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Comment by kayfox | Hacker News Reader

Paul Hessberg did a talk at TEDxBend a few years bask that helps sum it up visually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas

There are a lot of reasons fires are more and more common and more and more devastating, but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.

A lot more effort needs to be undertaken to build fire breaks and conduct controlled burns in the forests of North America to mitigate this problem and provide the fire the ecosystem evolved around and nutrients for new trees. It would also help beat back the various fungal and beetle pandemics in the western forests. We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.

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> but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.

So to go off on a bit of a tangent, in a fantasy book from 1998* there was a fire mage who had been preventing wildfires for decades. When green mage (plants/trees/etc) finds out about this she chews him out about the dangerous conditions he's creating by not letting the buildup on the ground burn away. By the end of the book the wildfires have reached the forest and the fire mage dies trying to stop the resulting firestorm.

Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.

* Circle of Magic #3, Daja's Book

> Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.

It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices. The problem has always been the people who live in and around fire prone areas. They've used public pressure, bureaucracy, and litigation to prevent State and Federal agencies from properly managing the forests since the post-war boom.

In California, for example, permits are managed by 35 different "Air Districts" created in 1947 each with their own local leadership that are easily lobbied. Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board.

It's coming up now because the situation is so dire we need a concerted effort to sway public opinion towards the realistic solution. Now that insurance companies are giving up on these fire prone markets, the residents have no choice but to get with the program.

>It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices.

Actually, the Native Americans historically started the practice.

That's why I said "at least." Those practices inspired Aldo Leopold (among others) but he was the one to do most of the work to convince US government agencies of their merit.

Is there a way to build permanent housing in parts of California that are prone to fires even with controlled burns? Even controlled fires pose a risk to habitation; if you were a semi-nomadic tribe (like the former residents before Americans brought western "Reason" and domestication to the west coast), you could move everyone out of the area to be burned, and then come back X many months/years later when wildlife and vegetation returned.

If, on the other hand, the area to be burned has "invested capital" and houses and land on it--essentially, private property, which has this strange quality of fixity even in the face of something as destructive as the earth (which never fails to dissolve it), how would you guarantee, without incredibly high insurance premiums, that people's houses wouldn't burn down.

And even if people are willing to pay the premiums, they would do so knowing that the government might decide, almost randomly (to them), to burn a chunk of forest right next to their house. They'd get fair warning, sure, but who wants to own a house that might burn down in 10 years because the state decides that its too much of a risk to have that patch of land burn naturally?

> Is there a way to build permanent housing in parts of California that are prone to fires even with controlled burns?

Absolutely. A good starting point is to look to Australia's regulations for construction materials, methods, water storage and setback/firebreak requirements, etc. for fire safety in bushfire prone areas.

While it may be picturesque to have your house or cabin nestled in amongst the forest, your fire survivability is Zero.

Even so, we lose plenty of houses because people want to live ‘out in the bush’ but don’t want to do all of these things.

Oh its certainly not foolproof, but better than what we usually do here in the states.

Yeah, hopefully the forestry people over there realise that hazard reduction burns aren’t optional if you’re gonna build houses in the forest and then expect it to not burn down.

The fact that people can go build a house in the middle of bush that's renowned, sometimes even evolved for, for fire, strikes me as nuts.

Especially when volunteer firefighters then have to risk their lives to save people with the lovely view. (Ditto California...)

I don’t know anyone working on wildfires in the United States for free. Not saying there is no risk, but they are paid and understand the risks. Some nice neighbors have their own contract fire crews, which are not cheap.

In Australia, "most" rural firefighters are volunteers, but have equipment and training providing by their local Government run rural fireservice (that has fulltime paid administrators).

The population density between Australia and the US is radically different though which changes the dynamic (deserts and marginal land exist in both, but Australia is particularly water challenged with no high mountains, so no major rivers).

I know folks that are volunteer wildfire firefighters in Colorado and in California they were enlisting prisoners and paying them very low wages.

Fun fact, NZ and Australian volunteer rural fire-fighters often fly in to help out with bad fire seasons in California. It's good practice.

this happened with some East Coast settlers moving to California after 1870 or so.. many areas known for fire now were the sites of fine home building with expensive techniques and materials, plus the lower quality homes or whatever. English speaking people apparently did not get the memo?

I live in a wooded area in Washington state, and I'm not too worried about my buildings, because I have a relatively huge clearing around my house and garage. And I don't live in my outbuilding that's kind of too close to the forest. But I'd still need to evacuate, somehow, if there were a forest fire. The smoke would be dangerous, I imagine utility power would be lost, and my generator is actually a couple trees into the woods.

Insurance companies could presumably do inspections of clearings and cancel or charge more if you don't have sufficient clearing, but municipalities aren't going to like the tree cutting that results.

What's hard to appreciate about wildfire is just how horrific conditions can be.

Yes, defensible space helps, but temperatures can exceed 1,000 to 2,000 F / 500 -- 1,000 C. Sustained exposure to that can damage all kinds of materials, let alone be difficult to survive. Even at considerable distance the radiant heat of even a smaller wildfire is quite palpable, something I've had personal experience of.

The fire will also reduce or remove available oxygen, there can be tornadic-ferocity winds (and what the winds blow), embers, and all manner of other threats.

Smoke is only one of your worries.

Build it out of concrete blocks with a metal roof. The contents are almost certainly flammable, but the structure isn’t.

Does it really make a difference if after the fire the burnt-out structure is still standing with the dead owners in it?

Metal shutters, and the owners would be fine.

Sprinklers on the roof work pretty well too.

I'm not sure the conditions in the middle of a wildfire are conducive to continued breathing.

Assuming the windows are closed and any outside ventilation is turned off, there would be zero issues inside the house for the length of time required.

That said, sitting around in an active wildfire is a bad idea compared to not being there.

The biggest issue is usually fuel close to the structure (bushes or trees right next to the house), or openings in the structure like eaves. Rooftop sprinklers work decently well for wooden roofs, but it's more complicated than just installing them due to potential water pressure issues. Metal roofs shouldn't need them.

All it takes is a small hole in the armor though sometimes, and without someone there to watch it and fight it, it takes a big change in building styles to be 100% sure. Like cement structure + metal framing & roofing + minimal combustible furniture, etc.

The biggest issue IMO is that western style (really central european/north western european) construction tends to focus on greenery, windows, wood and natural materials, etc.

Spanish-Colonial style construction is better suited to these kinds of conditions, with some modifications (avoiding exposed beams, and dealing with earthquakes both major necessary changes).

[https://firesafemarin.org/articles/should-i-put-a-sprinkler-...]

Houses are not airtight, even the absolute best, newest ones. The average house has a lot of air exchange with the outside world. It would not take long to be quite dead in the middle of a wildfire.

If you live somewhere that the risk of being overtaken by a wildfire is not more or less zero, buying a firefighter's SCBA regulator and tank is not a horrible idea.

Wildfires tend to move fast. Active fire in the vicinity of a home for even an hour is very unusual.

As long as fuel is kept a decent distance and the house is closed up (and doesn't catch on fire), you'd be fine. SCBA would make sure you didn't get any red eyes from the little smoke that would get in.

If you have bushes and trees right up against the structure (or are in a tinder dry forest in a fully involved canopy fire), then you're having a different kind of party of course.

I’m assuming the occupants have enough wit to leave when wildfires threaten.

Concrete tends to get weakened by fire. So even if the concrete doesn't burn, the home may need to be rebuilt because the concrete has been dangerously weakened by the fire. Stone and brick can also be damaged by fire. They are more resistant to fire but in a really hot fire, they may not be resistant enough.

>Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board.

Do they realize how much pollution is produced in the California's uncontrolled forest fires? Laws should not be that stupid.

I loved that book series. It's about time I reread it I think.

I also recommend most of the sequels: The Circle Opens, another quartet where each of the four takes on their first students; The Will of the Empress, what happens after they return from their travels in the second quartet; and Battle Magic, which follows Briar's group on the return trip before The Will of the Empress, when they got caught up in a war.

I wasn't really a fan of Melting Stones, which mainly focuses on Briar's student and takes place at the same time as The Will of the Empress. If I remember right that book was also an experiment, written as an audiobook first then later released as a regular book, so that may explain why it doesn't feel as good to me.

The author has had another in mind for years too, a continuation of the problems Tris had been having from The Circle Opens onwards: she can't figure out how to make a living with her magic, because she refuses to use it as a weapon. Unfortunately, the author doesn't actually have the rights to this universe, so she has to wait for Scholastic to want another book.

The same around the world. Happening in Europe from Scotland to Greece.

The media attribute it to global warming which means noting gets done about it.

It isn't mutually exclusive. Warming is a major cause of increased wildfires, and poor land use and overgrowth due to fire suppression make it worse.

The point is that the focus on global warming means no one will do anything about poor land management because that problem is not made public.

You can see what happens right here in the downvotes I have got. Just because I shift blame for something away from global warming to another cause, people feel they most downvote me.

Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed.

I partly made that comment to see how much a rational and reasonable comment would get downvoted for that reason. I think the experiment proved something.

The problem is extremely public here in the western US.

It's a matter of framing. We just have to move the discussion from "global warming increases wildfires, buy more EVs" to "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)".

> "global warming increases wildfires, buy more EVs"

There is a profit to be made from selling EVs.

> "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)"

Better forest management IS fighting climate change. Well managed land can be a carbon sink whereas fires release huge amounts of CO2 and are damaging in many other says. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27353-x bout just one region of the world

But doing this is costly and there is not much to be sold to do it.

There is always a lobby for doing something that that means someone can sell something. For things that do not increase sales, particularly things that involve not doing things (e.g. no cutting down forests) there is no equivalent lobby.

Fighting wildfires is expensive, which means it's big business. There's absolutely business interests in keeping wildfires raging. Fire suppression means the government gets to purchase planes and helicopters, 3M can supply countless brand new sets of fire resistant gear every year considering how high wildland fire employee turnover is, Perimeter Solutions gets to sell Phos-Chek faster than they can produce it, etc.

Just to be clear, the point you are making is that there is a business opportunity in not having good land management.

Yes. There's business interest in getting legislators/officials distracted from what is really good land management, namely prescribed fires and public services around clearing combustibles away from infrastructure and homes.

Don't worry, nobody will do anything about global warming, either.

We've already blown right past the Paris accord, I'm sure we'll soon come up with a new accord that will set a target that we will also blow past.

In the meantime, invest in an air conditioner and an air purifier for your city home, and try not to own any summer dachas in heavily forested areas.

The problem is not made public...except in the New Yorker? Except by the president of the United States?

Shifting blame towards land management practices - not necessarily by you, but for example by that particular POTUS - is often an attempt to downplay global warming and the urgent need to do take steps to stave it off, rather than a good-faith attempt to reform land management practices. If people detect a whiff of that, that's what makes them downvote; given the present and future consequences of downplaying global warming and the urgent need to take steps to stave it off, and the push that's been behind that for the past, oh, fifty-to-seventy years or so, can you blame them? No one's against reforming land management to prevent forest fires.

> is often an attempt to downplay global warming and the urgent need to do take steps to stave it off…

I mean so what…. I don’t see how having a conversation about taking a practical steps to avoid a disaster should be suppressed just because the person initiating the conversation might have a different opinion on a related subject.

You or I may want to have a conversation about taking practical steps to avoid a disaster, but personally speaking I don't want to have it with a hypothetical interlocutor who is not having that conversation in good faith, but rather weaponizing it in an attempt to further their catastrophic political goals.

“The northwest might burn to the ground, people may die or be displaced, but god dammit we simply cannot give that political party a win (even if we win too).”

Yep, that attitude that makes perfect sense for society.

Downvoting someone on HN for arguing in bad faith isn't keeping "a political party" from having "a win", much less determining whether or not the PNW is going to burn down.

I am a pragmatist so I am “results oriented” instead of “intention oriented”. But if you feel the need to try and suppress comments on here because it creates suspicion in you around the intentions of the commenter that’s your thing. For what it’s worth, I won’t downvote anyone on here for anything or any opinion whether I agree with the opinion or the commenter’s intention.

How do you know someone "arguing in bad faith"?

They might have different views from you, that you are certain are wrong, but they might be entirely sincere.

Describing it as "an experiment" to see how people would respond to it is one tip-off.

It is how you say that and how you just state something very oversimplified like fact, almost like a climate denier. To start with

> "focus on global warming means no one will do anything about poor land management"

Gross generalization, a lot changed long and still lately, you are just saying: all lazy because of global warming excuses.. and then

> "Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed."

Any quote where someone official reasoned like that? Btw funny, seeing that actually you are the one here blaming "global warming" for something?

The forest ecosystems in Europe have not evolved in the presence of regular fires afaik. Large parts of Germany for example used to be an impassable swamp before they were clear cut and drained for agriculture a few hundred years ago.

Climate change is the skeleton key of doing nothing. "Climate change means there is a drought" Nothing we can do about it, not build desalination plants, or raise the cost of water, or eminent domain farmers' property who refuse to relinquish their century old "water rights". Literally just complain about climate change is all we can do.

All those things are incredibly expensive and/or unpopular.

That's why no one does them.

Yup. Also, they aren’t clearly actually needed right now (in the way, say, a road is needed somewhere, or a fire truck).

When there is a clear causal connection, it will be easier. By then, it will be a pretty crazy mess.

What are we to make of the photographs taken from fire lookouts that are used as evidence in this talk? Consider the Thorp Mountain photo from the 1930s. Prior to that, loggers had come in and largely wrecked that forest. The USFS GIS indicates that the area around Thorp Mountain is between 20-30% old growth, is mostly mature replacement forest. So a photo from the 1930s showing patchy forests would have been a reflection of the fact that industrial era Americans had already come through and taken most of the trees.

What's your source on even high, rugged country like that being logged out by the 1930ies at an industrial scale?

I am looking at the USDA Old Growth and Mature Forests GIS. Why do you doubt it? The Northern Pacific Railroad went right through that area, and Congress granted them lands 40 miles on either side of their route.

They could have easily stripped the lower areas fairly thoroughly, and left higher peaks alone. I'm not saying "I doubt it happened", just that I'm not convinced either way.

What is there to be convinced of? The loggers weren’t hiding their practices as they weren’t doing anything illegal. This is well documented and studied.

They also left some timber in some places that were hard to reach, too.

In addition to logging grazing was also happening throughout California, even in the high country for hundreds of years. This also decreased fire risk by eliminating fuel.

The 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico was caused by controlled burns that got out of control. One part of the fire was from a controlled burn that was completed in January and then "reignited" in April!

In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a hundred years ago are no longer useful.

Going back in time and not clear cutting all old forest on a whole continent would be a big improvement, too.

The new growth is much more likely to be devastated by fires. Trees are smaller, branches are lower, brush is thicker etc.

And in many places the trees that grow back are not the same species that were cut to begin with, and don't necessarily function in the same fire ecology, either because they have evolutionary advantages in clean cut environments or because they were planted for their supposely greater economic value.

We probably need different solutions for the pacific northwest and the southwest. From everything I've read, Chaparral tends to turn into grasslands if it burns too often. And Chaparral is the wildfire problem in the LA region.

His research looks pretty interesting:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/about/people/phessburg

>fires are more and more common and more and more devastating

Maybe some individual fires are more devastating, but the statistics don't really bear out the "more and more common" narrative.

According to the US forest service, the 5 year average for both number of fires and acreage burned is lower than the 10 and 15 year averages.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wofambrief/firest...

Same story in Canada where the number of fires and total burned acreage has been decreasing slightly over the past four decades.

https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb

this is amazingly wrong. Fires occurred in California since 2017 of voracious nature. It made world headlines.

According to more up to date reports I got to from that website, none of those years were exceptionally bad. The worst one recently (2020), was slightly worse than 2017, and approximately equal to 2015. It seems to be a trend of more moderately bad years (and, probably just them happening in California when they normally happen elsewhere, so more headlines). Not particularly large individual years.

It does look like the 10 year average has come up a bit, as 2010s report lists the 10 year average at ~6.8 million acres and our current 10 year average is ~7.2 million.

Full report (PDF warning), page 13 for what I'm looking at: https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/NICC/2-Predictive%2...

Link to more reports for other years: https://www.nifc.gov/nicc/predictive-services/intelligence

These numbers seem to support the grandparent comment that the absence of controlled burns was causing more fires that covered more area. 2023 was a ridiculously low fire year, and at least one reason for that is the last few years of destructive fires finally kicked in the political will to do controlled burning. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2023

imagine for a moment, a firetruck driving down a street at 12 miles per hour; next to the truck is a dog from the firehouse, running along side.

What you describe is similar to "the dog decided to turn left at the corner, so things are better now"

The sheer number of people involved in fire response, and the deadly and immediate nature of their work, has natural links to military style leadership and organizational behavior.

No way, at all.. is "more controlled burning recently" the driving factor in the new stats.

The budgets and the size of the destruction, are hard for a person to think of.. in California

Real devastation was caused by "catastrophic" fires, burning at higher temperatures than previously recorded. Extensive forest die-off preceded these events in California. This is not over in one or two rainy years, since recent shrub growth is subject to die-off in a dry year and will burn.

You clearly feel very strongly about this, but maybe try not to assume that you are the only person who reeeeeally gets the scale of this stuff.

OP referenced North America, not California.

>We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.

Correct. But we can blame PG&E for whatever negligence lead played its part in a forest fire, and enact legislation to make combat it.

Along with that, we can use controlled burns to mitigate the problem as well. It's well known that different indigenous tribes in North America did controlled burns for the positive effect it had.

Lot another dollar in the Trump was right jar.

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...

Trump was being Trump: simplify complex issues and claim there is an easy answer, blame everyone else and boost yourself.

It has long been recognized that overreaching burn prevention has led to the situation we are in. There are often "controlled" burns that get out of control. There are inhabited/developed areas within and next to the forests that don't want to deal with the smoke of the burn and the chance that it gets out of control. The total area is immense and so the costs of burning 30% of the state which is forest would also be immense. The point is: it is complicated and there are practical considerations why it isn't an easy fix.

The next thing is Trump said they should "rake" the forests, which is asinine. Finally, much of California's forests are federal land ... which Trump was responsible for. How many people did he send out to rake the forest?

God forbid people simplify complex issues.

Your cognitive dissonance is real. He proposed what the parent comment said. Either Trump and the parent comment were both wrong or they were both right.

Trump blamed California for not raking their forest, and presented it as a simple solution. Trump was not right, for three reasons. One doesn't rake the forest to solve the problem, there are reasons (political and financial) why doing a controlled burn on 1/3 of the state hasn't happened, and finally, most of that is federal land -- Trump's responsibility.

BTW, I lived in California from 1985-2003; this issue existed then, and for decades before my time, and it continues to this day. It was there when California had Republican governors, Democratic governors, Republican presidents, and Democratic presidents.

Complex issues have multiple layers, often on opposition to each other. When you claim it is a black and white issue, you (like Trump) demonstrate you don't understand the topic.

He was directionally right - clear out the underbrush. I'm pretty comfortable with the president not knowing the specifics.

I’m not an expert, so I could be wrong about this, but this sounds like a case of not addressing the elephant in the room. Isn’t the number one reason the changing climates as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Sure there are bad forest management, alien species, build up of vegetation on the forest floor etc. But are these actually the number one reason when the climate is a whole degree warmer on average, with prolonged droughts, with native species dying from said heat and droughts, etc.

This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.

What is the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how much has that changed in the past 100 years? Something worth looking into.

I can look it up (and so can you) but it is irrelevant for this conversation.

This matters if you are a climate scientist and are constructing a model to make predictions or shape policy. But for this conversation, all we need to know is that the percentage has increased because of human activity (specifically as a result of fossil fuel extraction and usage for energy consumption) and this increase is enough to cause significant warming, shaping the climate, and escalating wild fire intensity and frequency.

About 420 ppm, an increase of about 120 ppm in the past 100 years? This is a strange question since it is obvious that it’s heavily “looked into” and easy to look up, and simultaneously hard to figure out what rhetorical point is being made in asking people to cite it out of context.

0.04% vs 0.03%

Illustrates how silly the comment is that I was replying to.

Huh?

There are plenty of systems where the difference between 0.04% and 0.03% is dramatic, after all it’s an increase of 30% — and what matters is not the paltry decimal representation but rather the effects.

For example: consider concentration of sodium in human blood. The normal range is 0.31%-0.33% by weight. By 0.4% you’re pretty much dead.

Or consider chromium, an essential trace element: the normal amount is practically infinitessimal, in blood it’s 0.0000007% by weight, approximately. But not enough and you end up with diabetes or cardiovascular disease.

“0.04% vs 0.03%” is not an effective takedown of global warming.

Exactly. Represented as decimal numbers, we could also say that is only 0.0004 vs 0.0003, which looks like even less. Seeing that there is a 30% difference is the important thing here.

>This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.

"Feels like" and "clear case" don't mix. Just say "I'm bluffing".

More than 90% of forests are provoked by humans. Some are accidents. Other not. Starting in multiple locations at the same time; at night. The same pattern seen again and again and again In Chile, Canada, USA, Spain, Portugal, Greece... Coordinated and deliberated.

> the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor

Yeah, sure man.

123 killed in Chile and everybody is avoiding to see the huge elephant in the middle of the room painted with the word terrorism in uppercase letters.

We could remove every single leaf in the soil of the forest, and gasoline cans would still grow in the trees.

> More than 90% of forests

must say -> More than 90% of forest wildfires

Isn’t the simple explanation the fact that non-human causes of wildfires are likely to start more than one in a given area?

- Lightning?

- Hot, dry winds + sparks from nearby power lines? (Debatably non-human, but usually not terrorists.)

At least in California we have forest ecosystems that practically require periodic fire for regeneration — seeds that require fire to germinate — suggesting forest fires have been common even on evolutionary timescales, long predating humans.

There is a even simpler explanation. Follow the patterns

Starting multiple fire outbreaks (aiming to overpower the firefighters) is the standard procedure of every "professional" arsonist.

Arsonists also do fire "tours". They drive, lights off, a secondary road without traffic and stop each few minutes to start outbreaks. This would easily mimick a chain of fire sparks starting from power lines in the road, but we know better because night-vision drones of the Spanish police videotaped some people red-handed doing exactly this. And this idiots had a surprise waiting at the end of the road.

The problem is that most [1] of this people just are sent and paid for doing the job. When caught they fake mental issues and claim to act alone, but then you see that every single one of they follow exactly the same procedures, and know all the tricks to maximize the effect.

[1] Arsonists searching revenge is the other category. They are strongly focused on smaller areas owned by the target

I'm not saying it's impossible that arsonists are starting some of these fires, and sure, some may be started in this way.

I'm just saying that "lightning" is a simpler explanation than "well-coordinated major conspiracy of terrorists that succeeds at keeping things under wraps"---and so when, in California, a bunch of fires are started in a bunch of places where lightning struck dry timber in a fire-reliant ecosystem, our initial assumption about the cause should maybe be "lightning".

The largest Californian wildfire (2020) was attributed to lightning in an isolated area.

But there are solid proofs that link one arsonist (at least one) with the --second largest-- wildfire in the full history of California (2021).

Gary Stephen Maynard, an ex-teacher of criminology, was caught driving to several locations and setting multiple fires on public lands for no obvious reason.

He was not the only people linked with wildfires on California. Not at all.

This articles happily parroting that the problem is that we don't burn the forest enough, just add fuel to the future wildfires and groom the new pool of gullible puppets online.

And burning is not free. It has nasty undesirable consequences on soil and water storage that newspapers always forget to remind.

Both types of wildfires are also different on nature:

"California wildfires caused by humans are more dangerous than fires sparked by lightning"

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-06-22/california-...

"A 2017 study looking at wildfires fought by state or federal agencies from 1992 to 2012, found that people caused 84% of the blazes, adding an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the USA".

Look, your original post claimed “terrorists” but now you’re pointing to an article that merely says that most wildfires are caused by people.

I even included accidental human-started wildfires (sparks from powerlines) as an example in my original post, where I use the regrettable phrase “non-human causes” to refer to “fire not deliberately caused by a human”, and I should have been more clear. If there were no people in the forests, there would be fewer fires, yes.

It’s the conspiracy of “terrorists” claim that seems spurious. And again, sure, there may by lone criminals out there committing arson, but the claim that most wildfires are started by terrorists is what needs backing up, not the claim that there’s a human in the loop.

I wonder how would you define what is happening in Chile at this moment

Well, It does not matter. This is not what the article says. Two important ideas in the article.

1) Most wildfires reported on USA (on a particular time interval) were started by an human. Natural wildfires are not so common as we think, even on ecosystems adapted to fire.

2) Natural wildfires and human wildfires seen to have very different dynamics. The second burn much faster and cause much more damages. If proven with more studies, this is a really powerful piece of knowledge.

Strangely, we are being spoon-feed by newspapers with the opposite idea: "nothing to see here", "This is how nature works", "humans should start more wildfires" and, implicitly, "arsonists are heroes doing gods work". And this is terrible advice.

After all this people that lost their lives, homes, all their life on wildfires started deliberately, claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers is extremely awful.

We need also to have in mind that wildfires fuel climate change, and accelerating climate change is exactly the opposite of what each scientist recommend for decades, so probably not a wise idea. Not if we want our species to survive for the next two thousands years.

1) I'm not sure this is the right metric -- by acres burned, depending on the source, natural fires are comparable to human-ignited fires.

2) Fully natural wildfires are typically caused by lightning -- which of course often also means rain, humidity, or other moisture.

But the reality is that human fire suppression is actually quite effective most of the time. It does lead to debris buildup. It does lead to more intense fires--as does climate change and the widespread tree death associated with infestations and drought.

We don't seem to have a great idea of what these ecosystems were like before people, but it's not unreasonable to think that a lot of land would burn a little bit with quite some regularity, but not as intensively as these human-ignited fires because of the whole thunderstorm thing. It's also not clear that wildfires fuel climate change--after all they're not really carbon reserves: those tries will eventually die and decompose anyway, it's not like oil underground that had been locked away for millions of years. And, crucially, they'll regrow.

Lastly: why, again, with the conspirational thinking? "Claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers" as though the people writing these articles are knowingly lying, when almost all are just perpetuating what they hear from scientists/nonprofits/others. Why?

> why, again, with the conspirational thinking? "Claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers" as though the people writing these articles are knowingly lying, when almost all are just perpetuating what they hear

Fair point

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