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.
Well,, since wild fires have declined over the past 60yrs or so, and human activity has increased them, that means climate change has even less to do with fires than we thought.
I find that most of these climate studies suffer from poor logic and failure to think broadly about problems they are working on. As such, critique is not really scepticism but rather a much lower form, like marking a high school social studies exam answer to a question. Hey, I don’t now much about fires but I feel perfectly qualified to critique such stuff at this level.
‘wildfire forecast through 2050’
chicken entrails or tea laves ?
On another subject: knowledge, information, patents, open source, etc. It seems like many papers are written for both peer review and profits and the scholastic market for information appears to be often times more costly then the non-scolastic market even though many scholars end up publishing in the non-scolastic market to sell more of their intellectual property. Very high priced text books are an example. Being from a poor family I just flat out couldn’t afford all the recommended reading and I was actually at times lucky to have the required texts. In 1971, a pretty crappy text book at today standards were $30 and $40 apiece. Is it still like this? The other issue I though interesting is intellectual property. I had the opportunity to meet the ex-astronaut and ex-CEO of Eastern Airlines, Frank Borman. Somehow the guy ended up with a bunch of laser patents, at least that’s what he told me. Pretty wealthy guy with auto dealer ships in New Mexico as well. Is intellectual property some of the things traded within the political system? When I see or read of NASA filing for a patent, it kind of astonishes me. Would somebody have to really pay NASA to be able to product one of their patented products, even though it was invented using taxpayers money? All government funded inventions, I though, were supposed to be open source. I was told during one of my own patenting processes, that if I used any public funding, I would not be able to get a patent. Is our system really this incorrigible. I know our justice system is.
Why ignore Arson?
California wildfire ‘selfie’ arsonist gets 20 years, $60 million fine
A Psychiatric Study of Persons Charged with Arson
Wildfires destroy over 3000 homes. Do I sense an oxymoron, or is it just an ordinary moron?
Imagine the carbon footprint of burning millions of acres of Yellowstone. Let’s carbon tax the Park Service to fund a forest thinning program to prevent future catastrophic wild fires.
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdamediafb?contentid=2010/10/0532.xml&printable=true&contentidonly=true
Many forests of today contain 2
–
4 times
more trees than they did in 1875. The
largest increases are for small and me-
dium
–
diameter trees (<12” dbh), but
there are also a few more large
–
diameter trees per acre.
Today, most wildland fires are suppressed.
Those that escape beyond control often
burn with high severity, causing high mor-
tality to trees of all sizes. Large, high
–
severity wildfires are generally undesirable
to forest users, including recreationists and
some wildlife species. However, some mod-
erately
–
sized patches of tree mortality are
not unnatural or uncharacteristic of pon-
derosa pine and dry mixed
–
conifer forests.
Mixed
–
severity fires occasionally visited
these forests, killing patches of large trees
(Sherriff and Veblen 2006).
The disruption of natural fire regimes in
western forests has generally led to in-
creased stand densities. Some mixed coni-
fer forests on the Uncompahgre Plateau
have basal areas that are almost three
times greater than conditions in 1875
A century of putting out fires resulted in forests overstuffed with fuel, and the beetles traveled efficiently through the dense stands of trees. While a healthy acre of forest may have 30 trees or fewer, some now have 10 to 100 times that many…The USFS policy of fire suppression had an early and ironic start. In convincing Congress of the need for national forests, and for a service to administer to them, the agency’s first head, Gifford Pinchot, told them that securing public land and then suppressing fires there would serve to protect public property. It was a persuasive argument in a time when wildfire was about the only thing left in the West that settlers hadn’t killed or wrestled into submission, and still feared. The need was galvanized not long after that when, in 1910, during a dry, windy summer crackling with lightning, many small fires grew into the largest wildfire in U.S. history…The Big Blowup, as it was dubbed, consumed 3 million acres in Montana, Idaho and Washington (that’s 35 times the size of the recent High Park fire near Fort Collins). At least 85 people were killed, five towns were reduced to cinders and much public land that Pinchot had fought to set aside, was incinerated.
https://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/seeing-the-overcrowded-forest-for-the-trees
The Wallow and Rodeo Chedeski fires in eastern Arizona took a big chunk out of the (previously?) largest ponderosa pine forest in the world, After fire fence line photos on the border between the USFS “managed” land and the Indian Reservations, where they practice healthy forest, sustainable production silviculture, were revealing. A healthy forest revitalizing burn on the Apache managed side contrasts sharply with the devastated once forested area on the USFS “managed” side. The habitat diversity maintained by the Apaches (a mosaic of forest, open meadows, ponds and lakes) is no doubt enhanced by healthy forest thinning producing increased water flow through the landscape – which is exceedingly beautiful as well as safe, healthy and productive of timber and beef. Biological diversity cannot help but increase in a varied, well watered and healthy landscape.
This ideology that all human interaction with this world is wrong or bad and must be forbidden by dictate has got to go. There are better ways to think about and do this. Ideologies are always ultimately destructive as they must by their restrictive nature shun reality and act from false premises. Silviculture is still being thwarted here as the “NO human/nature interaction” bunch has taken over the healthy forest funding and USFS process – dragging their feet so that very little healthy-forest thinning can occur and flammable biomass is quickly building toward another catastrophe