It's both. That 85% includes accidents, it's not all arson.
> According to the National Park Service, nearly 85% of wildland fires in the U.S. are caused by human activities, such as unattended campfires, debris burning, equipment malfunctions and arson. Severe heat, which persists across the country in dangerous waves, can also fuel wildfires.
Climate change easily makes little accidents more likely to turn into big ones. Hotter, dryer, windier, etc. means that little spark from your campfire winds up sparking a fire.
Where have temps ever reached a point close to ignition points? Quick search says hottest temp ever on Earth was 135°F/56.7°C in Death Valley. Another quick search doesn't show specific grass/leaf ignition points, and I've spent more time on it already that I probably should have, but not 0 effort.
Temperature records are generally recorded in a controlled way for consistent readings using the same height, shade, etc. There have certainly been points on the earth that have gotten hotter than the official record. Whether that's enough to cause plants to spontaneously combust though, I have no idea.
> Where have temps ever reached a point close to ignition points?
California wild fires are often triggered by chaparral combusting, helped by high ground temperatures, which are not the same as air temperatures and can be much, much hotter.
Even with arson, climate change makes arson-started fires worse. Ignition is only part of the story of the fire; climate change impacts the spread in a variety of ways.
I’ve previously read that in certain states (California) forestry services no longer maintain forests to avoid serious wildfire conditions.[0][1]
Somewhat ironically, while blaming climate change for the problem instead of dealing with the problem, the amount of pollution from mismanagement exacerbates the amount of CO2 released.
This is actually a bit of a political debate, there are those who believe that letting the undergrowth burn will be better long term for forest health and reducing the severity of wildfires.
...despite being started at the same time in 15 different locations by humans, in the most windy and hot night of the year, the wildfire got surprisingly big
Only lightning strikes and humans can. (or volcanos but not a lot of them around the US)
Climate change can, and does depending on the nature of the change, increase the risk of wildfires.
Also bears playing with matches.
edit: It is possible for a large mound of organic debris like a mound of animals that got killed by lighting and then rapidly covered and then decomposed by really vigorous microorganisms to spontaneously ignite but that would be so rare in a world without humans heaping up big piles of the stuff as to be irrelevant.
> but that would be so rare in a world without humans heaping up big piles of the stuff
Hogs will heap up lots of organic debris and sleep in it, choosing strategically where to urinate in order to increase or decrease the heat emitted by the pile.
> The distinctive “pigloos” the animals build consist of mounds of cattails, which they cut down and burrow into, capturing enough heat to steam on cold days, Brook explains.
> Farrowing nests are rooted-out areas typically round to oval in shape (Figure 8). Nests range in size from 3 to 8 feet long, 2 to 7 feet wide, and 2 to 7 inches deep. Sows excavate these shallow depressions for giving birth to their young. Sows line the nests using readily-available material in close proximity, or some nests are unlined. Nests found in colder or open habitats are more elaborate than those found in warmer or forested habitats. Elaborate nests can have dome-like covers made of vegetation piled to 4-feet high.
That’s confusing the issue a bit. Or, if you prefer, you are arguing against a strawman.
The claim is not that climate change “causes” fires (how would that even work, exactly?)
The claim is that the conditions that allow these fires to grow explosively and do so much damage are due in part to climate change. Without climate change, we’d still have human-caused fires, but their effect would not be so severe.
I take no position on this claim, but this is how it is typically advanced.
Yeah! I mean, sure, someone dumped gasoline everywhere, and continues to do so and then deny it's a problem, and millions of people keep voting to dump gasoline everywhere because otherwise they'd be slightly inconvenienced, and companies are spending billions to convince them to keep voting that way and also silencing scientists who are sounding the alarm...
"Stop blaming the rise in fatal car crashes on icy roads from the freak blizzard, because statistics show that 100% of car crashes are caused by humans! ...Also 100% of cars."
A final result can have multiple contributing causes.
Just go to a lake and tie them against someone's boat launch, or just throw them in the lake. After all, you've gone this far of committing a crime, what's a little illegal dumping going to bother you?
They're basically hazardous waste. Even if they have plenty of tread and a possible long life ahead of them, no shop wants the hassle or comeback risk that comes with installing parts that don't have a fresh warranty.
my first car had a bad tie-rod-end, something wrong with the steering. It would chew through tires unevenly every 4 months or so. but the beauty was (20+ years ago) they were only 13" tires, and getting them rotated was dirt-cheap. So I'd do that and replace them quarterly with used ones for $20 a pop instead of fix the steering problem.
"Bought a new set of tires within a week of each serial killing" is a thing that's easily datamine-able. Make it challenging by using different tire vendors each time and limiting your crimes to traditional seasonal tire changeover times.
Playing devil's advocate, you don't have to buy new tires. Just swap them. A couple hundred bucks at Harbor Freight and you can be setting beads at home.
When I read a headline like this, my mind always goes to parallel construction.
I'm not saying forensics can't do some amazing stuff, but it just feels so much more likely that someone was able to correlate a pair cell phones to both locations, pull search histories and know for certain who did it
Parallel construction is mainly used in the context of intelligence sharing. The CIA and NSA don't give two flying fucks about the 4th Amendment, but the FBI needs criminal convictions that will stick in US courts, so they at least have to pay lip service to it. Conversely the CIA/NSA really want their methods to remain secret, but the FBI has to disclose their reasoning as part of prosecution. Traditionally, the CIA and FBI didn't talk to each other at all[0], until 9/11 happened and Congress forced them to, so parallel construction is how they avoid stepping on each other's toes.
That being said, that's all moot, because the article says the guy self-reported[1]:
> The man in the Jeep had reported the first fire that occurred on May 3, claiming to be a wildland firefighter who tried to put it out, authorities said. Investigators said they observed, however, a stark contrast in his reaction to the Salt Fire; he didn't attempt to report or extinguish it, even though he claimed in an interview that it was visible from his house.
And to add to the stupidity, his girlfriend voluntarily provided shoeprints to compare:
> Less than a mile from where the Salt Fire started, an agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Office of Justice Services conducted a traffic stop of the suspected Jeep, with a man and his girlfriend inside.
> The Jeep’s tire tread patterns closely matched those near the fires, authorities said. A shoe print of the woman's Vans also matched the previously found impression, and the woman voluntarily gave her shoes to the FBI, it said.
More powerful than forensics or spyware is the fact that criminals suffer from profound stupidity. I mean, the reason why people say "crime doesn't pay" is because, in most cases, it literally doesn't. Crime is not an economically productive activity on net, but even for individuals, they rarely profit from it. The way you actually profit from crime is to make other people do the crime for you, so they get caught, like some kind of MLM pyramid scheme that eventually becomes the new state if left unchecked.
[0] Yes, the GTA5 subplot about the IAA breaking into the FIB to extract a man that was already arrested so they can go Jack Bauer on him is only slightly an exaggeration of actual US executive branch politics
[1] In Among Us, if you kill someone as the Impostor, you can accidentally click the Report button to report your own kill. This happens more often than you think.
I run multiple trail races greater than marathon length every year, along with the training to run those races. I have a whole rack of running shoes in various condition. That also explains why I was out in the woods in the first place.
In Seattle, I think the homicide closure rate was about 50% pre pandemic, and got a lot worse since then. But also closure != punishment, because not all homicide prosecutions end up being guilty (it's not like the feds with a 99.X% conviction rate once they bring a case).
Well, this is just not true. There are plenty of people that have committed crimes and gotten away with it. Some might have been done so well that nobody noticed the crime at all. Some might have done it just slightly less perfectly so that people know the crime happened, but nobody can find the culprit. There's an infamous art gallery heist that comes to mind right off the bat.
Or, just be the CEO, apologize profusely one time, then watch as the disaster doesn't even affect your stock price for more than a week or two. Because, hey, sometimes a catastrophe is just the cost of doing business.
You could also say you didn't have "good product market fit", and then get another round of funding. Remember: it's not fraud if you sincerely believe in your business idea!
I understand why someone may intentionally or accidentally start ONE wildfire but always been baffled anyone could do it a second time realizing the effects. It's a weird phenomenon.
exactly, this isn't reddit, so please don't post a meme comment that only contains a single line from a 15 year old movie. if you arent contributing to the conversation, please just stay silent.
I found it amusing. the bot (meme) / bat (movie) usage. Don't think of it as memeing for memes sake, but to reinterpret a meme in a manner directly relevant to the what one is responding to.
It's possible I guess that one would say all jokes should be banned from here, and every response needs to be fully serious (otherwise will lose it's black)
I think it’s that couples can either average out a bit (destructive interference?) or ramp each other up to an insane degree (constructive interference).
Usually it’s a mix across attributes, so nothing too notable occurs. But obviously not in this case…
I'm not sure why you would think they are climate deniers. The odds are that they are exactly the opposite.
Having been around far left activist groups in my past, there are many who think that doing things like this on purpose is morally justified, because it keeps the conversation on climate change. The media incentivizes it by covering them as "climate-fueled wildfire" stories, every single time.
Wildfires in Canada were at a two-decade low in 2020, during the lockdowns. Think about that.
>Wildfires in Canada were at a two-decade low in 2020, during the lockdowns. Think about that.
Likely because most wildfires are accidents, even with accelerationist provocateurs being profoundly stupid and causing the thing they're worried about to get you to worry about it. People radicalized enough to do that are wildly uncommon.
Perhaps as a percentage of the population - but we do have groups like Stop Oil routinely and deliberately causing massive traffic congestion, which ironically produces more wasteful emissions. Or the fools throwing liquids and pigments on irreplaceable historical artifacts and monuments.
Never underestimate a radicalized idiot... they are capable of the inconceivable.
They are (allegedly) criminals. All this people rushing to assign them to a particular left/right group just are doing damage control or trying to promote the relate that would suit better the interests of their own particular tribe.
Without more data, just criminals. Activists would behave differently IMO.
It was a random example of an absurd type of convention that normally would not have people seeking romance or hooking up. My comment originally did say "climate convention" but that didn't seem absurd enough to me. Climate denial is absurd, so I switched the example.
Given that there are serial killers, serial rapists, serial abusers, and so on for every other type of violent crime, I would be more surprised if there weren't serial arsonists on occasion.
I don't know what the parent comment was referring to, however it's notable how brittle society actually is.
Society only works when people generally play by the same rules, ie. "The Social Contract". When people stop adhering to the contract, chaos happens and society rots or crumbles.
There's a plethora of recent examples of this - including mass riots, mass looting and mass shoplifting. Society doesn't have an automatic and efficient way to deal with people who collectively decided societal rules don't apply to them.
For some people, chaos is a means to an end. Tear down the things you don't like in society by literally breaking them.
I would argue there are some baseline ones to follow, mostly revolving around consent, property rights, and violence. Fortunately even other apes generally understand these instinctually at some level so it's baked in well enough it won't completely break down, with various asterisks attached.
If we all stopped paying taxes and started smoking weed we would probably manage somehow. On the other hand if everyone becomes an arsonist we'd have real problems.
Dunno, but when somebody spends a lot of resources and time to assure that wildfires happen, there is something to gain in their minds. Poor people don't spend their scarce precious money so randomly.
My first question would be: Can they find a link between this people and Gary Stephen Maynard? I assume that the answer will be not (or not evident) but, the `modus operandi` is very similar and both attacks fall in USA election years, so we see the same patterns repeating again (as expected). This has happened before.
My second question would be: provoked fires happen more often, less often or are equally distributed between blue and red states?
America has a problematic history with the death penalty. Especially with making sure it's actual the perp who gets penalized. Not some convenient scapegoat.
But I might not object to jury members who lost homes or family to the fire, or "999 to life" jail terms.
Canada has a legit wildfire season, and electrical and accidents obviously occur, but it also has an arson problem apparently because the fires drive a set of other narratives. eco-terrorism has its own internal status system that incentivises it. It's a source of chaos for its own sake. The irony is that instead of dealing with the crime, police mainly protect these "activists" from the communities they harass and the impunity from traditional consequences just makes them worse.
I mean, sure, you could blame the climate crisis on the petrol companies that have doubled production in Alberta in the past 10 years, or you suspect "eco-terrorists" which, as far as I know, is a Maxime Bernier conspiracy theory that has never been proven, despite the fact that environmental groups are constantly under CSIS watch? (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230609-canada-wildfi...)
Finally it seems that a lot of countries are starting to take the crime aspect of wildfires more seriously. This is probably a year with a high risk by the elections so I would expect a complicated summer.
Shoe print evidence has a high chance to lead to false convictions:
>> The National Institute of Justice, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, has just published a report which found certain techniques, including footprint analysis and fire debris, in forensic science were disproportionately associated with wrongful conviction
>> It must also be considered that footprints discovered at a crime scene remain fixed, while the wearer of the footwear continues on likely changing the wear of the shoe. Thus, unless the print is immediately matched its potential value may be lost. Also of concern is the lack of science and standards demonstrating that footwear marks are unique. There are a lack of scientific studies demonstrating how many characteristics are needed to determine a match with such evidence. This is similar to other forensic evidence such as bite mark analysis, tire tread analysis, etc. where there is little scientific evidence of its efficacy. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences made the conclusion that, aside from DNA, there was little if not any, scientific evidence for many forensic disciplines, including footprint evidence.[13]
Well the El Paso Times has been covering this for about a month [0]. Witnesses, including a park ranger, repeatedly describe seeing a dark Jeep leaving the scene of each fire. Prints from a pair of Vans slip-ons and tire treads were found at multiple fire scenes. When she was pulled over, the prints of the girlfriend's Vans slip-ons matched those found at the scenes, as did the tread of the dark-colored Jeep she was then driving.
96 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] thread> According to the National Park Service, nearly 85% of wildland fires in the U.S. are caused by human activities, such as unattended campfires, debris burning, equipment malfunctions and arson. Severe heat, which persists across the country in dangerous waves, can also fuel wildfires.
Climate change easily makes little accidents more likely to turn into big ones. Hotter, dryer, windier, etc. means that little spark from your campfire winds up sparking a fire.
precisely - when climate tips ground temps close to ignition points it does not take much to spark a huge conflagration, even if the source is human.
Direct sunlight gets much hotter, and in Death Valley for instance you can get third degree burns walking on sand dunes (not even black sand!) [https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/a-man-got-third-d...]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#:~:t....]
Furnace creek had a measured ground temp of 201F not that long ago.
That’s a lot closer to flash point than air temp. And localized reflections can easily boost that.
California wild fires are often triggered by chaparral combusting, helped by high ground temperatures, which are not the same as air temperatures and can be much, much hotter.
Arson-caused: 320,814
Human-caused non-arson: 1,046,983
Natural-caused: 327,319
(Ignoring all fires classified as unknown/unspecified cause).
So, there's as many arson caused fires as natural caused fires, and three times as many non-arson fires from human activities as from arson fires.
Make of that what you will.
Somewhat ironically, while blaming climate change for the problem instead of dealing with the problem, the amount of pollution from mismanagement exacerbates the amount of CO2 released.
0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1243599
1 - https://nationalpost.com/opinion/canadas-burning-because-of-...
https://www.kqed.org/science/1134217/let-it-burn-the-forest-... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda...
Not to say you’re implying against that, just clarifying.
Only lightning strikes and humans can. (or volcanos but not a lot of them around the US)
Climate change can, and does depending on the nature of the change, increase the risk of wildfires.
Also bears playing with matches.
edit: It is possible for a large mound of organic debris like a mound of animals that got killed by lighting and then rapidly covered and then decomposed by really vigorous microorganisms to spontaneously ignite but that would be so rare in a world without humans heaping up big piles of the stuff as to be irrelevant.
Hogs will heap up lots of organic debris and sleep in it, choosing strategically where to urinate in order to increase or decrease the heat emitted by the pile.
> The distinctive “pigloos” the animals build consist of mounds of cattails, which they cut down and burrow into, capturing enough heat to steam on cold days, Brook explains.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/huge-fera...
and
https://feralhogs.extension.org/signs-of-presence/#:~:text=F....
> Farrowing nests are rooted-out areas typically round to oval in shape (Figure 8). Nests range in size from 3 to 8 feet long, 2 to 7 feet wide, and 2 to 7 inches deep. Sows excavate these shallow depressions for giving birth to their young. Sows line the nests using readily-available material in close proximity, or some nests are unlined. Nests found in colder or open habitats are more elaborate than those found in warmer or forested habitats. Elaborate nests can have dome-like covers made of vegetation piled to 4-feet high.
The claim is not that climate change “causes” fires (how would that even work, exactly?)
The claim is that the conditions that allow these fires to grow explosively and do so much damage are due in part to climate change. Without climate change, we’d still have human-caused fires, but their effect would not be so severe.
I take no position on this claim, but this is how it is typically advanced.
...but a human threw the match!
A final result can have multiple contributing causes.
I guess this explains some of it lol.
Some guy goes speeding down the freeway, weaving through traffic. Easily a reckless driving ticket, possibly jail time or car impounded.
But they won't dare enter the carpool lane, even though it's totally empty. A ticket of $165.
Allegedly.
I'm not saying forensics can't do some amazing stuff, but it just feels so much more likely that someone was able to correlate a pair cell phones to both locations, pull search histories and know for certain who did it
That being said, that's all moot, because the article says the guy self-reported[1]:
> The man in the Jeep had reported the first fire that occurred on May 3, claiming to be a wildland firefighter who tried to put it out, authorities said. Investigators said they observed, however, a stark contrast in his reaction to the Salt Fire; he didn't attempt to report or extinguish it, even though he claimed in an interview that it was visible from his house.
And to add to the stupidity, his girlfriend voluntarily provided shoeprints to compare:
> Less than a mile from where the Salt Fire started, an agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Office of Justice Services conducted a traffic stop of the suspected Jeep, with a man and his girlfriend inside.
> The Jeep’s tire tread patterns closely matched those near the fires, authorities said. A shoe print of the woman's Vans also matched the previously found impression, and the woman voluntarily gave her shoes to the FBI, it said.
More powerful than forensics or spyware is the fact that criminals suffer from profound stupidity. I mean, the reason why people say "crime doesn't pay" is because, in most cases, it literally doesn't. Crime is not an economically productive activity on net, but even for individuals, they rarely profit from it. The way you actually profit from crime is to make other people do the crime for you, so they get caught, like some kind of MLM pyramid scheme that eventually becomes the new state if left unchecked.
[0] Yes, the GTA5 subplot about the IAA breaking into the FIB to extract a man that was already arrested so they can go Jack Bauer on him is only slightly an exaggeration of actual US executive branch politics
[1] In Among Us, if you kill someone as the Impostor, you can accidentally click the Report button to report your own kill. This happens more often than you think.
In Seattle, I think the homicide closure rate was about 50% pre pandemic, and got a lot worse since then. But also closure != punishment, because not all homicide prosecutions end up being guilty (it's not like the feds with a 99.X% conviction rate once they bring a case).
[1] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/01/12/as-murders-spi...
You could also say you didn't have "good product market fit", and then get another round of funding. Remember: it's not fraud if you sincerely believe in your business idea!
"Selection bias" here. You don't know about all the people who DID get away with it.
Not that I'm encouraging anyone /s
It's possible I guess that one would say all jokes should be banned from here, and every response needs to be fully serious (otherwise will lose it's black)
But a couple in a stable relationship? How does that conversation start? Did they meet at a climate denial convention for radicals?
I think it’s that couples can either average out a bit (destructive interference?) or ramp each other up to an insane degree (constructive interference).
Usually it’s a mix across attributes, so nothing too notable occurs. But obviously not in this case…
In Mossad together?
Having been around far left activist groups in my past, there are many who think that doing things like this on purpose is morally justified, because it keeps the conversation on climate change. The media incentivizes it by covering them as "climate-fueled wildfire" stories, every single time.
Wildfires in Canada were at a two-decade low in 2020, during the lockdowns. Think about that.
Likely because most wildfires are accidents, even with accelerationist provocateurs being profoundly stupid and causing the thing they're worried about to get you to worry about it. People radicalized enough to do that are wildly uncommon.
Never underestimate a radicalized idiot... they are capable of the inconceivable.
Without more data, just criminals. Activists would behave differently IMO.
Why would you automatically assume this? The world has had pyromaniacs long before it was fashionable to make radical climate activism one's identity.
Society only works when people generally play by the same rules, ie. "The Social Contract". When people stop adhering to the contract, chaos happens and society rots or crumbles.
There's a plethora of recent examples of this - including mass riots, mass looting and mass shoplifting. Society doesn't have an automatic and efficient way to deal with people who collectively decided societal rules don't apply to them.
For some people, chaos is a means to an end. Tear down the things you don't like in society by literally breaking them.
If we all stopped paying taxes and started smoking weed we would probably manage somehow. On the other hand if everyone becomes an arsonist we'd have real problems.
My first question would be: Can they find a link between this people and Gary Stephen Maynard? I assume that the answer will be not (or not evident) but, the `modus operandi` is very similar and both attacks fall in USA election years, so we see the same patterns repeating again (as expected). This has happened before.
My second question would be: provoked fires happen more often, less often or are equally distributed between blue and red states?
But I might not object to jury members who lost homes or family to the fire, or "999 to life" jail terms.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0cx6tw7
>> The National Institute of Justice, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, has just published a report which found certain techniques, including footprint analysis and fire debris, in forensic science were disproportionately associated with wrongful conviction
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-science-and-b...
(https://archive.ph/4ezJo)
Also see wikipedia:
>> It must also be considered that footprints discovered at a crime scene remain fixed, while the wearer of the footwear continues on likely changing the wear of the shoe. Thus, unless the print is immediately matched its potential value may be lost. Also of concern is the lack of science and standards demonstrating that footwear marks are unique. There are a lack of scientific studies demonstrating how many characteristics are needed to determine a match with such evidence. This is similar to other forensic evidence such as bite mark analysis, tire tread analysis, etc. where there is little scientific evidence of its efficacy. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences made the conclusion that, aside from DNA, there was little if not any, scientific evidence for many forensic disciplines, including footprint evidence.[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_footwear_evidence#Lim...
[0] https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/crime/2024/07/22/fbi-...