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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

I remember when Big Basin south of the Bay Area was on fire in 2020. The alarmists were talking about how the fires were so especially intense that the region would never recover. I said at the time they were all full of hogwash, and there's nothing particularly special about the fire and it would recover. Heaps upon heaps of insults were laid upon me.

Guess what, I was right. Every time humans think they know better than nature, they are wrong. Humans interpret things like forest fires as "bad" just like they think rain is "bad" but there's no good or bad in nature, just cycles, and every time we have the hubris to think we know better, like trying to stop forest fires, we are wrong. We need to just step out of the way of Mother Nature and let her do what she does best, which is continue the cycle of life for herself.

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Big Basin is recovering, but it is a long way from recovery. If there aren't any fires as severe as the CZU fire for many years it will recover. But if intense fires become more frequent, that's far less clear. The regrowth you see in Big Basin, as described in the article, appears to have been fueled by sugar reserves in the old growth trees. Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again?

We have "just cycles" if the climate, on average, is fairly steady. But if there's a hotter/dryer trend, the areas that can sustain redwoods will drift north, and this might be difficult for very long-lived trees to keep up with.

300m years ago we had Pangea. I wait for that to recover.

I'm holding out for the cycle of planet formation to repeat

So Long Earth, Thanks for the Air and Whatnot.

> Big Basin is recovering, but it is a long way from recovery.

Define recovery. Do you mean recovery to the point that your Instagram pictures are as beautiful as before? Or do you mean that life is thriving and the forest is in its rebuilding phase?

> If there aren't any fires as severe as the CZU fire

How on earth can you get severe fires when the forests don't have as much fuel as they did before? The entire cycle is self-limiting.

> Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again?

Yes.

I don't have a stake in the broader fight, but note that severe fires often leave extra fuel in their wake. (It is a surprising fact, to me at least.) This is because 1) live tree trunks don't burn in severe fires, they leave behind dead trunks (which do burn next time) and 2) the ground cover that comes up will be more massive than the ground cover that used to be there.

>> Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again?

> Yes

Let me fix that for you. The correct answer is not.

A "severe" fire is any wildfire causing severe consequences. A small bonfire that would kill the last 20 specimens extant of a wild flower would be severe, for sure. Those small controlled fires will kill all the trees in the cohort 2-8 years old. Do it each five years and is "forest assassination". Dozens of species will quit the area because soil can not hold water anymore. There is not such thing as a free lunch.

I've been hiking in Big Basin for about 30 years now, and have been there since the fire. To use your language "the forest in its rebuilding phase" but it will take a long time.

The CZU damage was on a whole other scale from other burned forests I've hiked in that have recovered much more quickly.

the technical term missing here is "catastrophic" .. it differentiates between ordinary and extra-ordinary damage

Scientist don't think they are right or wrong they work with the data they have and add new data when it comes available otherwise they are not scientists. Honestly, insane that I have to say it on HN.

What is your scientific background? Your comment seems naive and disconnected to what is happening in research labs.

Not every country fucked up their scientific community like the US did with their main focus on grants and star power but even with their educational system kneecapped by capital the US is still a scientific power house because of the thousands of people that do honest work and get ignored by biased and self-righteous comments like yours.

If you have any insights lay it down on me...

That is a normative and outdated view of science proposed by logical positivists, it tells you how science is ought to be not how it is. A cursory look at history of science will tell you this is not so. Scientists bring their own biases and opinions and colour the data as they seem fit. Other major point is data is not value neutral it is theory laden.

Sure, but what is the alternative?

That science is a process of getting towards tentative truth via observations. That there is no single method of science, but there are several pathways by which scientific knowledge can be obtained. You can read Thomas Kuhn (structure of scientific revolutions), Imre Lakatos (Proofs and Refutations) for this perspective. Kuhn brought in the historical perspective which was missing earlier to study of philosophy of science. Also, you can look at books by Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield which detail a historical perspetive of development of scientific ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Toulmin

You're right but you can probably caveat that with natural cycles and not man made disasters

What’s more man-made is artificially preventing wildfires so dead brush builds up then you have a far worse fire.

Climate change isn’t causing wild fires. Wild fires are a natural part of nature’s cycle. What’s unnatural is us artificially delaying these cycles, then they come back 10x more intense.

For cases where wild fires are directly caused by people (arson, bad camping practices), these fires are also more intense.

This stuff happens all through the religion of science. I’m not a religious person, but time and time again the scientific community cries out “XYZ is bad/stupid/a relic of religion” then years later there’s some scientific evidence for it and we spend another 5 years pushing back against the scientific community to change from their old ways.

> Climate change isn’t causing wild fires.

I get what you are trying to say, but that statement alone is too blunt to be accurate. Desertification, extended drought and record high temperatures do directly relate to causing fires.

I’ll take the other side here. First, ok you were right in that the redwoods of big basin seem very healthy right now. I was swayed personally, as a layperson, by the following argument: it’s possible that current wildfires differ from past wildfires in heat and intensity because of human factors like climate change and too much fire suppression. I hope I was NOT one of the people you felt ridiculed by, my only hope was that the notion be considered with some seriousness and rigor. It still seems possible to me that future wildfires operate differently than those of the past, and I still would favor cautious conservation policies in that regard.

What you call "cautious conservatism" is actually playing fast and loose with the rules, and doing the wrong thing, if the prescribed burns are actually important.

No. What I want is more unbiased scientific study of the topic before assuming we know for certain that climate change hasn’t altered the relationship between wildfire and forrest health. Funding more research is hardly “playing fast and loose” rather it is the opposite.

> Guess what, I was right.

Not sure if you are physically capable of assessing the evidence. Everything hinges on how one divides the two words in your user name ;)

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