So to go off on a bit of a tangent, in a fantasy book from 1998* there was a fire mage who had been preventing wildfires for decades. When green mage (plants/trees/etc) finds out about this she chews him out about the dangerous conditions he's creating by not letting the buildup on the ground burn away. By the end of the book the wildfires have reached the forest and the fire mage dies trying to stop the resulting firestorm.
Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.
* Circle of Magic #3, Daja's Book
It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices. The problem has always been the people who live in and around fire prone areas. They've used public pressure, bureaucracy, and litigation to prevent State and Federal agencies from properly managing the forests since the post-war boom.
In California, for example, permits are managed by 35 different "Air Districts" created in 1947 each with their own local leadership that are easily lobbied. Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board.
It's coming up now because the situation is so dire we need a concerted effort to sway public opinion towards the realistic solution. Now that insurance companies are giving up on these fire prone markets, the residents have no choice but to get with the program.
If, on the other hand, the area to be burned has "invested capital" and houses and land on it--essentially, private property, which has this strange quality of fixity even in the face of something as destructive as the earth (which never fails to dissolve it), how would you guarantee, without incredibly high insurance premiums, that people's houses wouldn't burn down.
And even if people are willing to pay the premiums, they would do so knowing that the government might decide, almost randomly (to them), to burn a chunk of forest right next to their house. They'd get fair warning, sure, but who wants to own a house that might burn down in 10 years because the state decides that its too much of a risk to have that patch of land burn naturally?
Absolutely. A good starting point is to look to Australia's regulations for construction materials, methods, water storage and setback/firebreak requirements, etc. for fire safety in bushfire prone areas.
While it may be picturesque to have your house or cabin nestled in amongst the forest, your fire survivability is Zero.
Especially when volunteer firefighters then have to risk their lives to save people with the lovely view. (Ditto California...)
The population density between Australia and the US is radically different though which changes the dynamic (deserts and marginal land exist in both, but Australia is particularly water challenged with no high mountains, so no major rivers).
Insurance companies could presumably do inspections of clearings and cancel or charge more if you don't have sufficient clearing, but municipalities aren't going to like the tree cutting that results.
Yes, defensible space helps, but temperatures can exceed 1,000 to 2,000 F / 500 -- 1,000 C. Sustained exposure to that can damage all kinds of materials, let alone be difficult to survive. Even at considerable distance the radiant heat of even a smaller wildfire is quite palpable, something I've had personal experience of.
The fire will also reduce or remove available oxygen, there can be tornadic-ferocity winds (and what the winds blow), embers, and all manner of other threats.
Smoke is only one of your worries.
Sprinklers on the roof work pretty well too.
That said, sitting around in an active wildfire is a bad idea compared to not being there.
The biggest issue is usually fuel close to the structure (bushes or trees right next to the house), or openings in the structure like eaves. Rooftop sprinklers work decently well for wooden roofs, but it's more complicated than just installing them due to potential water pressure issues. Metal roofs shouldn't need them.
All it takes is a small hole in the armor though sometimes, and without someone there to watch it and fight it, it takes a big change in building styles to be 100% sure. Like cement structure + metal framing & roofing + minimal combustible furniture, etc.
The biggest issue IMO is that western style (really central european/north western european) construction tends to focus on greenery, windows, wood and natural materials, etc.
Spanish-Colonial style construction is better suited to these kinds of conditions, with some modifications (avoiding exposed beams, and dealing with earthquakes both major necessary changes).
[https://firesafemarin.org/articles/should-i-put-a-sprinkler-...]
As long as fuel is kept a decent distance and the house is closed up (and doesn't catch on fire), you'd be fine. SCBA would make sure you didn't get any red eyes from the little smoke that would get in.
If you have bushes and trees right up against the structure (or are in a tinder dry forest in a fully involved canopy fire), then you're having a different kind of party of course.
Actually, the Native Americans historically started the practice.
Do they realize how much pollution is produced in the California's uncontrolled forest fires? Laws should not be that stupid.
I wasn't really a fan of Melting Stones, which mainly focuses on Briar's student and takes place at the same time as The Will of the Empress. If I remember right that book was also an experiment, written as an audiobook first then later released as a regular book, so that may explain why it doesn't feel as good to me.
The author has had another in mind for years too, a continuation of the problems Tris had been having from The Circle Opens onwards: she can't figure out how to make a living with her magic, because she refuses to use it as a weapon. Unfortunately, the author doesn't actually have the rights to this universe, so she has to wait for Scholastic to want another book.
The media attribute it to global warming which means noting gets done about it.
You can see what happens right here in the downvotes I have got. Just because I shift blame for something away from global warming to another cause, people feel they most downvote me.
Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed.
I partly made that comment to see how much a rational and reasonable comment would get downvoted for that reason. I think the experiment proved something.
Similar issues with public transport, imvho
The "buy more EVs" conclusion when considering environmental impact of transit is an egregious logical fallacy (and I don't mean to say that a new car should preferably be a combustion one with that).
It's just that the logical conclusion from a perspective of scarcity or danger regarding environmental issues is hard to "sell", long-term, and acting on it requires collective effort and planning.
Just the oppoaite is true for handing out subsidies with a harmful shotgun mentality, worsening instead of bettering the problems.
So that's why I answered with this here: it's a similar problem and somewhat paradoxical. Generall, public attention to the topic of climate change is not doing anything useful by itself, as you correctly pointed out.
There is a profit to be made from selling EVs.
> "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)"
Better forest management IS fighting climate change. Well managed land can be a carbon sink whereas fires release huge amounts of CO2 and are damaging in many other says. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27353-x bout just one region of the world
But doing this is costly and there is not much to be sold to do it.
There is always a lobby for doing something that that means someone can sell something. For things that do not increase sales, particularly things that involve not doing things (e.g. no cutting down forests) there is no equivalent lobby.
We've already blown right past the Paris accord, I'm sure we'll soon come up with a new accord that will set a target that we will also blow past.
In the meantime, invest in an air conditioner and an air purifier for your city home, and try not to own any summer dachas in heavily forested areas.
Shifting blame towards land management practices - not necessarily by you, but for example by that particular POTUS - is often an attempt to downplay global warming and the urgent need to do take steps to stave it off, rather than a good-faith attempt to reform land management practices. If people detect a whiff of that, that's what makes them downvote; given the present and future consequences of downplaying global warming and the urgent need to take steps to stave it off, and the push that's been behind that for the past, oh, fifty-to-seventy years or so, can you blame them? No one's against reforming land management to prevent forest fires.
I mean so what…. I don’t see how having a conversation about taking a practical steps to avoid a disaster should be suppressed just because the person initiating the conversation might have a different opinion on a related subject.
Yep, that attitude that makes perfect sense for society.
They might have different views from you, that you are certain are wrong, but they might be entirely sincere.
> "focus on global warming means no one will do anything about poor land management"
Gross generalization, a lot changed long and still lately, you are just saying: all lazy because of global warming excuses.. and then
> "Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed."
Any quote where someone official reasoned like that? Btw funny, seeing that actually you are the one here blaming "global warming" for something?
That's why no one does them.
When there is a clear causal connection, it will be easier. By then, it will be a pretty crazy mess.
Which is to say, we absolutely can, we just choose not to. Absolutely goddamn infuriating how so many problems in our world have such catastrophically obvious solutions and we just don't, usually because of money.
Now that there are so many cabins in the woods, there's probably an opportunity for a startup that makes robots to clear out the forest floor. The only problem is that the forest ecosystem has evolved to have periodic fires, but perhaps this is still the best of a series of bad options.
But no. We do nothing, and people's homes continue to burn, and we dump yet more masses of CO2 into the atmosphere and waste thousands of trees, and of course a requisite number of human casualties. Ridiculous.
But that’s communism! You bureaucrats can’t tell me what to do! (You may think I am straw-manning but this is based on real, actual conversations that I have had with real, actual people in rural California. There is a terrible brain rot that has ossified in “conservative” culture in rural America and at this point I don’t think anything can actually be done about it. These people will happily burn to death with an ignorant smile on their face.
That's the entire thing now. Just fuck liberals. No matter what the issue is, fuck liberals. If liberals want sensible regulations, they will be opposed. If conservatives suggest the exact same ones, they'll be fine with it. If the Liberals cave and give the Conservatives exactly what they want, they'll still oppose it because it'll be signed by a Liberal president, which is a Liberal accomplishing something, and therefore conflicts with "Fuck Liberals." They will fuck Liberals if it costs them freedoms, the lives of their children, the stability of their government, and the habitability of their biosphere.
That's all mainstream conservatism is anymore here and frankly it should be roundly mocked and derided at every opportunity for that. This complete non-ideology is why political issues here can comprehensively not be resolved, because one side's entire driving force is fucking over the other.
Which tribes do you mean? Some were in the plains, some were in the forests, and many more were nomadic over vast areas. There were - and still are - many peoples with wildly different lives, cultures, and understanding encompassing the millions of square miles that make up North America. Don't call us "colonized" as you imagine we're all the same.
To address your specific point, the "figured out" part was the fact that fires could only be detected by sight (or smell if close enough) so they burned regularly without a massive build up of fuel. In present times, we detect and stop fires until we can't and then catastrophe occurs.
Yes, it is outrageous that we can't directly apply the same policies and methods considering we have the same level of urbanization, population, industrial and economic requirements and private property laws /s
Fire was a regular tool in everyone in North America's toolkit, indigenous or otherwise, and not something white people were too stupid to figure out.
The speed with which this fire ripped through was no joke, as an example:
https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/awbrey-hall-fire-20-...
And the city got lucky because the wind was out of the NW, rather than from the west, which might have driven it straight into the city.
> I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west
?
I think the urban sprawl is more to blame here. It's not that we as a society have forgotten about controlled burning or we've become so 'weak' and 'librul' that we don't do what needs to be done. There is a risk here (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire) and nobody wants to take responsibility over something which may cause immediate deaths or loses of property vs something which may or may not happen in the future. Sure, it's kicking the can down the road but who exactly is to blame for cities built right next to forests?
I have a huge issue with bringing up controlled burning as it is ALWAYS used as an argument against the obvious human created climate change. 'Hey, just burn the forest fuel from time to time, no big deal', etc..
I share the same view with you. But we are the minority, just FYI. I've expressed these sentiments in public and every single time I've been labeled a tree hugging commie.
This event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_hea... radicalized me.
If property rights cause us to kill the planet we're on because we're too stubborn to revisit that set of assumptions and maybe tweak them so we can save all of our lives, then IMO we rightly deserve the incredibly stupid demise we will suffer.
> the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor
Yeah, sure man.
123 killed in Chile and everybody is avoiding to see the huge elephant in the middle of the room painted with the word terrorism in uppercase letters.
We could remove every single leaf in the soil of the forest, and gasoline cans would still grow in the trees.
must say -> More than 90% of forest wildfires
- Lightning?
- Hot, dry winds + sparks from nearby power lines? (Debatably non-human, but usually not terrorists.)
At least in California we have forest ecosystems that practically require periodic fire for regeneration — seeds that require fire to germinate — suggesting forest fires have been common even on evolutionary timescales, long predating humans.
Starting multiple fire outbreaks (aiming to overpower the firefighters) is the standard procedure of every "professional" arsonist.
Arsonists also do fire "tours". They drive, lights off, a secondary road without traffic and stop each few minutes to start outbreaks. This would easily mimick a chain of fire sparks starting from power lines in the road, but we know better because night-vision drones of the Spanish police videotaped some people red-handed doing exactly this. And this idiots had a surprise waiting at the end of the road.
The problem is that most [1] of this people just are sent and paid for doing the job. When caught they fake mental issues and claim to act alone, but then you see that every single one of they follow exactly the same procedures, and know all the tricks to maximize the effect.
[1] Arsonists searching revenge is the other category. They are strongly focused on smaller areas owned by the target
I'm just saying that "lightning" is a simpler explanation than "well-coordinated major conspiracy of terrorists that succeeds at keeping things under wraps"---and so when, in California, a bunch of fires are started in a bunch of places where lightning struck dry timber in a fire-reliant ecosystem, our initial assumption about the cause should maybe be "lightning".
But there are solid proofs that link one arsonist (at least one) with the --second largest-- wildfire in the full history of California (2021).
Gary Stephen Maynard, an ex-teacher of criminology, was caught driving to several locations and setting multiple fires on public lands for no obvious reason.
He was not the only people linked with wildfires on California. Not at all.
This articles happily parroting that the problem is that we don't burn the forest enough, just add fuel to the future wildfires and groom the new pool of gullible puppets online.
And burning is not free. It has nasty undesirable consequences on soil and water storage that newspapers always forget to remind.
"California wildfires caused by humans are more dangerous than fires sparked by lightning"
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-06-22/california-...
"A 2017 study looking at wildfires fought by state or federal agencies from 1992 to 2012, found that people caused 84% of the blazes, adding an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the USA".
I even included accidental human-started wildfires (sparks from powerlines) as an example in my original post, where I use the regrettable phrase “non-human causes” to refer to “fire not deliberately caused by a human”, and I should have been more clear. If there were no people in the forests, there would be fewer fires, yes.
It’s the conspiracy of “terrorists” claim that seems spurious. And again, sure, there may by lone criminals out there committing arson, but the claim that most wildfires are started by terrorists is what needs backing up, not the claim that there’s a human in the loop.
Well, It does not matter. This is not what the article says. Two important ideas in the article.
1) Most wildfires reported on USA (on a particular time interval) were started by an human. Natural wildfires are not so common as we think, even on ecosystems adapted to fire.
2) Natural wildfires and human wildfires seen to have very different dynamics. The second burn much faster and cause much more damages. If proven with more studies, this is a really powerful piece of knowledge.
Strangely, we are being spoon-feed by newspapers with the opposite idea: "nothing to see here", "This is how nature works", "humans should start more wildfires" and, implicitly, "arsonists are heroes doing gods work". And this is terrible advice.
After all this people that lost their lives, homes, all their life on wildfires started deliberately, claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers is extremely awful.
We need also to have in mind that wildfires fuel climate change, and accelerating climate change is exactly the opposite of what each scientist recommend for decades, so probably not a wise idea. Not if we want our species to survive for the next two thousands years.
2) Fully natural wildfires are typically caused by lightning -- which of course often also means rain, humidity, or other moisture.
But the reality is that human fire suppression is actually quite effective most of the time. It does lead to debris buildup. It does lead to more intense fires--as does climate change and the widespread tree death associated with infestations and drought.
We don't seem to have a great idea of what these ecosystems were like before people, but it's not unreasonable to think that a lot of land would burn a little bit with quite some regularity, but not as intensively as these human-ignited fires because of the whole thunderstorm thing. It's also not clear that wildfires fuel climate change--after all they're not really carbon reserves: those tries will eventually die and decompose anyway, it's not like oil underground that had been locked away for millions of years. And, crucially, they'll regrow.
Lastly: why, again, with the conspirational thinking? "Claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers" as though the people writing these articles are knowingly lying, when almost all are just perpetuating what they hear from scientists/nonprofits/others. Why?
Fair point
Sure there are bad forest management, alien species, build up of vegetation on the forest floor etc. But are these actually the number one reason when the climate is a whole degree warmer on average, with prolonged droughts, with native species dying from said heat and droughts, etc.
This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.
Illustrates how silly the comment is that I was replying to.
There are plenty of systems where the difference between 0.04% and 0.03% is dramatic, after all it’s an increase of 30% — and what matters is not the paltry decimal representation but rather the effects.
For example: consider concentration of sodium in human blood. The normal range is 0.31%-0.33% by weight. By 0.4% you’re pretty much dead.
Or consider chromium, an essential trace element: the normal amount is practically infinitessimal, in blood it’s 0.0000007% by weight, approximately. But not enough and you end up with diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
“0.04% vs 0.03%” is not an effective takedown of global warming.
This matters if you are a climate scientist and are constructing a model to make predictions or shape policy. But for this conversation, all we need to know is that the percentage has increased because of human activity (specifically as a result of fossil fuel extraction and usage for energy consumption) and this increase is enough to cause significant warming, shaping the climate, and escalating wild fire intensity and frequency.
"Feels like" and "clear case" don't mix. Just say "I'm bluffing".
The new growth is much more likely to be devastated by fires. Trees are smaller, branches are lower, brush is thicker etc.
In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a hundred years ago are no longer useful.
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...
It has long been recognized that overreaching burn prevention has led to the situation we are in. There are often "controlled" burns that get out of control. There are inhabited/developed areas within and next to the forests that don't want to deal with the smoke of the burn and the chance that it gets out of control. The total area is immense and so the costs of burning 30% of the state which is forest would also be immense. The point is: it is complicated and there are practical considerations why it isn't an easy fix.
The next thing is Trump said they should "rake" the forests, which is asinine. Finally, much of California's forests are federal land ... which Trump was responsible for. How many people did he send out to rake the forest?
Your cognitive dissonance is real. He proposed what the parent comment said. Either Trump and the parent comment were both wrong or they were both right.
BTW, I lived in California from 1985-2003; this issue existed then, and for decades before my time, and it continues to this day. It was there when California had Republican governors, Democratic governors, Republican presidents, and Democratic presidents.
Complex issues have multiple layers, often on opposition to each other. When you claim it is a black and white issue, you (like Trump) demonstrate you don't understand the topic.
Maybe some individual fires are more devastating, but the statistics don't really bear out the "more and more common" narrative.
According to the US forest service, the 5 year average for both number of fires and acreage burned is lower than the 10 and 15 year averages.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wofambrief/firest...
Same story in Canada where the number of fires and total burned acreage has been decreasing slightly over the past four decades.
It does look like the 10 year average has come up a bit, as 2010s report lists the 10 year average at ~6.8 million acres and our current 10 year average is ~7.2 million.
Full report (PDF warning), page 13 for what I'm looking at: https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/NICC/2-Predictive%2...
Link to more reports for other years: https://www.nifc.gov/nicc/predictive-services/intelligence
What you describe is similar to "the dog decided to turn left at the corner, so things are better now"
The sheer number of people involved in fire response, and the deadly and immediate nature of their work, has natural links to military style leadership and organizational behavior.
No way, at all.. is "more controlled burning recently" the driving factor in the new stats.
The budgets and the size of the destruction, are hard for a person to think of.. in California
Real devastation was caused by "catastrophic" fires, burning at higher temperatures than previously recorded. Extensive forest die-off preceded these events in California. This is not over in one or two rainy years, since recent shrub growth is subject to die-off in a dry year and will burn.
Correct. But we can blame PG&E for whatever negligence lead played its part in a forest fire, and enact legislation to make combat it.
Along with that, we can use controlled burns to mitigate the problem as well. It's well known that different indigenous tribes in North America did controlled burns for the positive effect it had.
There are a lot of reasons fires are more and more common and more and more devastating, but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.
A lot more effort needs to be undertaken to build fire breaks and conduct controlled burns in the forests of North America to mitigate this problem and provide the fire the ecosystem evolved around and nutrients for new trees. It would also help beat back the various fungal and beetle pandemics in the western forests. We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.