand something until they can feel it. I lost count of how many such fires I have experienced. Nothing like having your neighborhood encircled by a fire to see and feel the scale of the event.

I will categorically state that there is no way we can win this battle through any form of emission reduction. That includes a full transition to electric ground transportation. This isn't to say we should not try to clean-up our acts and strive for EV's. Not at all.

My point has always been the same: These things (EV's, reducing emissions, etc.) are good because, well, they are. Marketing them as effective ways to counter atmospheric CO2 concentration is nothing less than a cruel fantasy. The problem is that the masses buy into this (most people are not equipped to evaluate such things analytically), which leads to companies and politicians pushing false narratives benefiting while, at the end of the day, we don't even make a dent.

   One year of fires negated 18 years of reductions.

Anyone with one gram of common sense would easily conclude that the forced reductions and the narrative being pushed isn't a solution at all. We are wasting time and money that could be applied towards real solutions.

Solar is another example of this. It's great. I invested in solar. However, it isn't at all a solution for atmospheric CO2 reduction. Even if we install the most optimal forms of renewable energy throughout the land and replace all fossil fuel energy production we will not stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. It will continue to rise as it has.

What we need is honest conversation based on facts and science, not politics and the financial interests of those making an absolute killing with narratives that are, to put it bluntly, nothing but lies.

NOTE:

Reading through the comments I see such things as "bad forest management". I understand where this comes from and, yes, some of that is true. However, it betrays a lack of understanding due to not living here. The largest and most damaging fires we have every year are not forest fires. They are brush fires. Yes, large numbers of trees are burned, however, entire mountains covered in vegetation colloquially referred to as "brush" burn every year. Tens of thousands of acres at a time.

This stuff is impossible to manage. You just can't. The best you can do is control the burn to protect homes. That's it. That's what they do. They pretty much let it burn. You don't have enough fire-fighting aircraft and resources anywhere to actually stop these monsters unless you happen to be able to catch one within a very short window of opportunity after they start. The combination of large brush fires and wind (and their self-generated air currents due to convection) makes for fast-moving ferocious fires that do as they please.

In other words, the forest management narrative is only valid to a point. Ironically enough, cutting down trees and brush is likely the only way to prevent and control these massive CO2 generating fires. Ironic because we need trees to capture CO2.

Not an easy problem.

And it is much harder to find solutions when we accept lies and misinformation for the sake of politics and profit.

I think the title should be edited to clarify that it wiped out 20Y of California's emissions.

(The current title is "2020 California wildfires wiped out 20Y of greenhouse gas emission reductions")

The title seems to imply that if we had not done any greenhouse gas reduction over the past 20Y, then there would be no California wildfires

Put another way, its the wildfires that we should prevent and improve how we reduce greenhouse gases

I wish more people start holding politicians accountable for their promises.

All these sacrifices that residents of California have had to make under the premise of a better environmental future, banning straws, forcing a specific complex fuel mix forcing refineries in state to go out of business and thus people at the pump paying a lot more for this imported complex blend etc . . . all of these are decisions that have consequences.

The premise thus far has never been challenged that the "Good" outweighs the "bad" in these decisions by the legislature in California.

Responses to 2020 (or subsequent) Wildfires in California & the US West by HOGWARTS HOUSE:

GRYFFINDOR: Hop on Nimbus 2000, cast "Aguamenti" a heroic and potentially effective number of times until suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, get rescued by friends.

HUFFLEPUFF: Check on friends and neighbors close to fire. Volunteer for group castings of "Accio Pluvia" and "Venit Inber" to bring rain, possibly "Defodio" firebreaks. Teach each other bubble charms for easier/safer breathing (also handy for airborne illness outbreaks).

RAVENCLAW: Read all 120 pages of thorough California governance report on Forest Management[0]. Try to organize herbology faculty, students, and community members into task force on controlled burns and forest restoration, begin research into long-term climate magic.

SLYTHERIN: Invest in private goblin enterprises specializing in lucrative airdrops of large amounts of fire-retardant potion. Circulate prospectus for wood-clearing companies. Talk angrily to anyone who will listen about how terrible political opponents are at fire management and how it just goes to show they should never be in charge.

[0] https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma...

(Please read the report!)

EDIT: can someone explain the downvotes here? Fire response/management and the politics surrounding it are going to be very relevant to the topic and an inevitable part of the discussion, and while I may have made some pop-culture whimsy a part of my comment, it's done hand-in-hand with serious observations about how politics play out, not to mention a link that contains a trove of essential solid information about policy considerations.