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Comment by incoherentmess | Hacker News Reader

I've currently got a big wildfire within walking distance from me. I moved to the community where I live less than a decade ago and there were never any serious wildfires, now we have a major one every year and it looks like there won't be much unburnt forest left after the next decade is out. And if it isn't the fire that kills the forest, the heat will. We've started to see a lot of trees dying off in local populations during the past 2 years. Can't find a spot of forest without a bunch of fresh snags mixed in anymore.

I almost got caught in a fire a few years ago and thought it was a freak event but it's really just a new normal. I'll be moving soon, not sure where, but I'm fed up.

/rant

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Forest fires are a great example of direct result ecological policy. We are at the point we’re at precisely because of bad public policy surrounding forest fires.

Partly yes, but 10 years ago, or even 5, were not even 1% as bad as they are now. Forest litter, undergrowth and logging practices didn't really change in that time, but the heat did. Drought cycles have happened periodically, but the fires didn't get anywhere like this. I think we've pushed the limits of a complex system and we're seeing the beginnings of a sudden and dramatic shift.

Look at wildfires probably anywhere on the planet. The trend is the same, independent of policy.

If you don't do occasional controlled burns, when you leave it several years the next fire will be a huge one.

yeah no joke. But that's not what were looking at here on a global scale...

It may very well be the case that your region is experiencing unusual fires, but citing a decade of experience with that land to make that point is pretty ridiculous. A decade is nothing, even a century of consideration is just the bare minimum. Ideally you should be able to look at records going back hundreds if not thousands of years and when those records are lacking (the case in much of the New World), geological evidence is important.

People thinking one lifetime of experience is significant is how you get people living in the PNW who think wildfires are a new aberration in the past 10 years because 15 to 50 years ago there was relatively little smoke.. but if you read accounts from people 150 years ago they all say the summers were insufferably very smokey. In Europe and Asia communities have much longer memories for these sort of things, for instance warnings about droughts and tsunamis hundreds of years ago. But in America people think 10 years is an eternity.

The old joke has a lot of truth; in America people think 100 years is a long time, while in Europe people think 100 miles is a long distance.

Geological data like ice cores? https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Ice cores are good for global climate trends, not so much for local wildfire trends. However the later can be revealed by examining char layers in the soil.

I sense a combative attitude coming from your comment so let me be clear about this: Man-made climate change is real. And simultaneously, drawing conclusions about a specific region's propensity to burn from only 10 years of personal experience is farcical.

Unfortunately despite the media coverage, most of these fires have nothing to do with climate change [1], and in fact in europe for example this year we had less fires by area than in the last 10 years [2].

I'm all for sustainable living, and looking after our planet, but the hysteria that media is riding now is absolutely ridiculous. I suggest following Bjorn Lomborg [3] for more rational coverage of climate issues.

[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/35/13/JCLI-D...

[2] https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1688536889974816768

[3] https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg

> we had less fires by area than in the last 10 years

The nature of wildfire is changing - a massive reduction in open grassland, savannah, managed area fires does nothing to offset the fact that old growth forests and long standanding thick woolands are being burnt to the ground.

Part of of climate change is a change in distribution of humidity - rain forests drying ut and burning is no light matter to be dismissed with a vapid "yes, but..."

I'm not hysterical,as you so condescendingly put it, I'm pragmatic about the real nature of actual data - comes from decades in global scale exploration geophysics and earth mapping.

Your Bjorn Lomborg is just doing the conservative misdirect tango.

Please point me to the data then. How are these fires worse than before, if acres burned are the lowest in 10 years?

Sure.

First point though, you bought up "but actually .. fires are decreasing".

As a STEM educator used to talking to students my first question to you is, why aren't you already across the primary data yourself?

Do you not care? Is this no more than a talking point for you like a meaningless afternoon tennis match?

So ..

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145421/building-a-l...

    “There are really two separate trends,” said Randerson. “Even as the global burned area number has declined because of what is happening in savannas, we are seeing a significant increase in the intensity and reach of fires in the western United States because of climate change.”

https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/topics/human-dimensions/natur...

    The number, severity, and overall size of wildfires has increased,

FIRMS: https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map

See also: recent Australian Bushfires, Canadian Bushfires

> How are these fires worse than before, if acres burned are the lowest in 10 years?

I'm going to assume that as you're on HN you're more than bright enough to understand the difference between 3D volume and 2D area .. correct? That you understand a wide open grassland is different to a dense tall forest in terms of fuel volume?

The tweet I linked shows european wildfires. Last time I checked, there are no savannas in europe.

"I'm going to assume that as you're on HN you're more than bright enough to" know there are no savannas in europe.

You are falling in the trap of thinking that ecologists argue in good faith.

They hate you, you are the carbon they want to reduce. Don't engage.

Bjorn Lomborg is great to read if you don't have an honest desire to understand and want to ignore the actual problem and feel better about yourself. Lomborg essential draws heavily on Nordhaus, who, like many economists starts from his point and then finds some maths to justify it. Nordhaus's IPCC contribution is disgraceful and should be utterly disregarded for its unjustified extrapolations and wishful thinking.

The paper you cite in [1] is interesting and worth reading. However, it doesn't support a claim that fires on Hawaii have nothing to do with climate change (and of course it says nothing whatsoever about fires elsewhere -- Hawaii's weather, and climate, are extraordinarily localized).

Yes if you do look at individual data points you'll find outliers, that's like the whole damn point people are making...

Look at 2022 now, one year ago, on the complete opposite of the spectrum:

https://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/sites/default/files/...

What does it mean ? That it's becoming increasingly unstable. Does it fit the """"narrative"""" ? yes

This dude is so obviously just trying to sell his books it's painful, "believe me and you'll be part of the in group of people who _know_ the _truth_". For every single data point he finds that doesn't fit the """"narrative"""" you'll find a hundred that do.

Cherry-picking data to support your biases hardly falls under the category of rationalist coverage. Just like the radical environmentalists, Lomborg seems particularly prone to his biases.

Unfortunately, reality is more complicated than what fits in a few tweets about wild fires, polar bears and coral reefs.

As a sibling has noted, the paper you cite does not support your claim. In fact, it doesn't even mention wildfires.

The authors suggest that existing predictors of Hawaiian precipitation need to be updated so they're more accurate. They note that "dryness has been observed over the islands, indeed the driest such 20-yr period on record" and that this has become particularly unpredictable in the 21st century.

In their "suite of atmospheric model simulations" the authors describe "the observed 2010–19 ocean boundary forcings and atmospheric chemical composition" as the "factual" which is contrasted with the "climate of that period absent effects of long-term global warming drivers" as the "counterfactual" (emphasis mine). They test three models, finding that "all three models produce Hawaiian-region drying in response to a zonally uniform ocean warming".

Their preferred theory of "atmospheric decadal variability" is "ENSO" -- El Niño Southern Oscillation. They cite [0] which describes "decadal scale changes in the general atmospheric circulation [and] long-term changes in the atmospheric circulation itself."

Finally, every author of the paper you cited has published repeatedly about the relationship between global warming and wildfires, e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4]. In conclusion, I find your post here to be disingenuous and either made in ignorance at best, or in bad faith at worst.

[0] https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.631

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013AGUFMGC51B0971P/abstra...

[2] https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/23003

[3] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/12/BAMS-...

[4] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/53/12/jamc-d...

Nothing to do with record heat and record droughts? dude.. seriously.. Get out of here with this nonsense.

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