Last I knew (as I lived right by areas that were constantly burning) Cal Fire had the contacts to maintain the majority of the federal land in northern California.
The only real tool for managing wildfires is controlled burns. The problem is, California isn't burning often enough [1].
The question is, if these areas were managed properly, with controlled burns, what would the greenhouse gas emissions be? I imagine proper management wasn't included in the emissions goals.
Related, we have some endangered pyrophytic [2] plants near where I live. I imagine they'll be extinct, within my lifetime.
Zero or minus, because you’re still burning a carbon capture tool.
It’s not a joke, it’s important. In Australia they forbade controlled burnings for 10 years. Result: A 10-year burn. CO2 emissions: Still 0 over 10 years, but lots of homesteads burnt.
Only 16% of US imports come from China. The majority of US imports are from nations with falling emissions. Obviously that isn't perfectly illustrative of exact shares of CO2 represented by those imports, but it's a useful proxy.
Some of it can be tied directly to US trade, and some of it can be tied to taking the all those profits and building internally. We exported all that manufacturing which used a lot of dirty coal
My point is that the US didn't "export all of its manufacturing" or all of its consumption emissions. Both statements are demonstrably false. Even still, of China's emissions only half are industrial. In the US manufacturing accounts for ~22% of emissions. If all of that manufacturing came back to the US, emissions would likely be lower, especially because we're phasing out coal. Don't get me wrong, it's a problem but the narrative that the US is only cutting emissions because of China's manufacturing is stupid.
Anyway, yes, part of the reason the US has dropped is because we have closed coal power plants in favor of natural gas, for example. But that’s another discussion
This isn't entirely true. The US still manufactures a lot of stuff, but does so more efficiently than in the past. The bulk of imported emissions other than electronics and a few minerals are in goods and raw materials that we trade around within NAFTA. A lot of our trade partners are also reducing emissions, even as they export to us. China is our largest partner in terms of our imports, but it only accounts for 16%, while Canada and Mexico represent 14% each.
Mexico is still cutting emissions year over year, as I mentioned in another comment Mexico, Canada, and the US are all making CO2 cuts. So even if that particular emissions is moved around all of NAFTA is making emissions progress.
And in the same period of time being considered, California's population got 18% larger. Perhaps the takeaway should be "be wary of non-per-capita figures when trying to measure the totality of a problem."
> What do you mean? Pollution effect is per habitat, not per capita.
What I mean is that you can still see higher total pollution even if you reduce per capita rates while experiencing population growth. Focusing solely on outputs while ignoring input considerations is bad engineering.
> Population growth is a baseline goal for emissions. If we can't cut pollution generation faster than population growth, we are losing.
Does the article suggest that's happening? Or is it just looking at a year in isolation of all other facts?
Agreed. Sensationalization about important things like this are not only falsy, it tends to make people feel helpless about climate change. This sense of helplessness only serves those that gain by continuing to destroy our planet.
Responses to 2020 (or subsequent) Wildfires in California & the US West by HOGWARTS HOUSE:
GRYFFINDOR: Hop on Nimbus 2000, cast "Aguamenti" a heroic and potentially effective number of times until suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, get rescued by friends.
HUFFLEPUFF: Check on friends and neighbors close to fire. Volunteer for group castings of "Accio Pluvia" and "Venit Inber" to bring rain, possibly "Defodio" firebreaks. Teach each other bubble charms for easier/safer breathing (also handy for airborne illness outbreaks).
RAVENCLAW: Read all 120 pages of thorough California governance report on Forest Management[0]. Try to organize herbology faculty, students, and community members into task force on controlled burns and forest restoration, begin research into long-term climate magic.
SLYTHERIN: Invest in private goblin enterprises specializing in lucrative airdrops of large amounts of fire-retardant potion. Circulate prospectus for wood-clearing companies. Talk angrily to anyone who will listen about how terrible political opponents are at fire management and how it just goes to show they should never be in charge.
EDIT: can someone explain the downvotes here? Fire response/management and the politics surrounding it are going to be very relevant to the topic and an inevitable part of the discussion, and while I may have made some pop-culture whimsy a part of my comment, it's done hand-in-hand with serious observations about how politics play out, not to mention a link that contains a trove of essential solid information about policy considerations.
The pop-culture whimsy is the major part of your comment. You may have some interesting ideas on how the politics would play out, but the reader has to decode them from the HP framing. Maybe try just giving the political analysis straight and giving a quick summary of the LHC report.
> while I may have made some pop-culture whimsy a part of my comment
I believe this is the entire reason. I almost didn't read your comment, thinking it was a distracting troll, but found it informative and distracting. ;)
Curious: will the regrowth of the burned forests have an opposite effect? It will take a while, but it should be capable of growing just as large, right?
That's why the externalities of CO2 management are too great for us to make a meaningful impact with legislation. We share an atmosphere with China, India, and everyone else. Game theory abounds.
I wish more people start holding politicians accountable for their promises.
All these sacrifices that residents of California have had to make under the premise of a better environmental future, banning straws, forcing a specific complex fuel mix forcing refineries in state to go out of business and thus people at the pump paying a lot more for this imported complex blend etc . . . all of these are decisions that have consequences.
The premise thus far has never been challenged that the "Good" outweighs the "bad" in these decisions by the legislature in California.
the title is not the information here -- a read over the papers show that one year of wildfires in California emitted more greenhouse gases than were saved by concerted means, over about 17 years.
The paper is meant to get attention. Unfortunately, the wildfires situation is quite a bit worse, since 2017, 2019 and 2020 were all record years for wildfire in California, not just 2020.
People who measure such things knew this quite some time ago, and the Elsevier-version of this had an egregious typo in the plain language summary section, suggesting a hasty edit job somewhere. Also notable is that yesterday was the California State Summit on Extreme Heat Events, led by presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom.
Here at YNews, maybe the angle ought to be the quantitative aspects of the measurement. I suggest that California is not the worst of it, worldwide, and that the science and data handling in California can serve as a lab of sorts, for less-able places around the globe facing new wildfires going into the future.
I think this is a misunderstanding of California. Wildfires are an ecological necessity here (and I doubt we're unique). In the last 25 years or so, the national forestry service has been failing [1], regarding controlled burns. The laws were changed, just recently, to make them easier to perform, to get the partially man made/unnatural conditions back under control [2].
There may be some climate change involved, but the primary reason is incompetence/mismanagement.
I worry that this is the beginning of something more troubling in terms of the climate crisis. We've been lucky so far that most of the carbon budget has been spent by human activities, lucky that is because we can change that
However, this is the start of a worrying global trend. We're currently seeing the West Coast ecosystems shift into something new, maybe grasslands maybe deserts. The Amazon Rainforest is next. Currently it's started emitting more CO2 than it takes in. We've been warned by scientists that if no land use policies change we can expect it flip from being a rain forest to a savannah. What that means in concrete terms are megafires and mass species die off for most of the amazon.
What's next? Cold and rainy England is expected to have the climate of Spain by 2050. Nothing native in England can adapt to that. So much of the world is going through rapid climate shifts that are devastating ecosystems. We're on the verge of flipping to a hot house earth and we're doing less than the bare minimum to stop it
> What's next? Cold and rainy England is expected to have the climate of Spain by 2050. Nothing native in England can adapt to that. So much of the world is going through rapid climate shifts that are devastating ecosystems. We're on the verge of flipping to a hot house earth and we're doing less than the bare minimum to stop it
Alternatively, the Gulf Stream could collapse leading to a massive drop in temperatures over Europe, which would collapse their agriculture faster than the current warming trends.
Yes that's possible, but it's unclear to me how long that trend would last. The artic will be ice free in a decade or so. I've never been able to square that with the cold descending over Europe. Quite frankly, I don't hold much confidence in that theory given the heat we've seen over Canada and Siberia
> However, this is the start of a worrying global trend. We're currently seeing the West Coast ecosystems shift into something new, maybe grasslands maybe deserts. The Amazon Rainforest is next.
The scary part is that it's not "either or" or "this first, this next". It's going to be happening at the same time. Greenland glacier melts, Siberian wildfires and methane ejections, North American West desertification, Indian peninsula becoming too hot in parts, etc. etc. etc.
Sure, some parts might become more habitable, but overall, there will be far less hospitable areas to live.
Ironically much of the problem in California is that California essentially adopted German forest management practices, which don't work in California, because Germany has a very different climate. Germany is much wetter, and so when a tree falls in the forest, in Germany it rots. In much of California, it just sits there until it catches fire.
What this means is that in Germany, suppressing every fire is a good strategy, because eventually the energy embedded in the dead wood is consumed by bacteria. In California, it can only be consumed by fire (or potentially mechanical removal). Constant suppression only serves to make the fires much worse when they inevitably do happen.
I'm sorry you lost your home. I can only imagine that being devastating. It's unfair how the crisis shakes out
As others have said, California is an ecosystem used to fires. It's integral to their function. Repressed burning by following a European style of land management has led to this issue becoming exacerbated and combined with the shifting climate, what we're calling the mega drought, leading to mega fires.
Western forests burn and regrow regularly... so much so that some species of plants rely on or optimize for the fire cycle. Things like having seeds that only open after a fire, fire-resistant bark, and so on.
Unless we pave over the locations the carbon released by the fires will be re-captured when those areas re-grow. It is nothing like digging up buried carbon and spewing it into the air.
It took 400 million years for fungus to figure out how to digest wood. Those plants are what we are burning at probably 100's of thousands of years per year at this point.
> Over the long to very long term, regrowth of vegetation in burned areas could alleviate some of the emissions, but will not occur quickly enough to avert highly dangerous levels of increased pollutions, temperatures, and climate change, the researchers said.
Note the use of the word "could". There is much less water in these areas than there was before (due to climate change).
It is extremely unlikely these forests will regrow any time soon.
I frequently see people get the temporary vs. permanent emissions conflated. Like the argument that burning fallen wood for heat, that is going to disintegrate anyway, is more environmentally unfriendly than burning natural gas.
Who's ever made that argument?
It's probably worse for your health (depending on what sort of fireplace you use), and sure, fallen wood can act as a home for various species, but I'd think only a fossil fuel company's PR department could come up with an argument that burning fallen wood is worse for the environment.
The fires happened because of the disastrous mismanagement of California's "Wildfire Prevention" efforts. By cutting back significantly on prescribed burns for decades because of perceived emissions, all the growth in the forests has created the perfect conditions for extended and humongous wildfires that we have seen in the past several years.
Most of the fires were on national forest land, therefore not managed by California. The US govt's forestry management has been mismanaged of course. Blame the right people. US govt federal management is the issue.
Sure, but we also can't just quickly undo a century of bad management. Doing the right thing is going to be a combination of wildfires, controlled burns, mechanical thinning, etc.
You're right that the trees will eventually grow back and replace that carbon (presuming they do not burn again), but it takes many decades. Am I misunderstanding your question?
Yes, this is true. For instance, the periodic annual increment in a western Oregon douglas fir forest peaks around forty years, and if each year you average the annual growth of all preceding years, the mean annual increment peaks somewhere between 60 and 80 years depending on site class. I only mean to suggest that regrowing a 40 year old stand takes 40 years.
Trees won't necessarily grow back. In a lot of cases native forest species are pushed out by non-native grasses. And some of the non-native grasses like to catch fire.
Fire is a natural part of the landscape. We are seeing today the consequence of 100 years of aggressive suppression combined with forty years of failed management. There are those arguing today that we should accommodate fire, harden our homes, and live with the consequences, including terrible air quality. But there's another way. We can actively manage our forests. Mechanical thinning combined with fire in the shoulder seasons can return our overstocked forests to healthy condition. While we could let nature run its course, it will take decades of catastrophic wildfire to get there, with the attendant loss of life and livability. We should support active management of our federal forests to produce better outcomes more quickly.
Actively managed forests sound good, but be rational. Are you willing to risk several hundred years of the region's health on the government doing something right? We know that natural fire works. It ain't pretty, and it can be dangerous, but at least it's more likely to resolve the problem than "40 years of failed management" is to not turn into another "40 years of failed management."
I live near the towns of Detroit and Gates in Oregon, both burned to the ground in the 2020 labor day fires. Many people died. Hundreds of homes destroyed. I think it's worth trying better management.
Natural fire is incompatible with houses built with sticks. Either you figure out how to build fireproof houses, or you manage the forests in the Wildland-urban interface [0].
> Actively managed forests sound good, but be rational.
It can work. The U.S. Forest Service does a pretty good job of managing the forests around my part of Northern Arizona. 20 years ago a fire got out of control and we lost a few homes, but they've been diligently mowing the underbrush ever since.
~5 years ago a fire started. I went to their briefing. They were honest: "this is a worst-case-scenario location for a fire", because it was burning in an area that hadn't been burned or treated in 40+ years.
They contract for companies with brush mowers to shred the underbrush, and keep track of when each section of the forest gets mowed.
No fires this summer, on account of a crazy amount of rain. It'll be 10 years before this summer's growth dies out and becomes a fire hazard.
I just don't trust the assumption that the world's leading forestry science experts and a perfectly run government could manage a forest.
There are unknown unknowns. It's an ecosystem that's way more complicated than we realized 40 years ago, so thinking "yeah we just do these 5 things and problem solved" is hubris that could end up be called mismanagement in 40 years, because it created an even bigger problem when we failed to consider an unknown.
If people need to evacuate the area for a few decades, so be it. It sucks, but not as badly as another 100 years of dealing with problems.
Or just live in places that don't require active management to such a high degree. It's also very energy intensive and completely preventable since humans merely would have to move to safer places.
It's like people who like to live on a cliff by the water and then are bailed out when few years later the cliff is in risk of collapsing. Just avoid it in the first place.
Edit: some governments are already realizing this. It's impossible economicly to properly protect all people who live in remote locations surrounded by forest. At some point we just have to understand that the outsized costs to overall society of keeping small towns with dozens of people safe is not smart when they can move to somewhere safe. I'm just being honest. Governments are doing this implicitly by doing the bare minimum that will fly in the press, while demonstrating through actions that the more time goes on the more you're at your own risk if you live in a small town in a fire zone.
Putting aside the profound ethical implications of shuttering rural towns (and the political hurdles to doing so), this strategy does not address carbon emissions, much less the profound air quality impacts associated with catastrophic wildfire, including impacts in urban areas like Portland Oregon right now.
If there's no people or power lines going through those forest areas, the fires will go down by a lot.
I do suggest a slow transition away from remote / dangerous places, unless people are willing to deal with the fact that nobody will come to help if bad things happen. It's a bit rich to expect all of society to contribute such a big effort just so small minorities can stay in places where it's not safe or economical to live, once you factor in the fact that Nature exists, and doesn't care about the fact your parents lived there.
And by the way, this is how it works in countries that can't afford this already. Even in Portugal after the last round of fires, the prime Minister said that the country cannot afford to protect every remote village in case of fire, and that people should reconsider where they live. More countries will follow.
Most of the fires in CA are not forest fires. Most of the atmospheric CO2 contributions are from what most refer to as "brush" fires. Take several mountains and valleys covered with dry vegetation of all types (yes, trees included) and burn them. That's what we have here.
Yes, forest management is important. Difficult, and maybe even practically impossible, yet important. However, this will not have the effect most commenters on this thread seem to think it will. Brush fires are nearly impossible to control. The best we can do is protect property and let them have their way with the hills an valleys they consume.
I live in this area. My neighborhood has been affected by and even surrounded by brush fires multiple times. I know how they fight them. You can't control them. If the winds are blowing in the wrong direction there's almost nothing you can do to prevent a catastrophe.
I have seen half a dozen air-dropping helicopters, a couple of Canadian fire fighting aircraft and a couple of DC-10's (or whatever they are) mount a combined attack on a massive brush fire north of my town multiple times in the decades I have lived here. All they can hope to do is protect property when the conditions allow. Nothing more.
Forest management is a very small part of the problem (or solution, depending on your take on the matter).
Don't ask what I think the solution might be. I don't think anyone knows. It's like asking how to plug a volcano or stop a hurricane. Sometimes you have to accept that things are the way they are and we just don't have the power to control any of it.
Meanwhile, onerous California forestry regulation is reducing the management of wildfire through the virtue of not culling (thinning) the forest often enough, either in form of firelines or lumberjacking.
The gardeners with their leaf blowers and 20 year old unmaintained pickup trucks are not helping either. Every one I pass by has a bunch of empty oil jugs in the bed. I’m sure all of that isn’t helping…
A 20 year old pickup is fuel injected, has a catalytic converter, and is checked by it's OBD2 controls constantly.
Unless the pickup is failing its smog tests, and driving around with expired registration, it's operating pretty well I promise.
Regarding oil consumption, that might be possible, but would eventually clog up the catalytic converters with an oily residue and also cause OBD2 faults for bad catalytic converter efficiency.
I have written about this and other climate change realities often on HN. It is always met with what I usually refer to as violent rejection. Of course, I understand why this is so. With so many players in this game seeking to benefit from selling a narrative (be it political or financial) it is nearly impossible to counter the carpet-bombing of distorted information that hits the masses on this topic day after day. It's the old adage about about what happens if you repeat something enough times.
The actual headline from the linked page is, one could say, somewhat deceiving. You have to at least read the first paragraph, quoted below, to understand the gravity of what is being reported:
"A new analysis led by researchers with the University of California has found the 2020 wildfires in the state, the most disastrous wildfire year on record, put twice as much greenhouse gas emissions into the Earth’s atmosphere as the total reduction in such pollutants in California between 2003-2019."
A few sentences later, further driving the point home:
"Wildfire emissions in 2020 essentially negate 18 years of reductions in greenhouse gas emission."
Even simpler:
1 year of forest fires >= 18 years of GHG emission reductions
And that, to a greater or lesser degree, happens here in CA every year. For some who don't live here I think what's missing is to actually experience the awesome scale of these events. Some simply can't understand something until they can feel it. I lost count of how many such fires I have experienced. Nothing like having your neighborhood encircled by a fire to see and feel the scale of the event.
I will categorically state that there is no way we can win this battle through any form of emission reduction. That includes a full transition to electric ground transportation. This isn't to say we should not try to clean-up our acts and strive for EV's. Not at all.
My point has always been the same: These things (EV's, reducing emissions, etc.) are good because, well, they are. Marketing them as effective ways to counter atmospheric CO2 concentration is nothing less than a cruel fantasy. The problem is that the masses buy into this (most people are not equipped to evaluate such things analytically), which leads to companies and politicians pushing false narratives benefiting while, at the end of the day, we don't even make a dent.
One year of fires negated 18 years of reductions.
Anyone with one gram of common sense would easily conclude that the forced reductions and the narrative being pushed isn't a solution at all. We are wasting time and money that could be applied towards real solutions.
Solar is another example of this. It's great. I invested in solar. However, it isn't at all a solution for atmospheric CO2 reduction. Even if we install the most optimal forms of renewable energy throughout the land and replace all fossil fuel energy production we will not stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. It will continue to rise as it has.
What we need is honest conversation based on facts and science, not politics and the financial interests of those making an absolute killing with narratives that are, to put it bluntly, nothing but lies.
NOTE:
Reading through the comments I see such things as "bad forest management". I understand where this comes from and, yes, some of that is true. However, it betrays a lack of understanding due to not living here. The largest and most damaging fires we have every year are not forest fires. They are brush fires. Yes, large numbers of trees are burned, however, entire mountains covered in vegetation colloquially referred to as "brush" burn every year. Tens of thousands of acres at a time.
This stuff is impossible to manage. You just can't. The best you can do is control the burn to protect homes. That's it. That's what they do. They pretty much let it bur...
94 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadThe takeaway is "We're doing a shit job of reducing greenhouse gasses."
What CA doesn't do well is manage forests.
The question is, if these areas were managed properly, with controlled burns, what would the greenhouse gas emissions be? I imagine proper management wasn't included in the emissions goals.
Related, we have some endangered pyrophytic [2] plants near where I live. I imagine they'll be extinct, within my lifetime.
1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte
edit: perhaps you had this in mind with "managing wildfires".
Zero or minus, because you’re still burning a carbon capture tool.
It’s not a joke, it’s important. In Australia they forbade controlled burnings for 10 years. Result: A 10-year burn. CO2 emissions: Still 0 over 10 years, but lots of homesteads burnt.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Of course, global emissions are way up but we were warned 40 years ago about global coal use.
https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
China built the second largest economy, the second largest military, and 3x as much greenhouse gas on the back of US consumer spending.
But hey, people on HN don’t like it when you point out stuff like this.
I think people are hoping for plausible deniability.
With half a century of warning, how did we end up in this climate mess?
“ hey, let’s blame the oil companies“
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/06/chinas-greenhouse-gas-em...
Some of it can be tied directly to US trade, and some of it can be tied to taking the all those profits and building internally. We exported all that manufacturing which used a lot of dirty coal
The US is 11% of the total.
China produces half of the world’s steel, for example. Most used internally.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_p...
Largest cement producer in the world by far:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267364/world-cement-prod...
All that industrialization…got China to 27% of total emissions.
When the US released oil from its reserves it has to be sent overseas because of the lack of domestic refineries
https://www.corporateknights.com/energy/is-the-sun-setting-o...
Anyway, yes, part of the reason the US has dropped is because we have closed coal power plants in favor of natural gas, for example. But that’s another discussion
Pacific Northwest Quantitative Wildfire Risk Assessment: Methods and Results; PyroLogix/ USFS 27Aug2018
Population growth is a baseline goal for emissions. If we can't cut pollution generation faster than population growth, we are losing.
What I mean is that you can still see higher total pollution even if you reduce per capita rates while experiencing population growth. Focusing solely on outputs while ignoring input considerations is bad engineering.
> Population growth is a baseline goal for emissions. If we can't cut pollution generation faster than population growth, we are losing.
Does the article suggest that's happening? Or is it just looking at a year in isolation of all other facts?
Put another way, its the wildfires that we should prevent and improve how we reduce greenhouse gases
(The current title is "2020 California wildfires wiped out 20Y of greenhouse gas emission reductions")
GRYFFINDOR: Hop on Nimbus 2000, cast "Aguamenti" a heroic and potentially effective number of times until suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, get rescued by friends.
HUFFLEPUFF: Check on friends and neighbors close to fire. Volunteer for group castings of "Accio Pluvia" and "Venit Inber" to bring rain, possibly "Defodio" firebreaks. Teach each other bubble charms for easier/safer breathing (also handy for airborne illness outbreaks).
RAVENCLAW: Read all 120 pages of thorough California governance report on Forest Management[0]. Try to organize herbology faculty, students, and community members into task force on controlled burns and forest restoration, begin research into long-term climate magic.
SLYTHERIN: Invest in private goblin enterprises specializing in lucrative airdrops of large amounts of fire-retardant potion. Circulate prospectus for wood-clearing companies. Talk angrily to anyone who will listen about how terrible political opponents are at fire management and how it just goes to show they should never be in charge.
[0] https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma...
(Please read the report!)
EDIT: can someone explain the downvotes here? Fire response/management and the politics surrounding it are going to be very relevant to the topic and an inevitable part of the discussion, and while I may have made some pop-culture whimsy a part of my comment, it's done hand-in-hand with serious observations about how politics play out, not to mention a link that contains a trove of essential solid information about policy considerations.
I believe this is the entire reason. I almost didn't read your comment, thinking it was a distracting troll, but found it informative and distracting. ;)
All these sacrifices that residents of California have had to make under the premise of a better environmental future, banning straws, forcing a specific complex fuel mix forcing refineries in state to go out of business and thus people at the pump paying a lot more for this imported complex blend etc . . . all of these are decisions that have consequences.
The premise thus far has never been challenged that the "Good" outweighs the "bad" in these decisions by the legislature in California.
The paper is meant to get attention. Unfortunately, the wildfires situation is quite a bit worse, since 2017, 2019 and 2020 were all record years for wildfire in California, not just 2020.
People who measure such things knew this quite some time ago, and the Elsevier-version of this had an egregious typo in the plain language summary section, suggesting a hasty edit job somewhere. Also notable is that yesterday was the California State Summit on Extreme Heat Events, led by presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom.
Here at YNews, maybe the angle ought to be the quantitative aspects of the measurement. I suggest that California is not the worst of it, worldwide, and that the science and data handling in California can serve as a lab of sorts, for less-able places around the globe facing new wildfires going into the future.
I think this is a misunderstanding of California. Wildfires are an ecological necessity here (and I doubt we're unique). In the last 25 years or so, the national forestry service has been failing [1], regarding controlled burns. The laws were changed, just recently, to make them easier to perform, to get the partially man made/unnatural conditions back under control [2].
There may be some climate change involved, but the primary reason is incompetence/mismanagement.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-l...
2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s...
However, this is the start of a worrying global trend. We're currently seeing the West Coast ecosystems shift into something new, maybe grasslands maybe deserts. The Amazon Rainforest is next. Currently it's started emitting more CO2 than it takes in. We've been warned by scientists that if no land use policies change we can expect it flip from being a rain forest to a savannah. What that means in concrete terms are megafires and mass species die off for most of the amazon.
What's next? Cold and rainy England is expected to have the climate of Spain by 2050. Nothing native in England can adapt to that. So much of the world is going through rapid climate shifts that are devastating ecosystems. We're on the verge of flipping to a hot house earth and we're doing less than the bare minimum to stop it
Alternatively, the Gulf Stream could collapse leading to a massive drop in temperatures over Europe, which would collapse their agriculture faster than the current warming trends.
The scary part is that it's not "either or" or "this first, this next". It's going to be happening at the same time. Greenland glacier melts, Siberian wildfires and methane ejections, North American West desertification, Indian peninsula becoming too hot in parts, etc. etc. etc.
Sure, some parts might become more habitable, but overall, there will be far less hospitable areas to live.
Had my house burn down due to wild fire. So I am a little passionate about it.
What this means is that in Germany, suppressing every fire is a good strategy, because eventually the energy embedded in the dead wood is consumed by bacteria. In California, it can only be consumed by fire (or potentially mechanical removal). Constant suppression only serves to make the fires much worse when they inevitably do happen.
As others have said, California is an ecosystem used to fires. It's integral to their function. Repressed burning by following a European style of land management has led to this issue becoming exacerbated and combined with the shifting climate, what we're calling the mega drought, leading to mega fires.
Unless we pave over the locations the carbon released by the fires will be re-captured when those areas re-grow. It is nothing like digging up buried carbon and spewing it into the air.
> Over the long to very long term, regrowth of vegetation in burned areas could alleviate some of the emissions, but will not occur quickly enough to avert highly dangerous levels of increased pollutions, temperatures, and climate change, the researchers said.
Note the use of the word "could". There is much less water in these areas than there was before (due to climate change).
It is extremely unlikely these forests will regrow any time soon.
Study : The fire frequency-severity relationship and the legacy of fire suppression in California forests.
Steel, Z. L., H. D. Safford, and J. H. Viers. 2015. Ecosphere 6(1):8. dx.doi.org/10.1890/ES14-00224.1
Nature Scientific Reports published a study called "Spatial and temporal pattern of wildfires in California from 2000 to 2019" with code and data IIR
doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88131-9
The 10 am rule was not related to CO2 emissions… please don’t comment vehemently when unfamiliar with a topic.
Earning $300 and having to buy food for $300 is a lot better than having to buy the food without earning any money.
[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/
> Actively managed forests sound good, but be rational.
It can work. The U.S. Forest Service does a pretty good job of managing the forests around my part of Northern Arizona. 20 years ago a fire got out of control and we lost a few homes, but they've been diligently mowing the underbrush ever since.
~5 years ago a fire started. I went to their briefing. They were honest: "this is a worst-case-scenario location for a fire", because it was burning in an area that hadn't been burned or treated in 40+ years.
They contract for companies with brush mowers to shred the underbrush, and keep track of when each section of the forest gets mowed.
No fires this summer, on account of a crazy amount of rain. It'll be 10 years before this summer's growth dies out and becomes a fire hazard.
There are unknown unknowns. It's an ecosystem that's way more complicated than we realized 40 years ago, so thinking "yeah we just do these 5 things and problem solved" is hubris that could end up be called mismanagement in 40 years, because it created an even bigger problem when we failed to consider an unknown.
If people need to evacuate the area for a few decades, so be it. It sucks, but not as badly as another 100 years of dealing with problems.
It's like people who like to live on a cliff by the water and then are bailed out when few years later the cliff is in risk of collapsing. Just avoid it in the first place.
Edit: some governments are already realizing this. It's impossible economicly to properly protect all people who live in remote locations surrounded by forest. At some point we just have to understand that the outsized costs to overall society of keeping small towns with dozens of people safe is not smart when they can move to somewhere safe. I'm just being honest. Governments are doing this implicitly by doing the bare minimum that will fly in the press, while demonstrating through actions that the more time goes on the more you're at your own risk if you live in a small town in a fire zone.
I do suggest a slow transition away from remote / dangerous places, unless people are willing to deal with the fact that nobody will come to help if bad things happen. It's a bit rich to expect all of society to contribute such a big effort just so small minorities can stay in places where it's not safe or economical to live, once you factor in the fact that Nature exists, and doesn't care about the fact your parents lived there.
And by the way, this is how it works in countries that can't afford this already. Even in Portugal after the last round of fires, the prime Minister said that the country cannot afford to protect every remote village in case of fire, and that people should reconsider where they live. More countries will follow.
Most of the fires in CA are not forest fires. Most of the atmospheric CO2 contributions are from what most refer to as "brush" fires. Take several mountains and valleys covered with dry vegetation of all types (yes, trees included) and burn them. That's what we have here.
Yes, forest management is important. Difficult, and maybe even practically impossible, yet important. However, this will not have the effect most commenters on this thread seem to think it will. Brush fires are nearly impossible to control. The best we can do is protect property and let them have their way with the hills an valleys they consume.
I live in this area. My neighborhood has been affected by and even surrounded by brush fires multiple times. I know how they fight them. You can't control them. If the winds are blowing in the wrong direction there's almost nothing you can do to prevent a catastrophe.
I have seen half a dozen air-dropping helicopters, a couple of Canadian fire fighting aircraft and a couple of DC-10's (or whatever they are) mount a combined attack on a massive brush fire north of my town multiple times in the decades I have lived here. All they can hope to do is protect property when the conditions allow. Nothing more.
Forest management is a very small part of the problem (or solution, depending on your take on the matter).
Don't ask what I think the solution might be. I don't think anyone knows. It's like asking how to plug a volcano or stop a hurricane. Sometimes you have to accept that things are the way they are and we just don't have the power to control any of it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-88131-9
Unless the pickup is failing its smog tests, and driving around with expired registration, it's operating pretty well I promise.
Regarding oil consumption, that might be possible, but would eventually clog up the catalytic converters with an oily residue and also cause OBD2 faults for bad catalytic converter efficiency.
Maybe they're leaking it on the ground I suppose.
Or it's two stroke oil for the leaf blower.
The actual headline from the linked page is, one could say, somewhat deceiving. You have to at least read the first paragraph, quoted below, to understand the gravity of what is being reported:
"A new analysis led by researchers with the University of California has found the 2020 wildfires in the state, the most disastrous wildfire year on record, put twice as much greenhouse gas emissions into the Earth’s atmosphere as the total reduction in such pollutants in California between 2003-2019."
A few sentences later, further driving the point home:
"Wildfire emissions in 2020 essentially negate 18 years of reductions in greenhouse gas emission."
Even simpler:
And that, to a greater or lesser degree, happens here in CA every year. For some who don't live here I think what's missing is to actually experience the awesome scale of these events. Some simply can't understand something until they can feel it. I lost count of how many such fires I have experienced. Nothing like having your neighborhood encircled by a fire to see and feel the scale of the event.I will categorically state that there is no way we can win this battle through any form of emission reduction. That includes a full transition to electric ground transportation. This isn't to say we should not try to clean-up our acts and strive for EV's. Not at all.
My point has always been the same: These things (EV's, reducing emissions, etc.) are good because, well, they are. Marketing them as effective ways to counter atmospheric CO2 concentration is nothing less than a cruel fantasy. The problem is that the masses buy into this (most people are not equipped to evaluate such things analytically), which leads to companies and politicians pushing false narratives benefiting while, at the end of the day, we don't even make a dent.
Anyone with one gram of common sense would easily conclude that the forced reductions and the narrative being pushed isn't a solution at all. We are wasting time and money that could be applied towards real solutions.Solar is another example of this. It's great. I invested in solar. However, it isn't at all a solution for atmospheric CO2 reduction. Even if we install the most optimal forms of renewable energy throughout the land and replace all fossil fuel energy production we will not stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. It will continue to rise as it has.
What we need is honest conversation based on facts and science, not politics and the financial interests of those making an absolute killing with narratives that are, to put it bluntly, nothing but lies.
NOTE:
Reading through the comments I see such things as "bad forest management". I understand where this comes from and, yes, some of that is true. However, it betrays a lack of understanding due to not living here. The largest and most damaging fires we have every year are not forest fires. They are brush fires. Yes, large numbers of trees are burned, however, entire mountains covered in vegetation colloquially referred to as "brush" burn every year. Tens of thousands of acres at a time.
This stuff is impossible to manage. You just can't. The best you can do is control the burn to protect homes. That's it. That's what they do. They pretty much let it bur...