Posted on 09/21/2020 7:20:49 PM PDT by logician2u
Early this week, Oregon governor Kate Brown went on national television to call the Pacific Coast fires a “bellwether for climate change.” As UC Berkeley professor of sustainable development Maximilian Auffhammer writes, “It’s the climate change, stupid.”
This is one of four responses to the Pacific Coast fires. Brown and Auffhammer are warmers, people who believe the earth’s climate is changing and the fires must be due to that change. In the warmers’ minds, the fires themselves then become evidence that we need to change our lifestyles to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.
A second group are the burners, people who believe that a century of fire suppression has led to a dangerous build-up of fuels in the forests. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden falls into this category. He wants to give the Forest Service and other agencies more money and more freedom to do prescribed burning.
A third group, which is smaller than the other two, are the loggers. They see the increase in fires in the last few years as nature’s response to the decrease in logging on federal lands. (One wonders how the land survived before Europeans came here to log it.) An example is Oregon Congressional Representative Greg Walden, who wants to give the Forest Service more freedom to thin the forests. Thinning, as opposed to burning, means cutting down trees and taking them to a mill.
Note that Brown, Wyden, and Walden aren’t experts; they’re politicians. (Brown and Wyden are lawyers; Walden was a radio broadcaster and radio station owner.) Even Auffhammer isn’t a climatologist; he’s an economist. All of these people are repeating things other people have told them.
But the experts aren’t much better. The warmers’ claims are based on short-term studies that fail to take in account the possibility that recent droughts are just a natural variation in climate. For example, this study looked back just four decades, finding that droughts were worse in 2000-2015 than 1985-1999. Another study also went back only to the 1970s, with the authors claiming that they proved “that human-caused climate change . . . doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984.” Both of these studies start out by assuming that humans are causing climate change and then concluding that recent changes in fire must be due to that climate change. With circular reasoning, they further find that increases in fire prove that the climate is changing.
The loggers start with similar assumptions. According to the owner of some sawmills near the Beachie Creek fire, “Ending large-scale logging on federal land has also ended active management, which has only provided more dead trees and created more dense forests that result in more fuel for fires,” he says. But then he adds, “A great deal of our family timberland I think has been hammered.” Wait a minute — if “active management” (which has become the euphemism for logging) protects the forests from fire, how did his family forests, which he presumably actively manages, get “hammered”? In general, the fires last week roared through both public and private forests and only stopped growing when they reached farm lands.
Studies supporting the burners aren’t much better. Many of them begin saying something like, “Most administrators and ecologists agree that reducing the levels of hazardous fuels on forests is essential to restore healthy watersheds and protect adjacent human communities.” There’s no need to prove that statement because “most” agree with it.
Twenty years ago, when I set out to write a report on fire, I also believed that statement. But I didn’t want people to have to take my word for it, so I dug deep into Forest Service fire records that were on file at Oregon State University. I assumed I would find that, after adjusting for levels of drought, the number of acres burned had significantly increased in the last few decades. Instead, I found that fires had been almost perfectly proportional to drought for the previous century. To the extent they were less than perfectly proportional to drought, there were fewer acres burned in recent years that would be expected based on the levels of drought.
This suggested no major changes in on-the-ground conditions had taken place in recent years. This conclusion was supported by a Forest Service report showing that the fire susceptibility of no more than 15 percent of forest lands in the West had been significantly altered by fire suppression.
I also found that, if you look further back than the 1970s, which were an unusually wet and cool decade, there were many droughts in our history as or more severe than the ones we have seen in recent years. As the authors of this paper found, acres burned in western states did not significantly increase over the last 100 years. Instead, they appear to be cyclical, with high periods of drought and burning before 1940 and after 1985 and a low period in-between.
If we go back several hundred years, as this paper did, there is “increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago.” Specifically in the western United States, the “area burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement,” which is the opposite of what the burners say.
University of Wyoming ecologist William Baker went back a full 2000 years. After scrutinizing fire data in 43 different regions in the western United States, he concluded that “the rate of recent high-severity fire in dry forests is within the range of historical rates, or is too low.”
Variations in fire from decade to decade may reflect climate variations, but if such variations are the result of natural fluctuations, it would be a mistake to call them climate change, much less human-caused climate change. This doesn’t prove that anthropogenic climate change isn’t happening; only that we can’t blame this year’s wildfires on it.
I said there were four groups, and I would call the fourth group the defenders. Fires are going to burn, they say. Fires burned before humans were on the continent; they burned before Europeans started logging; they burned before the era of fire suppression. Instead of proposing some magic prescription that will supposedly stop the fires, the defenders say we need to learn to live with the fires. Early this week, Oregon governor Kate Brown went on national television to call the Pacific Coast fires a “bellwether for climate change.” As UC Berkeley professor of sustainable development Maximilian Auffhammer writes, “It’s the climate change, stupid.”
Not surprisingly, I don’t know of any politicians who promote this view. Politicians get attention by promising to solve problems, not by saying the problems aren’t going to go away. But the remedies promised by the warmers, the burners, and the loggers aren’t really remedies at all.
The climate activists would have Americans completely change their lifestyles, yet all they can promise is that, if we do, it might influence outcomes several generations from now. That’s not going to help people whose homes and businesses might be in the path of next year’s fires.
The burners want to increase spending on prescribed fire. But the Forest Service is already spending $430 million a year on fuel treatments, and the Department of the Interior spends another $194 million. Given the number of acres they treat each year, I estimate this would have to be tripled to fully manage all federal lands. Even if Wyden could convince Congress to forever spend $1.5 billion a year on prescribed burning, if lightning strikes a tree and then a windstorm blows burning cinders five miles away to land on someone’s cedar-shake roof, as happened last week, that house is going to burn no matter how many acres of prescribed fires were done on the lands between them.
The loggers’ claims are weakened by their obvious self-interest. As forest ecologist Chad Hanson argues, the claim that active management would reduce fire is merely an argument to “plunder the forests,” which are actually left more vulnerable to fire after logging than before. Even climate activists are wary of these arguments.
As a homeowner in the wildland-urban interface, I have my own self-interest, which is to cost-effectively protect homes and other private property from wildfire. Some blame rising fire costs on people like me who live in the wildland-urban interface. But a Forest Service study that compared recent Pacific Northwest fires with the nearby developments “fail to show a relationship between either total housing or housing density and suppression cost.”
I count myself as a defender, along with Jack Cohen, Chad Hanson, perhaps William Baker, and numerous other scientists. I see this debate happen every fire season, so I end up writing about it every year, if only to counter the politicians who grab headlines for being warmers, burners, and loggers.
The Antiplanner argues they're all wrong, for different reasons.
Fire is something we need to learn to live with. Safeguard your home and property, but don't expect a single solution that will stop forests from burning.
It's a natural occurrence, no matter what we do to prevent it.
Thanks
Not directly related to the fires, but check out “The Chilling Stars” by Svensmark and Calder. It’s a very convincing review of how the ball of fusing helium ~1AU from us is more responsible for global climate than anything we could even begin to comprehend.
You are very welcome.
Interesting. I wonder what that could be . .
It's fireworks and molotov cocktails! Arson, in other words!
Did I mention, piss poor management of the forests?!!!
I wish President Trump would just state the obvious in the debate. 10,000 years ago much of this country was under two miles of ice. The climate changed, it is always changing. The ice melted. We prospered. It’s natural. We adapt. How stupid is this discussion?
Actually climate change could be a bad thing. Global COOLING would be a real crises.
well I gotta say I’ve had two days now with the heat on here in W. Pa......and it’s way early doing that.
I am not willing to accept living with this level of fire (and smoke).
Trees grow back. Forests should be managed like any other crop. Active management means both grazing, logging, prescribed burns and fire suppression especially in the in the urban interface regions. Logging and grazing offset management costs while reducing fuel load.
Managing the environment for our own benefit is what humans do and the mushy headed Gaia worshippers who think natural is better are idjits.
I say this because for the next ten hours - the fall equinox is at 9:31 AM EDT - it is still officially summer. Stick that in your furnace and smoke it.
I am wondering if the lack of air travel and the lack of CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere is causing this early cold snap? Plus the really wet summer. Probably not but....
I’m just above Allegany county... they’re usually a few degrees warmer than we are as we pick up weather off Erie, ...but dang it never expected to put heat on this early.
The stupid in these ideas is the way this guy tries to put people in groups and label them.
That way, nobody has to do any thinking. It’s all a matter of reacting to labels.
..”Managing the environment for our own benefit is what humans do”......
Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden ‘to tend and keep it’ (Manage it)......that directive hasn’t changed.
The answer is remove the fuel lying on the forest floor.
Otherwise known as dead, fallen down trees.
Thinning is part of the solution. And clear cutting.
And another thing. Why should we “have to live with fire” now? We didn’t “have to live with fire” in the past.
It’s propaganda.
Deceptiveness is the lowest IQ plan any person can undertake.
There is a tendency, especially among the scientific community, to want to play God (as if there wasn't a Real God) and change naturally-occurring events to benefit "mankind" or "society" or some other abstraction.
I recall a TV ad for margarine in years past that ended with ". . you can't fool Mother Nature."
Humorous but largely true.
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