Yep....that's a culturally 'diversified' bunch alright. But lacking much of any female participation.....once again proving they're great with a bullhorn but cowards when it comes to danger.
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.
South Dakota photographer Paul Horsted has painstakingly matched photos taken by William Illingsworth,photographer for the 1874 Custer expedition to the Black Hills with modern views. You are immediately struck by the lack of trees in many of the 1874 photos. The difference is that no forest fires were extinguished in the primeval forests and in the last 80 years there have been massive efforts at reforestation. If the California forests have not been managed there arE very prone to fires that leave a denuded landscape.
There are reasons why clear-cutting and even thinning don't solve the problem, and can lead to other. less-visible problems.
Globull Warming Bookmark.
Just, JUST got off the phone with one of my buddies who is still on the fire just north of Yosemite.
That fire is over 280 thousand acres now. He says that at least 80% of the wood they are cutting for fire lines is dead snags-a lot of it over 4 foot in dia.
If I did not have this dam COPD, I would be right up there with them.
The guy I work for is up in Northern CA in near 80% and steeper ground hand cutting/falling. Its his third 21 day stint and they told him the other day to expect to be up there for at least three more months. Some of the timber he is cutting is over 8 ft in Dia.
Thank you for saying exactly what I was thinking.
Leave that to the aerial fire-fighters.
Do you have a link to that fire so we can catch up on current progress in fighting it?
Yeah, it depends on elevation and whether you’re on the windward or leeward side of the precip blowing off Erie. Lake effect weather. It might be blue skies and 35 in Cumberland, but 30 and snowing with whiteout conditions in McHenry and Deep Creek Lake. Our house is on the top ridge of which used to be a part of Haystack Mountain before I-68 was cut through. I could start at the lowest elevation on that side of town, and if it was drizzling, I’d drive higher and higher up along the switchbacks until I got in front of our house, and you could literally see the drizzle turning into flurries as you got higher. By the time you peaked the ridge, it would be snow so thick you couldn’t see the lights of town below you. If it was warmer and fog was building, it was like something out of a John Carpenter movie.
Yep I know exactly what you mean....plus the Jet Stream ‘wobbles’ right thru here. The car’s been full of snow enough to work at brushing it off......drive to my sons and not a single flake in sight...they wonder where I’ve been!
On the other hand I’ve driven out to work...10 minutes away, without a single flake and gotten to the top of the hill and it’s like a blizzard! First time that happened I was stunned!
So with the Jet Stream thingy going on too we just never know what we’re going to get.
Yep....that's a culturally 'diversified' bunch alright. But lacking much of any female participation.....once again proving they're great with a bullhorn but cowards when it comes to danger.
Odd that the fires seem not to effect British Columbia to a great extent just North of Washington State.
Repeat after me, “left wing arsonists, and good forest management in British Columbia.”
Ever try Wellersburg Mountain? My mother always swears that it’s got it’s own microclimate. I thought she was exaggerating until I went with her several years ago to meet my sister and her family in Somerset. They live in P’Burgh and we didn’t have the bandwidth to go stay a couple days, so we met at a restaurant off the turnpike for lunch and to exchange gifts. Well, she was right about Wellersburg. It was about 35 and sunny when we left, then we hit the mountain, and it dropped to 30 and snowed like hell all the way down the other side. That’s hillbilly coal country for you. Did you know that Cranesville Swamp in far western Garrett County is one of the few remaining subarctic bogs left over from the last Ice Age in the USA? It sits in a ‘frost pocket’ and has an ecosystem of plants and wildlife known only to exist in far northern climes in Canada. The altitude and geography is such that colder mountain air naturally sinks down into the pocket, and it stays in a tundra-like state most of the year.
If some percentage of the west coast fires was started by arsonists, that should account for the great number of fires as compared to last year and the year before. It doesn't follow, though, that an intentionally-started blaze would consume more acreage than one started by lightning or downed power lines.
It would seem that drought conditions in those states affected probably caused the fires to spread very rapidly, burning dry timber faster than forestry crews could put it out. The intense heat generated by those dry trees may have been the primary reason for fires to spread so fast, but wind could also be a factor. (I'm sure somebody will earn an advanced degree in a few years putting the blame on globull warning, which plays a negligible part in this drama.)
Odd too that the news stories seldom give a hint as to the species of trees consumed in the fires. Pine forests burn relatively fast, hemlock even faster, redwoods seldom more than a burn scar near the base.
H/T Pookie18
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list.
Here is a fact. In NE Wisconsin, the largest death toll from forest fire happened in the history of the world. The thing was caused by farmers/RR men burning brush.
Since that time, not one catastrophic fire has ever happened..AND you can include MN in that since they had experienced fires like that back in the day. Why havnt fires like that happened up there since? BECAUSE WE LOGGED IT in a sensible way...or as they say, we managed the land and created a unique eco system that is advantageous to everyone. They dont “Prescribe” burn ANYTHING up there-EVER!
The forests are managed!
Now do forests fire happen? Yes they do, but since there is access to corporate and private lands, they are limited in size.
If there are fires, they nearly always are started on federal lands that are mismanaged by jackasses who have no know how at all about forest management.
The only people I feel for in the western states are those who have to live with asshole who learn from a “book” and think they know it all. They can take those “Books” and rip the pages out of them, wipe their ..... with the pages and throw the cover away.
[partisan shill and stooge Olivia Herken: "Father James Altman of the St. James the Less church in La Crosse, condemning Democratic Party-supporting Catholics as imposters who are going to hell, and repeated common right-wing conspiracy theories about things like climate change and Planned Parenthood."]
The worst is that they don’t know that they don’t know anything. Or they are true believers in the “natural is better” crap.
Nature wants to kill us.
Boggles my mind how these nimrods spout all this darwinian nonsense and then fail when it comes to understanding that if humans evolved big brains to survive, then we should use them to manipulate nature to survive.
Or if you are biblically minded, hello, tending the earth means managing the eco-system.
Doesn’t matter which way you lean. What we are doing now runs counter to both belief systems. Makes me crazy. /rant
Hey Val..you want to see any fire bugs head explode? You know, the ones who claim the only way to solve this issue is by massive prescribed burns?
Ask them about the wildlife that gets burned up in those burns. I aint talking about the deer-etc. I am talking about the small wildlife that are the prey for the larger predator wildlife, the ones that cant escape burns.
Then ask them about the carbon left about the ground after a burn. How can they explain that they released all that carbon intentionally without any attempt to contain that carbon-after all, they are the experts and all that are they not?
Logging displaces wildlife for short periods of time. That wildlife comes back after, to inhabit a better and more healthy eco system.
They’ll say that to manage a forest eco system, you have to use fire exclusively. Pure BS, and they know it. There are machines now days that can clear brush and grind it up even in slopes up to and beyond 80 per cent. As far as logging goes, whole tree skidding simulates burn.
They wont admit to that because fire is a big business. The machinery owners who are contracted get anywhere from 2 thousand to 4 thousand per day for each machine on site if that machine is used or not. Ten machines? Thats anywhere form 20 thousand to 40 thousand per day. Hand cutters get a healthy sum also, but is a pretty nasty occupation.
But none of that’s true.
Managing the forests is what we’ve always done, until the anti-American communists fabricated their “environmentalist” narrative, much like the one you’re pushing here.
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