An invariably this will lead to "more taxes to protect our forests". As a state leading the climate change policies this tells you how miserable government will be in fighting climate change.
> The California Little Hoover Commission (LHC), officially the Milton Marks "Little Hoover" Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy,[1] is an independent California state oversight agency modeled after the Hoover Commission and created in 1962, that investigates state government operations and promotes efficiency, economy and improved service through reports, recommendations and legislative proposals.[2]
> Created by SB 37 in 1993, the California State Auditor operates under the direction of the Little Hoover Commission.[3]
> Milton Marks, Jr. (July 22, 1920 – December 4, 1998) was a California politician who served in the California State Assembly and California State Senate, as both a Republican and a Democrat,[1] representing San Francisco for 38 years.[2]
> The Hoover Commission, officially named the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, was a body appointed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to recommend administrative changes in the Federal Government of the United States. It took its nickname from former President Herbert Hoover, who was appointed by Truman to chair it.
They have the authority, but do they have the duty?
Also, "could" doesn't mean that they do. From your very own link:
"States can obtain authority to own and manage federal lands within their borders only by federal, not state, law. Congress’s broad authority over federal lands includes the authority to dispose of lands, and Congress can choose to transfer ownership of federal land to states. States have legal authority to manage federal lands within their borders to the extent Congress has given them such authority. As an example, Congress has to a large extent allowed states to exercise management authority over wildlife as a traditional area of state concern. Congress could give states authority to manage certain other activities, resources, or other aspects of federal lands. Congress also could give federal agencies authority to delegate or assign responsibility for aspects of federal land management to states or other partners."
Looks like there's some nuance here. From your linked document (emphasis mine):
> Although Congress has ultimate authority over federal lands under the Property Clause, states have legal authority to manage federal lands within their borders to the extent that Congress has chosen to give them such authority.
So whether California is able to manage forests on federal land within state borders to address the risk of uncontrolled fires isn't immediately clear, and presumably someone would need to dig up a relevant statute, if any, to show who is actually responsible.
Question everyone should be asking - where are the federal lands versus the state lands, and what is the proportion of state lands that have burned versus federal lands that have burned.
The insinuation of that statistic is that federal land management should be blamed as much or more than the state of California. That may be true. It also may be true that the actual lands that have been burning and been poorly managed are more state lands than federal lands. California is obviously a large state. That's why we need to know what percent of the burnt lands are actually state versus federal before I'd deem the statistic in question to be useful.
> The number of acres treated by the U.S. Forest Service in California during fiscal 2020 was the second lowest under Trump's administration, and 40% below a recent peak of 424,486 acres treated in the state during the last year of the Obama administration, according to the data.
But that seems a little misleading considering the impact of COVID-19 on 2020. Here's a nice table of historical prescribed burns broken down nationally: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_prescribed.html (also https://www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/intelligence/2019_st...). From that it doesn't seem Trump's administration is substantially any better or worse than Obama's. Other than that Trump's accusation seem off-base--if California is to blame, to a first approximation so too must be the Feds, and in any event states seem to perform several times more prescribed burning by acreage than the Feds--I don't think there's much else that can be said without some domain expertise. The types of lands and their locations, the appropriateness of mitigations (or lack thereof), the distribution of fires, etc, would all seem to be important to drawing any serious conclusions about what has happened and what is practicable in the future.
California is an odd place. Dry, warm, and sunny, surrounded by deserts on two sides and slowly fading to a wet climate in the north. In the desert there are few trees. In the lush PNW trees do well, generally. Is it any surprise that dry California is so prone to fires? It’s the edge of the forest ecosystem, the last stand before it gives way to dry desert.
The fires are the worst in wet years, generally. It rains all winter, at least in the north part of the state, so lots of underbrush grows. It doesn't rain at all in the summer, so all the brush dries out, providing fuel for the fires. But a bigger problem is that all the forests are wild, so over time all that underbrush grows up and then a fire starts and burns everything down. If there were regular fires than the underbrush would burn quickly leaving the trees unharmed.
Probably looking at it similarly but slightly different lens. My take is that wet years trees don’t die off in large numbers. Drought years kill enough trees that the forest can ignite. The death of the trees a few years ago allowed the fast growing underbrush to become big enough to create the problem there. The dead trees remain to move the problem up. The living trees are engulfed by hot and long burning fires that surround.
> Paleoclimatological studies indicate that the last 150 years of California's history have been unusually wet compared to the previous 2000 years. Tree stumps found at the bottom of lakes and rivers in California indicate that many water features dried up during historical dry periods, allowing trees to grow there while the water was absent. These dry periods were associated with warm periods in Earth's history. During the Medieval Warm Period, there were at least two century-long megadroughts with only 60-70% of modern precipitation levels. Paleoclimatologists believe that higher temperatures due to global warming may cause California to enter another dry period, with significantly lower precipitation and snowpack levels than observed over the last 150 years.[5]
I've been reading Dan De Quille's "The Big Bonanza", about the history of the Nevada silver mines, and I was struck by a sentence from an early chapter:
> Pointing out the blue peaks of the Marysville Buttes, seen far away in the smoky distance, [Kit Carson] said "Yonder lies the valley of the Sacramento!"
This was in 1846; was it smoky because of persistent forest fires? Since it was still before the gold rush, the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas presumably weren't particularly populous.
The Great Smoky Mountains are part of the Appalachian chain, between Tennessee and North Carolina, across the country from the Sierra Nevada. I imagine that the latter might also experience haze from the same cause (terpenes emitted by living trees), but given that a large part of the current problem is the suppression of natural wildfires, it would not be surprising for there to be actual smoke despite there being few European settlers. Native Americans in the region also used fire to manage their environment, e.g. to create meadows, as in Yosemite.
I'm pretty sure the comment you're replying to didn't intend to suggest any connection between the Sierra Nevada and the Great Smoky Mountains, but to show that the usage of "smoky" as an adjective for mountains does not necessarily mean literal smoke. The Great Smoky Mountains are just one example of this usage (thus "Great".) Similarly note the usage of "blue peaks" which probably doesn't mean the peaks were actually blue but that Rayleigh scattering was being observed.
Side note, Kit Carson, who is oftentimes celebrated as a folk hero, was responsible for many massacres of indigenous peoples and displacement of them. He was never really the schemer behind these atrocities, but he was one of the US governments best trigger man when it came to this. It was very odd considering he was married to a Mexican woman and had indigenous wives at other points in his life.
It's only odd if you think of 'indigenous peoples' as a monolithic group. No one thinks it odd that europeans fought one another, even though they're all european, right? Same deal in the Americas. Cortez would never have prevailed against the Aztec without his Tlaxcalan allies, for example.
> Before Europeans arrived (pre-1800), when the area was much more forested and the ecology much more resilient, 4.4 million acres (1.8 million hectares) of forest and shrubland burned annually.[1]
> During the 2020 wildfire season alone, over 8,100 fires have contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of land, making it the largest fire season in California's modern history.
4.4 million acres of burn in an already historically thinned forest is going to be entirely different than the same area of burn in a mostly un-thinned forest. The damage to the forest, the CO2 produced, the smoke levels ... all could be at least an order of magnitude different.
Well California is not yet as dry as it once was a few centuries ago, so you should expect things to get even worse. You think it's bad now, but some day you'll look back on present conditions fondly. If that's not your cup of tea then I suggest getting out of the state because there are no political solutions to this. Even if by some miracle AGW were stopped dead and reversed, California would still be getting hotter and dryer. That's what the pre-industrial climate of California was typically like.
I live in a place that is likely to be even adversely affected (in terms of human living conditions) by the move out of the last several thousand years of relatively wet weather in the American southwest. Note that this change isn't expected to involve increasing temperatures of much note all by itself, just increasing dryness. AGW will likely do that, however.
I'd also note that talking about the climate of "California" doesn't make a lot of sense. If state boundaries were based on biomes/climatic zones, CA would likely be at least 3 different states. The coastal zone of Northern CA is essentially unrelated, climate-wise or ecologically, to either Central Valley, the high Sierras or the start of the great basin to the east.
This discussion about fire in California is specifically about the regions of California which are prone to fires, in case that somehow was unclear to you. If you're trying to make a point, it's not clear what that point is.
My point is this: Fires in California will get worse and this shouldn't be news to anybody who cares. Both AGW and California's history point to fires becoming increasingly common. One without the other would be bad enough, but California has both.
When I reply to people on HN (or anywhere else) I assume I am talking to that person. You noted that "you" (meaning me) should consider taking certain steps. I noted that I don't live in CA. I then pointed out that the concerns you raised about CA apply to the entire US southwest. I then noted that CA has several different climate zones and biomes and that these concerns do not apply to all of them.
Not sure why you've been downvoted. For years Central Valley aquifers have been getting drained faster than they refill, it's unsustainable. Particularly in the case of 'fossil aquifers', named because the water in them is ancient and doesn't appreciably replenish on human timescales.
Central Valley agriculture isn't sustainable. The lower their ground waters get, the more they'll try to pull from the rest of the increasingly dry state. Californian politicians have no answer for this because there is none (other than 'scale back or move out') and they probably know it.
I thought a core issue was that if you just throw firefighting money at a problem, the (well-intentioned and honorable) fire-fighting forces will find ways to use that money. Which long-term, turns into incentivizing the putting out of fires, rather than the prevention of fires (brush clearance, controlled burns, reducing/managing human encroachment into fire-vulnerable areas).
And creating almost a fire-industrial complex that justifies why you need so spend so much money.
This claim should not be made lightly -- do you have any sources to back up your claim? I imagine the money spent on local and state fire departments does not subtract from the NPS/BLM budget for forest management.
I do not, except from sporadic NPR series on the costs of wildfire fighting versus lack of attention on wildfire prevention. The governor just committed another $2B (I recall), and much of it to go to fighting I believe.
Honestly, I would be glad to see some analysis and find that my uninformed impression is incorrect.
I also find it interesting that I'm being downvoted for raising such a fundamental question. As if the money is clearly being used in the right way.
I suspect the budget is actually a fair bit more nuanced than a dichotomy of fighting versus prevention, but regardless, the tools, training and people used to fight fires are the same tools and people that go out and do the preventative measures.
I wouldn't be worried about the macro budget, look at your actual firefighting policies and decide from those if the money will end up spent well.
I do not know anything about Calfire, but I have worked with a few other fire crews at state and federal levels in California and neighboring states, and while they have and love nice fire equipment--would you want bad eqp in an out of control wildfire?--most of it is 100% usable in prevention tactics. As another commenter mentions, fire crews are almost universally very interested in preventative methodology and more broadly in forest ecology--it's in the job description, and certainly necessary for a career path.
Whether or not a given crew is assigned to fuels or other fire prevention tasks in a given jurisdiction depends entirely on the budget priorities of that jurisdiction. In turn, that jurisdiction has to work with whatever annual budget trickles down from administrative and executive levels.
Regarding California, I know too little to speak with confidence on government spending. People I know who live there are work in land management have always said that forest (fire) management has been neglected for many years.
I don’t know about Californian fire fighters, but the ones that I know here in germany are fairly well interested in all kinds of preventative measures. They’d all prefer to sit on their couch and be paid for not having a fire than donning that flame-proof suit and literally putting their lives at risk. That certainly doesn’t mean that all money is perfectly allocated - they all love their toys and might go procure stuff that’s not truly needed if budget has no limit, but all in all they’re fairly well incentivized towards prevention.
I'm going to weigh in and say the fire fighters here in Canada are pretty much the same. My uncle (now passed) pretty much channelled Smokey the Bear at family BBQs.
If you want to spend firefighting budget, preventative measures are about as expensive as fighting the fires, and you're still going to get fires anyway. If you are thinking purely in cost of appliances and man-hours, putting crews in the middle of nowhere running controlled burns is pretty costly.
In Australia, cut funding to firefighting caused a reduction in preventative measures, which significantly worsened our 2019/2020 fire season to say the least. An outcome that was signaled to policy makers by the firefighters well in advance of the fires. Pretty much the opposite to the scenario you've described, but in my opinion an outcome that was fairly obvious.
Of all the takes out there, this one seems most reasonable. There are plenty of areas with much more forest per square km that are not up in flames year after year, but they're just as impacted by the global climate.
No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA, and why it has nothing to do with the decades and decades of fire suppression they've been doing that have built up a huge tinder box in a drought-prone area.
I guess it'll take some more reading to understand this. Upshot: due to unprecedented warming and drying, California had tens of millions of dead trees. No amount of 'forest management' would have prevented this. And it was due to large regional climate changes.
This 'whistling in the dark' about simple explanations for climate change is not helping anybody.
<edit> Yes there was lots of thrashing around, and not all of it helped. But the last decade of drought created simultaneously 150 Million dead trees. It might have taken the combined industrial output of California for a decade to get them all cut, hauled and disposed. There was no time, most of the trees were in impassable terrain, and heck that activity would inevitably have created a few unintentional fires.
What was done or not done, couldn't have blunted the tsunami of dead wood that inundated the state. Arguing over a teacup in a tempest is fun but not informative.
Not sure about that. We already harvest half a billion trees every year. Those mechanized harvester-loaders are almost disturbingly effective. It doesn't seem like it would take very long to thin all those snags, if we made it a real policy goal.
Not sure of those numbers. 3-4B board feet. 100 ft per tree? We're talking 30M trees. With the combined effort of all the equipment in every state, and usually in groomed tree farms. Not the mountains and wild places of California. And with an end result of millions of trash trees, not good lumber. It would arguably have cost more than the entire US lumber industry earns.
Thinning the tree population would not achieve anything. Many insects can fly several Km routinely. Bees do it constantly. The beetles probably could do it also. So either you remove all trees in a radius of lets say "4 km" or beetles just keep growint. But if you remove all trees in a few Km, then you don't have a forest anymore (neither water, wood, or the other environmental services that the forest provides).
More pesticides equal to less birds and bats. Not having birds and bats plus sucking all the water that trees need equal to more beetles. The disdain of politicians (and their voters) for this themes is the root of this problem.
It doesn't say that making the trees further apart prevents the movement of the beetles, it's saying that the tree density is so high that the individual trees can't draw enough water to produce the sap that protects them from the beetles.
>> Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem?
Thinning the tree population wouldn't solve it. Removing part of the dead trees could mitigate it but those trees are essential to beetle predators like woodpeckers. Things in ecology are complex and always connected.
A snag doesn't draw any water, though, so it seems like you could leave them standing while culling live trees to reduce the areal water demand, right?
I had seen this narrative lots of times before. "Fix it for me for free whereas I take the money" because you like the trees, don't you?.
Not. Sorry. Is nor is my mission, neither I have the private resources to "draw any water" or fix the consequences of the greed of others.
I assume that US government could fix the problem if they wanted, so don't blame on the messenger, please. The current narrative seems to be "forests are expensive so lets remove them and problem solved". Will not work.
There is a direct correlation between fire suppressive actions carried out over the last hundred or so years, and the increase of more devastating wildfires in California.
The state government made it a practice to stifle any potential wildfire for so long that a significant overgrowth and buildup of flammable materials has occurred, which otherwise would have burned in minor incidents over the years.
Maybe for far Northern California and the Sierras. But Southern California doesn't have much in the way of flammable materials other than grass and shrubs. And they grow back very quickly. One of my in-laws had to be evacuated 2 times in 3 years due to a fire in the same area.
> There is a direct correlation between fire suppressive actions carried out over the last hundred or so years, and the increase of more devastating wildfires in California.
And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. It's only been the last 20 years--when underbrush management was prohibited because of environmental concerns--that we've had this problem.
> Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were.
Which is my point. Modern industrial forest management figured out how to fix this problem. There were economic incentives for lumber, and cooperative regulation allowing controlled burns + underbrush clearing by loggers solved the problem. Industrial humans allowed there to be more trees, not fewer.
Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control.
There are direct policy consequences of disallowing controlled burns and underbrush management. And it's California's fault. People in the southern Central Valley have been complaining about these policies for decades. And it's because once all the Bay Area's pollution and fires get swept downwind, those people have the luxury of breathing it as it stays in the basin.
> Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control.
Californian climate is relevant, not just global climate. Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. This is for California, not the whole world. 100 years ago, when you say California's fire management was working well, California's climate was unusually wet. California is naturally more inclined to burn than most other parts of the world, up there with Australia and Siberia. Most of the rest of the world is not nearly so imperilled as California and it's not because everybody is is better at managing forests.
> Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet.
And the last 20 have not been. These patterns also have not shown up in other places with the same climate patterns but different policies.
Australia, for instance, has had nightmare fires forever. It's only been the last few decades that underbrush removal has been made more difficult or illegal in many cases.
The past 20 years has seen California returning to it's more typical dry and hot climate. California has had huge fires every year 'since forever' just like Australia, but awareness of this is low because living memory of the past hundred years is of an aberrantly wet period. Being hot, dry and on fire has been California's typical climate for two thousand years at least and the past 20 are a return to that. If anything, California is still wetter than usual, not dryer.
Clear all the brush you want, California will almost certainly continue to get hotter and dryer than it was a century ago, and the fires will continue. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for California, only an orange glow on the horizon. Fire management strategies that worked a century ago for wet California will not continue to work. That was never maintainable.
Because the consequences of fire suppression take a fair bit of time to accumulate. You don't get 30 years of overgrown dry forest 1 year into fire suppression policies.
But you do when those policies _began_ in the 70s.
California's prohibiting underbrush removal due to environmentalism was just the preview of Delta Smelt Dust Bowls last decade.
(The Dust Bowl, also being something that humans fixed with industrial policy, and the reason Oklahoma, despite no natural lakes, has more lakefront property per capita than anywhere in the U.S.)
You had me there for a few seconds but your alternate-universe view of California water policy is kinda hard to swallow. If it wasn't for the state water project there wouldn't be any water in the western San Joaquin Valley at all. All those "Congress Created Dust Bowl" signs up and down I-5 belong to land barons who really believe that not only should they get water from 500 miles away, but that they should get all the water in the state, at no cost, and no matter if it rains or doesn't.
Except for one thing. There was actually nothing keeping that water from flowing except for the delta smelt. The Central Valley went from green to brown in a single year. Nobody else was affected.
Irrespective of the politics of "who should get this water", the reality is that the people who were for protecting the Delta Smelt created an environmental disaster.
It's the same logic that they used to prevent thinning forests via logging and clearing underbrush--and lo and behold we have too many trees and when the fires burn, they're too hot!
It's the same logic that the U.N. used to ban mahogany exports, which led to those countries burning thousands of years of trees to make room for farmland, as it was their only economic recourse.
At some point, the environmentalists might want to ask themselves if "they're the baddies", given that other, supposedly less enlightened cultures have similar ecological situations and different outcomes.
You're obviously a crank and arguing about water policy on HN is the very definition of a waste of time, but why not?
> The Central Valley went from green to brown
This is a normal tactic of California water cranks, to use "Central Valley" to mean something else. The "Central Valley" is a huge, 400-mile-long flood plain, most of which is always ankle-deep in water. But the place you are talking about is just the bit of western Fresno County that you can see from I-5, what informed people call Westlands. Before 1968, the Westlands was never green. Not even once. Its natural hydrology is that of absence.
> Nobody else was affected.
Not sure what you could possibly be talking about with this sentence. The whole state was greatly affected by the drought.
You have bought into the propaganda of a Beverley Hills billionaire. If you are actually interested in the reality of this topic, i urge you to read Mark Arax's latest book:
> > You're obviously a crank and arguing about water policy on HN is the very definition of a waste of time, but why not?
I've lived in Bakersfield for over 15 years. All of these arguments are things that people have been talking about when I was there 20 years ago.
There's no crankery about it. It's just now--all of a sudden the effete sensibilities of San Franciscans are affected by these problems. Oh we care now.
What is remarkable, and I know you won't listen, but is to consider that perhaps a certain worldview got this wrong. When information goes one way, from privileged to unprivileged, the unprivileged know more than the privileged. They know both the situation of the privileged (because the privileged are sure to tell them) as well as their own. People in the Central are directly affected by this stuff constantly. It's the reason they'd leave and make a new state if the Bay Area wasn't holding them hostage.
> There are plenty of areas with much more forest per square km that are not up in flames year after year, but they're just as impacted by the global climate.
And not only that, but California didn't use to have this problem. It used to be that as a condition for allowing loggers to harvest trees (1 out of 200), they'd have to clear the underbrush.
It is zero cost to fix this problem. There would be more trees and fewer fires if CA just allowed the policies they had in the 90s. Unbelievable incompetence.
California exists in a weird transition zone, especially in the South of the state, between the Mediterranean coastal zone and the Eastern deserts.
As a result, its forests can get real hot and dry.
A drive from the San Bernardino basin up highway 38 to Big Bear either in real life, or on Google StreetView will show how dry, hot areas very gradually transition into forest. This is how a stupid gender-reveal party ignited 23,000 acres of hot, dry transition zone between hot desert, and alpine forest, resulting in me not being able to see across the street.
>No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA
Well for one thing, let's start with the fact that this is wrong. CA is not the only state experiencing dangerous and widespread forest fires. It just seems to be the only state that is actually being discussed here.
No, it does not have "very little" to do with climate change.
We just had the worst heat wave in the recorded history of CA. To suggest that climate change is an insignificant factor is just plain wrong.
> In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land.
Another factor is the indirect effects of climate change that can cause nonlinear impacts. E.g. a single unusually warm winter could cause the population of bark beetles to swell, weakening or wiping out large swaths of trees (this has happened in Yosemite for example).
I'm in agreeance that it's mostly forest management, but it's poor management in part due to a lack of response to the increased risk of fire climate change is introducing. Many regions are experiencing prolonged, record breaking dry spells. Some of the same regions also experienced well above average catastrophic fire seasons these past 12 months or so. I don't think it would be bold of me to link the two.
Isn't this basically what Trump has been saying? Hot weather (which isn't the same as climate) + overzealous suppression = tinder box forests that lead to explosive wildfires we cannot control.
A report like this is good news, in that we have a single item we can point to that says what the problems are and what we can do about them. The numerous large fires in 2018 and 2020 help make the case for taking the report seriously and urgently.
So what can citizens who are not in government do to move this along?
California could stop voting for the same people over and over again. After enough iterations, the only two possibilities left are that either Californians are victims to widespread false consciousness, or that they support the path their state is proceeding on.
The submitted title ("State of California Knew the Fires Were Coming") was badly editorialized, which breaks the site guideline about titles [1]. We take submission privileges away from accounts that do that, so please don't do that.
All is not lost though. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you're welcome to. Indeed, that's helpful. Just please do it as a comment in the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's [2].
The main thing we're trying to avoid is submitters using the title field to promote their interpretation of an article. Titles are by far the largest influence on threads, so it's important that they reflect the underlying content neutrally. Otherwise, simply by virtue of being the first (or luckiest) person to submit an article, one user would have the power to frame it for everyone else, and that would lead to an entirely different kind of site.
dang- it is not my intention to break guidelines here. The previous title was factually accurate, since the California Senate leader's name is listed among the authors. Please reconsider that this was "badly" editorialized.
Unless the original title is incredibly vague or generic ("Report from Committee, May 2019"), you should stick to that, rather than highlight (cherrypick) one fact from it to support a viewpoint. Even if that fact is "actually accurate."
Sorry, I can see how 'badly' would land badly. I just meant that it isn't a borderline case. HN has that title rule for really good reasons and the submitted title clearly broke the rule. Let's not get too worried about that though. It's a good submission and that is more important.
Edit: maybe one clarification would help. Factual accuracy is good and necessary but not sufficient; there are many facts one could choose from, and cherry-picking the fact that you think is most important and making that be the title is a form of editorializing. It's actually the main form of editorializing.
I grant you that the title you used is probably what most of us would consider most interesting, when looking at that article from the present moment.
Are there any "controlled burns over time" statistics?
I'd venture that "not enough controlled burns" should be the first hypothesis for why these fires are so common. I learned how important controlled burns are in boy scouts -- this isn't exactly a well kept secret. Before any other explanations are suggested, this one should be addressed.
I'd also venture that the state of California would prefer if the fires were outside of their control rather than caused by forest mismanagement. I will neglect to mention any other political reasons that might influence what these fires are blamed on.
Can anyone who rejects the controlled burns hypothesis explain the basis of their beliefs and also explain what they think would happen if the frequency of controlled burns were increased?
No. CalFire has reports on their response to crises, but no statistics on preventative measures. It hasn't been what's driving promotions.
They can't change incentives placed on them. And we have to be willing to voluntarily accept man-caused air quality tradeoffs (and e.g. make liability exemptions, or have the state pay for harm caused by the side effects of intentional, planned burns)
> Certain Department activities may be exempt from CEQA due to their emergency nature (e.g., firefighting, flood response) or their minimal likelihood for causing significant impacts (statutory or categorical exemptions). Other actions may require the Department's development and approval of environmental documents, including Environmental Impact Reports. The following is a summary of CAL FIRE approvals that are subject to environmental review under CEQA:
> Scientists estimate that prior to European settlement in California, fires burned approximately 4.5 million acres annually in California. In comparison, between 1950 and 1999, fires burned about 250,000 acres annually, less than 6 percent of the historical average. Within a few years, the natural fire regime in which Sierra forests evolved and thrived largely ceased.
This not only set up a perfect storm for massive wildfires, but also makes you think it this had something to do with the droughts. If there's millions of extra trees consuming/holding water, it's not crazy to think this may be related.
Warmer and drier areas are definitely more likely to start a fire. Climate change causes places to be warmer and drier over the long-term. However, this long-term trend, which is worrisome, does not explain the magnitude of the fires that have been haunting California the past few years.
The Governor was wrong when he said that it is mostly caused by climate change and only partially due to forest management. It's the other way around.
101 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] thread> The California Little Hoover Commission (LHC), officially the Milton Marks "Little Hoover" Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy,[1] is an independent California state oversight agency modeled after the Hoover Commission and created in 1962, that investigates state government operations and promotes efficiency, economy and improved service through reports, recommendations and legislative proposals.[2]
> Created by SB 37 in 1993, the California State Auditor operates under the direction of the Little Hoover Commission.[3]
The cover page footer also mentions Milton Marks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Marks
> Milton Marks, Jr. (July 22, 1920 – December 4, 1998) was a California politician who served in the California State Assembly and California State Senate, as both a Republican and a Democrat,[1] representing San Francisco for 38 years.[2]
It's presumably named in deference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
> The Hoover Commission, officially named the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, was a body appointed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to recommend administrative changes in the Federal Government of the United States. It took its nickname from former President Herbert Hoover, who was appointed by Truman to chair it.
* State leaders should continue to remind federal lawmakers and policymakers of federal obligations to its forests within California.
* State agencies should plan to make greater use of the Good Neighbor Authority to perform treatments on federal land.
"""
51% of forests in California are on Federal Land.
> By far the largest forest landowner in the state is the fed-eral government, which controls 57 percent of Californiaís forests.
Edit since I'm getting downvoted: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44267.pdf
Also, "could" doesn't mean that they do. From your very own link:
"States can obtain authority to own and manage federal lands within their borders only by federal, not state, law. Congress’s broad authority over federal lands includes the authority to dispose of lands, and Congress can choose to transfer ownership of federal land to states. States have legal authority to manage federal lands within their borders to the extent Congress has given them such authority. As an example, Congress has to a large extent allowed states to exercise management authority over wildlife as a traditional area of state concern. Congress could give states authority to manage certain other activities, resources, or other aspects of federal lands. Congress also could give federal agencies authority to delegate or assign responsibility for aspects of federal land management to states or other partners."
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/08/13/california-u-s-forest-serv...
> Although Congress has ultimate authority over federal lands under the Property Clause, states have legal authority to manage federal lands within their borders to the extent that Congress has chosen to give them such authority.
So whether California is able to manage forests on federal land within state borders to address the risk of uncontrolled fires isn't immediately clear, and presumably someone would need to dig up a relevant statute, if any, to show who is actually responsible.
The insinuation of that statistic is that federal land management should be blamed as much or more than the state of California. That may be true. It also may be true that the actual lands that have been burning and been poorly managed are more state lands than federal lands. California is obviously a large state. That's why we need to know what percent of the burnt lands are actually state versus federal before I'd deem the statistic in question to be useful.
By acres burned in California, Federal lands are still usually in the lead but not by as much; very roughly in proportion to Federal landownership, which is 57% of state forests. See overview at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wildfires-forests-ins.... The hard numbers seem to come from the historical state-by-state statistics from https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_statistics.html
From the Reuters article:
> The number of acres treated by the U.S. Forest Service in California during fiscal 2020 was the second lowest under Trump's administration, and 40% below a recent peak of 424,486 acres treated in the state during the last year of the Obama administration, according to the data.
But that seems a little misleading considering the impact of COVID-19 on 2020. Here's a nice table of historical prescribed burns broken down nationally: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_prescribed.html (also https://www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/intelligence/2019_st...). From that it doesn't seem Trump's administration is substantially any better or worse than Obama's. Other than that Trump's accusation seem off-base--if California is to blame, to a first approximation so too must be the Feds, and in any event states seem to perform several times more prescribed burning by acreage than the Feds--I don't think there's much else that can be said without some domain expertise. The types of lands and their locations, the appropriateness of mitigations (or lack thereof), the distribution of fires, etc, would all seem to be important to drawing any serious conclusions about what has happened and what is practicable in the future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Land_Management
"Bureau of Land Management"
When everyone was talking about the drought in CA a few years ago was it really a stretch of the imagination that fires would follow?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California
Welcome to normal. I think California is so young, many people living in California just don't have a realistic expectation for California's climate.
> Pointing out the blue peaks of the Marysville Buttes, seen far away in the smoky distance, [Kit Carson] said "Yonder lies the valley of the Sacramento!"
This was in 1846; was it smoky because of persistent forest fires? Since it was still before the gold rush, the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas presumably weren't particularly populous.
Wikipedia, "Great Smoky Mountains".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaxcala#Conquest
> Before Europeans arrived (pre-1800), when the area was much more forested and the ecology much more resilient, 4.4 million acres (1.8 million hectares) of forest and shrubland burned annually.[1]
> During the 2020 wildfire season alone, over 8,100 fires have contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of land, making it the largest fire season in California's modern history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
4.4 million acres of burn in an already historically thinned forest is going to be entirely different than the same area of burn in a mostly un-thinned forest. The damage to the forest, the CO2 produced, the smoke levels ... all could be at least an order of magnitude different.
I live in a place that is likely to be even adversely affected (in terms of human living conditions) by the move out of the last several thousand years of relatively wet weather in the American southwest. Note that this change isn't expected to involve increasing temperatures of much note all by itself, just increasing dryness. AGW will likely do that, however.
I'd also note that talking about the climate of "California" doesn't make a lot of sense. If state boundaries were based on biomes/climatic zones, CA would likely be at least 3 different states. The coastal zone of Northern CA is essentially unrelated, climate-wise or ecologically, to either Central Valley, the high Sierras or the start of the great basin to the east.
My point is this: Fires in California will get worse and this shouldn't be news to anybody who cares. Both AGW and California's history point to fires becoming increasingly common. One without the other would be bad enough, but California has both.
What is so hard to understand about this?
Central Valley agriculture isn't sustainable. The lower their ground waters get, the more they'll try to pull from the rest of the increasingly dry state. Californian politicians have no answer for this because there is none (other than 'scale back or move out') and they probably know it.
And creating almost a fire-industrial complex that justifies why you need so spend so much money.
Honestly, I would be glad to see some analysis and find that my uninformed impression is incorrect.
I also find it interesting that I'm being downvoted for raising such a fundamental question. As if the money is clearly being used in the right way.
More money for planes, firefighters, modeling fire behavior: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/07/09/ahead-of-peak-fire-season-...
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4172
Although some discussion of prevention: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/867395353/california-was-set-...
I wouldn't be worried about the macro budget, look at your actual firefighting policies and decide from those if the money will end up spent well.
Whether or not a given crew is assigned to fuels or other fire prevention tasks in a given jurisdiction depends entirely on the budget priorities of that jurisdiction. In turn, that jurisdiction has to work with whatever annual budget trickles down from administrative and executive levels.
Regarding California, I know too little to speak with confidence on government spending. People I know who live there are work in land management have always said that forest (fire) management has been neglected for many years.
In Australia, cut funding to firefighting caused a reduction in preventative measures, which significantly worsened our 2019/2020 fire season to say the least. An outcome that was signaled to policy makers by the firefighters well in advance of the fires. Pretty much the opposite to the scenario you've described, but in my opinion an outcome that was fairly obvious.
No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA, and why it has nothing to do with the decades and decades of fire suppression they've been doing that have built up a huge tinder box in a drought-prone area.
This 'whistling in the dark' about simple explanations for climate change is not helping anybody.
<edit> Yes there was lots of thrashing around, and not all of it helped. But the last decade of drought created simultaneously 150 Million dead trees. It might have taken the combined industrial output of California for a decade to get them all cut, hauled and disposed. There was no time, most of the trees were in impassable terrain, and heck that activity would inevitably have created a few unintentional fires.
What was done or not done, couldn't have blunted the tsunami of dead wood that inundated the state. Arguing over a teacup in a tempest is fun but not informative.
More pesticides equal to less birds and bats. Not having birds and bats plus sucking all the water that trees need equal to more beetles. The disdain of politicians (and their voters) for this themes is the root of this problem.
It doesn't say that making the trees further apart prevents the movement of the beetles, it's saying that the tree density is so high that the individual trees can't draw enough water to produce the sap that protects them from the beetles.
>> Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem?
Thinning the tree population wouldn't solve it. Removing part of the dead trees could mitigate it but those trees are essential to beetle predators like woodpeckers. Things in ecology are complex and always connected.
The real problem here is the lack of water.
I had seen this narrative lots of times before. "Fix it for me for free whereas I take the money" because you like the trees, don't you?.
Not. Sorry. Is nor is my mission, neither I have the private resources to "draw any water" or fix the consequences of the greed of others.
I assume that US government could fix the problem if they wanted, so don't blame on the messenger, please. The current narrative seems to be "forests are expensive so lets remove them and problem solved". Will not work.
The state government made it a practice to stifle any potential wildfire for so long that a significant overgrowth and buildup of flammable materials has occurred, which otherwise would have burned in minor incidents over the years.
Mother Jones had a great piece on this - https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of...
And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. It's only been the last 20 years--when underbrush management was prohibited because of environmental concerns--that we've had this problem.
Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were. 100 years ago was during an unusually wet period of Californian history.
Which is my point. Modern industrial forest management figured out how to fix this problem. There were economic incentives for lumber, and cooperative regulation allowing controlled burns + underbrush clearing by loggers solved the problem. Industrial humans allowed there to be more trees, not fewer.
Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control.
There are direct policy consequences of disallowing controlled burns and underbrush management. And it's California's fault. People in the southern Central Valley have been complaining about these policies for decades. And it's because once all the Bay Area's pollution and fires get swept downwind, those people have the luxury of breathing it as it stays in the basin.
Californian climate is relevant, not just global climate. Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. This is for California, not the whole world. 100 years ago, when you say California's fire management was working well, California's climate was unusually wet. California is naturally more inclined to burn than most other parts of the world, up there with Australia and Siberia. Most of the rest of the world is not nearly so imperilled as California and it's not because everybody is is better at managing forests.
> Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet.
And the last 20 have not been. These patterns also have not shown up in other places with the same climate patterns but different policies.
Australia, for instance, has had nightmare fires forever. It's only been the last few decades that underbrush removal has been made more difficult or illegal in many cases.
Clear all the brush you want, California will almost certainly continue to get hotter and dryer than it was a century ago, and the fires will continue. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for California, only an orange glow on the horizon. Fire management strategies that worked a century ago for wet California will not continue to work. That was never maintainable.
California's prohibiting underbrush removal due to environmentalism was just the preview of Delta Smelt Dust Bowls last decade.
(The Dust Bowl, also being something that humans fixed with industrial policy, and the reason Oklahoma, despite no natural lakes, has more lakefront property per capita than anywhere in the U.S.)
Except for one thing. There was actually nothing keeping that water from flowing except for the delta smelt. The Central Valley went from green to brown in a single year. Nobody else was affected.
Irrespective of the politics of "who should get this water", the reality is that the people who were for protecting the Delta Smelt created an environmental disaster.
It's the same logic that they used to prevent thinning forests via logging and clearing underbrush--and lo and behold we have too many trees and when the fires burn, they're too hot!
It's the same logic that the U.N. used to ban mahogany exports, which led to those countries burning thousands of years of trees to make room for farmland, as it was their only economic recourse.
At some point, the environmentalists might want to ask themselves if "they're the baddies", given that other, supposedly less enlightened cultures have similar ecological situations and different outcomes.
> The Central Valley went from green to brown
This is a normal tactic of California water cranks, to use "Central Valley" to mean something else. The "Central Valley" is a huge, 400-mile-long flood plain, most of which is always ankle-deep in water. But the place you are talking about is just the bit of western Fresno County that you can see from I-5, what informed people call Westlands. Before 1968, the Westlands was never green. Not even once. Its natural hydrology is that of absence.
> Nobody else was affected.
Not sure what you could possibly be talking about with this sentence. The whole state was greatly affected by the drought.
You have bought into the propaganda of a Beverley Hills billionaire. If you are actually interested in the reality of this topic, i urge you to read Mark Arax's latest book:
https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California...
I've lived in Bakersfield for over 15 years. All of these arguments are things that people have been talking about when I was there 20 years ago.
There's no crankery about it. It's just now--all of a sudden the effete sensibilities of San Franciscans are affected by these problems. Oh we care now.
What is remarkable, and I know you won't listen, but is to consider that perhaps a certain worldview got this wrong. When information goes one way, from privileged to unprivileged, the unprivileged know more than the privileged. They know both the situation of the privileged (because the privileged are sure to tell them) as well as their own. People in the Central are directly affected by this stuff constantly. It's the reason they'd leave and make a new state if the Bay Area wasn't holding them hostage.
And not only that, but California didn't use to have this problem. It used to be that as a condition for allowing loggers to harvest trees (1 out of 200), they'd have to clear the underbrush.
It is zero cost to fix this problem. There would be more trees and fewer fires if CA just allowed the policies they had in the 90s. Unbelievable incompetence.
As a result, its forests can get real hot and dry.
A drive from the San Bernardino basin up highway 38 to Big Bear either in real life, or on Google StreetView will show how dry, hot areas very gradually transition into forest. This is how a stupid gender-reveal party ignited 23,000 acres of hot, dry transition zone between hot desert, and alpine forest, resulting in me not being able to see across the street.
https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7148/
Well for one thing, let's start with the fact that this is wrong. CA is not the only state experiencing dangerous and widespread forest fires. It just seems to be the only state that is actually being discussed here.
No, it does not have "very little" to do with climate change.
We just had the worst heat wave in the recorded history of CA. To suggest that climate change is an insignificant factor is just plain wrong.
> In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147256/california-h...
Source: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/8/602/305152
So what can citizens who are not in government do to move this along?
All is not lost though. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you're welcome to. Indeed, that's helpful. Just please do it as a comment in the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's [2].
The main thing we're trying to avoid is submitters using the title field to promote their interpretation of an article. Titles are by far the largest influence on threads, so it's important that they reflect the underlying content neutrally. Otherwise, simply by virtue of being the first (or luckiest) person to submit an article, one user would have the power to frame it for everyone else, and that would lead to an entirely different kind of site.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: maybe one clarification would help. Factual accuracy is good and necessary but not sufficient; there are many facts one could choose from, and cherry-picking the fact that you think is most important and making that be the title is a form of editorializing. It's actually the main form of editorializing.
I grant you that the title you used is probably what most of us would consider most interesting, when looking at that article from the present moment.
I'd venture that "not enough controlled burns" should be the first hypothesis for why these fires are so common. I learned how important controlled burns are in boy scouts -- this isn't exactly a well kept secret. Before any other explanations are suggested, this one should be addressed.
I'd also venture that the state of California would prefer if the fires were outside of their control rather than caused by forest mismanagement. I will neglect to mention any other political reasons that might influence what these fires are blamed on.
Can anyone who rejects the controlled burns hypothesis explain the basis of their beliefs and also explain what they think would happen if the frequency of controlled burns were increased?
They can't change incentives placed on them. And we have to be willing to voluntarily accept man-caused air quality tradeoffs (and e.g. make liability exemptions, or have the state pay for harm caused by the side effects of intentional, planned burns)
- Most recent "Redbook": https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/11146/2018_redbook_final.pdf
- "Stats and Events": https://www.fire.ca.gov/stats-events/
- "Vegetation Management Program" (sub-programs (2-tick "--") existence and structure shows how much CalFire has been able to invest in these): https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resourc...
-- Forest Practice (other portals mentioned here): https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/forest-...
--- Open Data Hub, mainly timber mgmt: https://forest-practice-calfire-forestry.hub.arcgis.com/
-- ...Landowner Assistance: https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resourc...
-- Environmental (e.g. Air quality): https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resourc...
--- CEQA CA Env. Quality Act: https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/CEQA/Purpose#what
-- Climate Change: https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/climate...
> Certain Department activities may be exempt from CEQA due to their emergency nature (e.g., firefighting, flood response) or their minimal likelihood for causing significant impacts (statutory or categorical exemptions). Other actions may require the Department's development and approval of environmental documents, including Environmental Impact Reports. The following is a summary of CAL FIRE approvals that are subject to environmental review under CEQA:
> Fire Protection: ... Fuels Management Projects
This not only set up a perfect storm for massive wildfires, but also makes you think it this had something to do with the droughts. If there's millions of extra trees consuming/holding water, it's not crazy to think this may be related.
The Governor was wrong when he said that it is mostly caused by climate change and only partially due to forest management. It's the other way around.