Study weighs human influence in wildfire forecast through 2050
![Wildfire_in_California[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/wildfire_in_california1.jpg?quality=83)
From GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
WASHINGTON (April 28, 2016)–A new study examining wildfires in California found that human activity explains as much about their frequency and location as climate influences. The researchers systematically looked at human behaviors and climate change together, which is unique and rarely attempted on an area of land this large.
The findings suggest many models of wildfire predictions do not accurately account for human factors and may therefore be misleading when identifying the main causes or drivers of wildfires. The newest model proportionately accounts for climate change and human behavioral threats and allows experts to more accurately predict how much land is at risk of burning in California through 2050, which is estimated at more than 7 million acres in the next 25 years.
The paper, “Incorporating Anthropogenic Influences into Fire Probability Models: Effects of Human Activity and Climate Change on Fire Activity in California,” appears Thursday in PLOS ONE.
Climate change affects the severity of the fire season and the amount and type of vegetation on the land, which are major variables in predicting wildfires. However, humans contribute another set of factors that influence wildfires, including where structures are built, and the frequency and location of ignitions from a variety of sources–everything from cigarettes on the highway to electrical poles that get blown down in Santa Ana winds. As a result of the near-saturation of the landscape, humans are currently responsible for igniting more than 90 percent of the wildfires in California.
“Individuals don’t have much control over how climate change will affect wildfires in the future. However, we do have the ability to influence the other half of the equation, those variables that control our impact on the landscape,” said Michael Mann, assistant professor of geography at the George Washington University and lead author of the study. “We can reduce our risks by disincentivizing housing development in fire-prone areas, better managing public land and rethinking the effectiveness of our current firefighting approach.”
The researchers found that by omitting the human influence on California wildfires, they were overstating the influence of climate change. The authors recommend considering climate change and human variables at the same time for future models.
“There is widespread agreement about the importance of climate on wildfire at relatively broad scales. At more local scales, however, you can get the story quite wrong if you don’t include human development patterns,” said Max Moritz, a co-author and a University of California Cooperative Extension specialist based at UC Berkeley. “This is an important finding about how we model climate change effects, and it also confirms that getting a handle on where and how we build our communities is essential to limiting future losses.”
Between 1999 and 2011, California reported an average of $160 million in annual wildfire-related damages, with nearly 13,000 homes and other structures destroyed in so-called state responsibility areas–fire jurisdictions maintained by California, according to Dr. Mann. During this same period, California and the U.S. Forest Service spent more than $5 billion on wildfire suppression.
In a model from 2014 that examined California wildfires’ destruction over the last 60 years, Dr. Mann estimated that fire damage will more than triple by 2050, increasing to nearly half a billion dollars annually. “This information is critical to policymakers, planners and fire managers to determine wildfire risks,” he said.
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Note: for those who didn’t catch the nuance between the title and the body, this isn’t THAT Michael Mann of hockey stick fame at Penn State, it’s another person by the same name at George Washington University. Kudos to the commenters who noticed, it was fun to watch the responses.
“Assistant Professor of Geography”…yeah, tell me more about your future predictions of fire damage.
“We can reduce our risks by disincentivizing housing development in fire-prone areas, better managing public land and rethinking the effectiveness of our current firefighting approach.”
Sharp guy…”better managing public land and rethinking the effectiveness of our current firefighting approach.” Sounds destined to be a politician – sees a problem, offers nothing of substance as a solution
“We can reduce our risks by disincentivizing housing development in fire-prone areas…” or, alternatively we could incentivize housing in those locations. Human development is less fire-prone than undeveloped nature in these areas…not to mention that the associated infrastructure that comes with it makes it easier to fight fires.
Never mind the housing developements, if they didn’t allow the nature loving hikers out there in the wilderness it would have prevented one of the largest fires in California history in 2003 near San Diego.
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2076476_2076484_2076507,00.html.
The lost hiker set a fire to draw attention. The link above is to a Time Magazine story. They wouldn’t lie would they?
In the Sierra Mountains, especially I’ve noticed around Yosemite, they do what’s called ‘controlled burns’. Not sure how successful but interesting approach.
Living in CA I’ve experienced many lighting storms over the Coastal Ranges coming in from the Pacific. A few years ago over a 1000 wild fires were sparked off.
If we want a natural environment I guess we just let it burn.
May not be what you think. In the southeast, controlled burns are done to kill off ground cover arising on the forest floor. It keeps new plants from crowding out the old.
Don’t know about west coast. Could be to burn off debris, or it could be same as in SE, to prevent succession.
It is burn off debris and undergrowth that is no longer disposed of because ecological changes: monoculture, varmints, beavers, etc.
When we visited Yosemite in the early ’80s we visited the Mariposa giant sequoia grove. The ranger guiding our tour pointed out a baby sequoia that had sprouted after a controlled burn some 12 years before. In fact a controlled burn (elsewhere in the park) was in progress during our visit. The trees are so adapted to fire that they actually need fire to reproduce optimally:
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/yosemite-sequoias-fire
I didn’t like his Hockeystick much but I enjoyed Heat (1995 — De Niro is always good value) and Collateral (2004).
Versatile guy.
As I understand it, this is a projection of what might happen in over 30 years if the climate models are accurate and if the projections of human behavior are accurate. I doubt that I will ever consider it worth the amount of my time it would take to read it. Some of the information about how appropriate our current beloved federal overlords are behaving with respect to rational forest management might be interesting, but I have little interest in trying to sort the useful from the pure speculation.
Somebody could coin a phrase from the reactions we’ve seen in this thread- auto response to the words Mann and “study”.
Knee- jerk, Mann- jerk, whatever.
Make up some stuff, fund a study, pay for a few pages of subroutines…
Science.
Out.
Well managed forests rarely burn. We need more logging and logging roads. Notice there are no fires in tree farms.
New Zealand has the largest man ( not MANN ) planted forest in the world, ( created work for all during the depression ) today it is logged, and replanted, no fires !
I imagine that CO2 does increase fire likelihood and consequence due to increasing plant productivity, increasing the rate of accumulation of fuel and shortening the average fire period for a given area…
This is absolute nonsense. If the climate models were removed, the result would be exactly the same. Man is indeed a likely cause. Forests near urban areas suffer both intentional and accidental fires on a continuing basis, ala the LA and Oakland water sheds. Forest management areas are subject to gross environmental mismanagement starting with the wrong trees (Eucalyptus instead of Oak) and then going on to letting excess under-growth build up allowing infernos.
note. Archaeologist have ascertained many of the early fires were intentionally set by Indians to clear areas for oak planting.
“…humans are currently responsible for igniting more than 90 percent of the wildfires in California.”
So Smokey was right, and he didn’t need a model: “Only you can prevent wildfires.” Well, 90 percent anyway. The other 10 percent must be caused by climate change because this study only allows for those two possibilities. We all know there were no wildfires before climate change and people came along. /sarc
Can we get a percentage of wildfires started by careless smokers dropping cigarette butts out of car windows? Could be a tax payer-funded PhD in this.
I won’t believe it till I see a hockey stick graph .
How does the math work that 90% of CA wildfires are caused by man, which is the other half of the equation? Is that not the other 90% of the equation? Millenial New Math?
Note to George Washington University Michael Mann: Although it may upset your family, it’s not illegal to change your name.
Like they do in PA, When there is a small fire which they spot from fire towers, they put it out right away, before it gets out of hand. PA also has firebreaks which if properly maintained can prevent large spreading of fires. I just say put them out when they are small, as soon as possible. Now Pa doesn’t have Santa Ana winds, but CA should take that into account. They seem to wait too long before they send in the big planes with the big fire retardants…(after the fires are out of control, they seem to send in the big planes) They should send in the big planes at the start…just sayin….
Putting out the small fires is why we have a fire control problem today.
PA is fairly heavily populated.
Can you imagine the uproar is we tried to cut firebreaks throughout Yellowstone?
“if we tried”
I never made it past the following sentence:
“The newest model . . . allows experts to more accurately predict how much land is at risk of burning in California through 2050.”
Only a person devoid of any critical reasoning skills could write such gibberish. I’d like to know whether the authors bought their time machine or whether they built it themselves. I’d also like to know what metric is used to evaluate the accuracy of a prediction of the future “risk” of an event. Technically, I suppose that every square inch of California is “at risk” of burning by 2050, but somehow I don’t think that their model just forces a 100% answer with a single line of code.
What about the effect of forest fires on tree rings?
Small fires don’t show up in the tree rings.
Medium fires show up as some scorching and scoring.
Really big fires, no tree rings as the tree burns up completely.
Shame the anthropogenic influence didn’t extend to burning down a particular tree in the Yamal peninsular. Or carbonising certain bristle cone pines. We might have been spared the Hockey Schtick.
He would have found something else.
One only has to look at the history of management at Yellowstone to know it is Federal management of land that is causing fires to be worse.
So humans are responsible, federal humans, for land management.
Burned acreage is still much lower than the past, regardless of cooked numbers.
When we visited Yellowstone some years ago we were informed that lightning caused at least 35 fires a year in the park. When trying to verify this a few minutes ago I came across:
“Lightning may ignite dozens of forest fires during a single summer, but most of them go out naturally after burning less than half an acre. Others torch isolated or small groups of trees, become smoldering ground fires, and eventually go out on their own. On rare occasions, wind-driven fires have burned through large areas of forest, as in 1988, when multiple fires crossed more than one million acres in Yellowstone and on surrounding federal lands despite massive efforts to extinguish them. Without frequent small and occasional large fires to create a mosaic of plant communities in different growth stages, biodiversity declines and leaf litter and deadfall accumulate much faster than they can return nutrients to the soil through decay.
Evidence of fires that burned before the park was established in 1872 can be found in soil profiles, charcoal found in lake sediments, landslides, and old-growth trees. Research shows large fires have been occurring in Yellowstone since forests became established following the last glacial retreat 14,000 years ago.”
source:
https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/fire.htm
Since I have forgotten all the chemistry that I learnt in school could someone please tell me whether the CO2 from these fires is identified as coming from “fossil fuel”? If not, how does one differentiate between the CO2 emanating from man made fires (including industrial and home woodburners) and natural fires?
The carbon isotopes are different.
One of my university lecturers was demonstrating things you could do with Markov chains. This specific piece of research demonstrated that the forestation level of Tasmania reflected the fire conditions pre-white settlement. Things such as how often a particular area was burned, how hot, etc. If you look at the fire conditions post-white settlement, there would be hardly any forrest, mainly because there wasn’t enough time for the regrowth to mature and set new seeds.
Anyhow, long story short. This is old news, we’ve known about it for over 30 years. Oh, and it didn’t need a computer to work it out.
Headlines are one thing. They are meant to be provocative. The bylines are often more to the point. I went for the byline, then “fire damage will more than triple by 2050”. I glossed over the article looking for the meat behind the byline and found the article sort of uninformative, more like the general low-level background noise of AGW buzz you see everywhere. So it wasn’t comment worthy in that respect. You know… unremarkable stuff. Since it is now a social experiment with trees, the name Michael Mann, hyperbole in the headline, it begs a comment.
How do y’all feel being guinea pigs? And when did Anthony realize that the Michael Mann wasn’t his pet devil?
All they had to do was ask the firemen (or even just the web) to find out that “9 out of 10 wildfires are caused by humans”.
http://www.cultureofsafety.com/wilderness/forest-fire-prevention/
So you need a grant now to find out the bleeding obvious?
If 9 out of 10 fires are caused by human activity, and the other 1 out 10 is caused by climate change, that means that climate change is not caused by human activity.
but what about fires caused by lightning? 10 out of 10 are already caused by humans and climate change, which either means that zero out of 10 are caused by lightning, of that lightning is caused by human activity or by climate change.
of maybe it is human activity that is caused by climate change? after all, we didn’t develop agriculture of cities until the climate warmed up ten thousand years ago. and if the climate change and we returned to ice age conditions it seems pretty likely that a lot of human activity would change, with plenty of shivering and dying along the way.
Models shmodels. Don’t play with matches.
The CA Dept of Finance projects a population growth of 20 million more people by 2050: http://www.exurbiachronicles.com/?page_id=672
California packs in about 250 people per square mile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density
At that rate, these 20 million new Californians will need 800,000 square miles to live and work on.
At 2.56 acres per person (640 acres per square mile), that’s 512 million acres.
Compared to this forecast, loss of land to wildfire is small, and temporary. Development of land into cities, suburbs, and highways is not.
We shouldn’t worry about the 7 million burned acres. California has wildfires almost every year, and the plants will regrow. Almost every part of the state experiences wildfires with some regularity.
Some California species (i.e. Lodgepole Pine) have actually evolved to *require* wildfire to reproduce.
Wonder if this paper deals with the estimates
that 20% of the fires are deliberately set? As a quick and easy tactic for terrorists, particularly in multiple coordinated attacks, it should be a major concern. http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/outdoor-fires/brush-grass-and-forest-fires