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
- 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.