From the UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
Fighting fires before they spark
University of New Mexico research could impact forest management around the world
With warm, dry summers comes a deadly caveat for the western United States: wildfires. Scientists say the hot, dry climates found west of the Mississippi, along with decades of fire suppression efforts, are creating a devastating and destructive combination – leading to fires like the ones currently burning in California.
It’s a problem biologists at The University of New Mexico are looking to put a damper on. Now, new research from UNM is giving forest and fire management teams across the country the upper hand in reducing the severity of these events.
“These big fires will always happen,” said Dan Krofcheck, a post-doctoral fellow in UNM’s Department of Biology. “We’re looking at what forest managers can do to minimize the impact these wildfires have on the system.”
The issue has two main components, according to Krofcheck, both stemming from human impact to the environment. Global warming, due to human-caused carbon emissions, has worsened the already hot and dry climate in the most at-risk areas, like California. In addition, aggressive firefighting and fire suppression efforts have left a large amount of fuel, in the form of underbrush, throughout the forests. Together, these two factors lead to massive blazes with the capacity to destroy land, homes and lives.
“For a long time, there’s been this stigma that fire in the landscape is a bad thing. It makes sense, because fire is a destructive process,” says Krofcheck. “But, it’s also an integral part of how these ecosystems evolved and we kind of shut that down through heavy fire suppression activity. The result is that fuel that would have been consumed by frequent fire, builds up and accumulates. Subsequently, when you finally have fire move through an area, after it’s been suppressed for 30, 50, 100 years, you have these massive fires that no longer just consume the understory but they’re actually torching crowns and moving through the tree canopy.”
To combat this, forest managers employ two primary treatment practices. Mechanical thinning is the process of physically removing the thick underbrush with machinery or by hand – a method that is effective but also very expensive. Managers also use prescribed burns to clear areas – using fire, under very strict environmental conditions, to consume excess brush.
The UNM research, ‘Prioritizing forest fuels treatments based on the probability of high-severity fire restores adaptive capacity in Sierran forests,’ recently published in Global Change Biology, examines how to most efficiently use these two methods.
Krofcheck, along with his advisor, UNM Associate Professor Matthew Hurteau, and colleagues from North Carolina State University and the USDA Forest Service, ran forecast simulations using projected climate data in the Dinkey Creek Collaborative Landscape Forest Restoration Project area in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. In Scenario A, researchers mechanically thinned the entire area that is operationally and legally available – an unrealistically expensive endeavor in practice. Scenario B employed an optimized approach, thinning only the most at-risk portions of land, about two-thirds less than in Scenario A.
“We wanted to find a way to apply these expensive thinning treatments in such a way that we could put as few on the landscape as possible and achieve some comparable outcome, relative to a case where we thinned everything,” said Krofcheck.
After nearly a thousand simulations, the results show that both scenarios reduced the mean fire-severity by as much as 60 percent.
“Even though we thinned about two-thirds less of the forest, we saw the exact same treatment outcomes,” said Krofcheck.
“This research and way of thinking about optimally using your resources, in terms of where you thin, could go a long way in helping these organizations use their dollars most efficiently to achieve their desired outcomes, which is less severe fires,” Hurteau said.
Along with mechanical thinning, both scenarios also heavily depended on fire, either naturally occurring or through prescribed burning, being present in the ecosystem. Researchers say it’s another big takeaway: without fire, no amount of treatment will successfully do the job. It’s something they hope those who live in forested areas will begin to appreciate as a mechanism for stopping devastating wildfire before it breaks out.
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The paper:
Prioritizing forest fuels treatments based on the probability of high-severity fire restores adaptive capacity in Sierran forests
Abstract
In frequent fire forests of the western United States, a legacy of fire suppression coupled with increases in fire weather severity have altered fire regimes and vegetation dynamics. When coupled with projected climate change, these conditions have the potential to lead to vegetation type change and altered carbon (C) dynamics. In the Sierra Nevada, fuels reduction approaches that include mechanical thinning followed by regular prescribed fire are one approach to restore the ability of the ecosystem to tolerate episodic fire and still sequester C. Yet, the spatial extent of the area requiring treatment makes widespread treatment implementation unlikely. We sought to determine if a priori knowledge of where uncharacteristic wildfire is most probable could be used to optimize the placement of fuels treatments in a Sierra Nevada watershed. We developed two treatment placement strategies: the naive strategy, based on treating all operationally available area and the optimized strategy, which only treated areas where crown-killing fires were most probable. We ran forecast simulations using projected climate data through 2,100 to determine how the treatments differed in terms of C sequestration, fire severity, and C emissions relative to a no-management scenario. We found that in both the short (20 years) and long (100 years) term, both management scenarios increased C stability, reduced burn severity, and consequently emitted less C as a result of wildfires than no-management. Across all metrics, both scenarios performed the same, but the optimized treatment required significantly less C removal (naive=0.42 Tg C, optimized=0.25 Tg C) to achieve the same treatment efficacy. Given the extent of western forests in need of fire restoration, efficiently allocating treatments is a critical task if we are going to restore adaptive capacity in frequent-fire forests.
For the life of me I don’t see how increased CO2 (a gas used in fire extinguishers) in the atmosphere is adding to the wild fire threat.
More CO2 means more trees.
The claim was increased CO2, increased warming, not increased trees, which is NOT the problem here – it’s the dead underbrush.
More plants means more underbrush, dead or otherwise.
The real problem is fire suppression. When small fires are prevented from occurring, the fuel load grows and when the fire EVENTUALLY occurs it will be a whole lot bigger.
Or how decreasing CO2 in the atmosphere will reduce the wild fire threat!
As always, they assume their evidence.
The only thing that says the forests should be hotter and drier are climate models.
The same models that even the top scientists admit are useless for determining regional changes.
Actual, on the ground data, does not show this warming, but the models say it must be there, so we will continue to assume that it is until we can find or manufacture the evidence that we need to prove we were right all along.
I’ve lived in a California coastal redwood forest for 40 years. We’ve always been in fear of fire. Always. Since 1977 for me personally. Nothing has changed over that time period. Yesterday a wildfire broke out 15 miles from my home. 5 years ago, a similar fire, 10 years, 20, 30, 40, all the same.
In 1889 the land I live on was clear cut and in 1907 the land around me was cleared to help rebuild San Francisco after the earthquake. There really weren’t any forest management policies in place at the time so the land was just left to recover on its own. As a result I live in a climax hardwood forest surrounded by California oaks and madrones that are being choked out and killed by redwoods. As of about 20 years ago the California Coastal Commission made it illegal for me to thin the trees on my property without paying for a one time $10,000 permit.
The solution isn’t a controlled burn, there’s no such thing. It isn’t mechanical removal, the slopes around me are often greater than 2 in 1. Firefighters yesterday injured themselves just walking around, they fell down 50 foot cliffs and broke bones without getting near the fire.
What’s needed is a biological solution, something designed to rapidly break down the accumulated dead wood on the forest floor without burning it. A fungus would be nice. There’s plenty of water here, it’s technically a rain forest. A drought is 56″ of rain per year, normal is 90″. A wet year is about 150″. Fungus like this environment. We need something that can be sprayed from aircraft to mitigate the damage done by foresters 100 years ago.
And we need it desperately.
So yet another unintended consequence of naive and ill-thought-out enviro policies.
To save the trees we stopped using paper bags. Now we have to stop using plastic which is pollution everywhere and we are back to paper bags again.
Then we were supposed to use diesel because it gave better mileage, now it is a major no-no.
Then they wanted us to use bio-diesel but that put up the price of basic grain commodities and poor countries and the starving were hit hard to feed western “green” fuels.
Then there was ethanol which they are carefully walking away from too.
Do this, do that. Oh wait, don’t to this don’t that. Do this instead.
Give them another ten years and they will saying we need more CO2.
Spray massive amounts of fungus out of airplanes. What could possibly go wrong?
Arrogant impatient geoengineering has the propensity get us into more trouble. It’s always the unintended consequences.
Nature always tends to self correct, but often not on our timescale.
As Blue Oyster Cult once said:
“History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man”
Tom I admit the idea is half-baked and would require a lot of study and some serious money to develop, but when you consider the amount of money involved it seems to me the whole thing could be funded by fire insurance companies who would benefit from the technology by not having to pay claims.
“Unintended consequences” are the excuse of weak minds in my opinion. If you completely study all the effects of a bio-engineered solution they can be avoided. I’m not suggesting they whip up some quick and dirty solution, but honestly, something is needed.
Alternatively, the Green Lobby might be convinced to allow profitable clearing of our forests to undo the damage done a century ago, instead of just being stupid about it. That too has “unintended consequences”.
Bartleby, I respectfully disagree about both controlled burns and mechanical removal. The last wildfire that moved through my property near Big Sur a few years back did very little permanent damage due to mechanical removal: no fuel, no fire. Over 100 treed acres and we didn’t lose even one live oak or white oak; just leaves and grass. Nearby areas choked with brush lost 75% or all their trees. As to controlled burns getting out of control, you are correct; they do get out of control, but that’s only because they are not done often enough. The last wet season around Napa would have been perfect for controlled burns with little danger of jumping fires from airborne embers. It should be mandatory at least every 5 years. And even after the recent wildfire disaster in Napa and Sonoma, the authorities will still deny you a burn permit in January after a heavy rain with heavy rain in the forecast.
mairon62, when I discounted mechanical removal it was because it was impossible, only very expensive under the current eco-regime imposed by the Coastal Commission and other Green lobbies. Obviously, the land was cleared in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s so it’s not a technical problem, it’s a regulatory problem. I think I mentioned that I’m required to pay an onerous tax to thin the trees on my property which makes it impossible for me to afford. I end up having to pay large amounts of money and give away the trees to lumber mills, unlike pre-regulation California, when people actually made money from harvesting timber in this area.
Why would I pay to mechanically clear the forest just to protect society from wildfires, when it’s society that prevents me from being able to afford to do so? That’s the real problem.
Oh crap. “when I discounted mechanical removal it was because it was impossible”.
Should read: “when I discounted mechanical removal it wasn’t because it impossible…”
Oh I just give up when I need to correct my corrections. This site really needs an edit button, even if only for five minutes. You Moderators know that there’s an off the shelf Disqus integration for WordPress? I’ve used it, it’s far superior to the default WordPress implementation IMO.
[I agree, but, all that is for self-hosted wordpress on your own server, WUWT operates on wordpress.com which doesn’t have that feature, I’ve asked many times. Being on wordpress.com protects WUWT from DDOS and other attacks from people who would rather see it disappear – Anthony]
Anthony Watts writes: “WUWT operates on wordpress.com which doesn’t have that feature”
OK. Explanation accepted and I’ll henceforth quit complaining. Good work. 🙂
Here is your biological solution. Goats. Sheep. Animals in general. The symbiotic relationship between animals and plants has been crushed. All those animals that would have kept these fire hazards down have been removed from the land.
Put them back.
” Goats. Sheep.” Really? Look at the Middle East. Look at Northern Africa, Central Africa, large swaths of Asia. Allowing goats and sheep to denude the landscape has CREATED MASSIVE PROBLEMS, and you want to turn them loose in North America uncontrolled? Christ on a crutch, no wonder the human race is so f*cked.
Depends how you do it. If you do high density short duration grazing you can do wonders for the soil, the grasslands and the forests. If you let them loose to do their own thing they continue to cause the destruction you describe.
Letting them run wild and uncontrolled is what is happening. Take the famous Cedars of Lebanon. Enviroloons tell us humans destroyed them by cutting them all down when what has decimated them is goats eating the saplings and sprouts. They also go after the ends of limbs that are low enough to reach and they eat bark when conditions get bad enough. This is true of all other naturally occurring tree and shrub species in the region. Same holds for Saharan and the northern reaches of Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a yuge problem, made exponentially worse by continuous political instability and a constant state of low grade warfare throughout the entire effected region.
And the paper’s authors think their modeling of fires is also evidence. It is not. It is hypothesis generation. Models aren’t reality anymore than fashion models are a realistic representation of humanity.
Perhaps North Korea has picked up on the Japanese WW II project which used balloons with incendiary devices to start forest fires 🔥 on the west coast. This used the prevailing westerly winds to move the balloons across the Pacific Ocean.
They were bombs, which I suppose could start a fire.
https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0505japanese-balloon-kills-oregon/
Indeed, they were called fire ballons…
There has not been any long term warming in the continental US over the past 100 years, but there have been incoherent forest management policies. “Mechanical thinning” is apparently PC speak for lumbering only useless timber, rather than using the wood commercially. Small, low fires were once common, until suppressed due to policy.
In Oz we have similar problems but they have sweet FA to do with ‘global warming’ and everything to do with us ‘whitefellas’ stuffing up the eco management that the indigenous peoples had sorted of tens of millenia ago. ‘Cold burning’ is the name for the technique used to clear flammable understory and brush and thankfully there are programs starting up where both local indigenour communities and ‘white’ fire fighters are re-learning the methods and timing. Recenly a program started on Cape Barren ISland in Bass Strait with the local indigenous people going to Northern Australia to be trained in remote communities where the methods were never lost.
The irony is that English and other explorers all around the continent all typically described our landscape as being like ‘ an English gentleman’s park’. There was a reason for that which is it was an indigenous gentleman’s park(as well as his family’s) and his home and his church and he was just the custodian for the term of his life.
Get with the program folks.
It is much the same in North America. The natives were here since before the end of the last ice age, and were thus present longer than the forests or open woodland had been present. Somehow, active management by non-whites is somehow “natural”, as if the Aborigines or Indians were not really people.
In the Americas, many of the Indians died of disease before the Europeans moved into the area in large numbers, so there was very little experience of the sort of active land management that had been done.
Fortunately the Australian indigenous practice is still alive, particularly in the North of the continent although the main risk to the (white) population centres is in the south and the East Coast. The eucalypts just explode once the heat gets up high enough. You see this in California I gather where there ae a lot of introduced eucalypts. I think Spain does too.
I undertsnad the US & Canada peoples used to burn the oaks to open up for the maples and enjoy the fruits of that. Our forst peoples sculpted the vegetation for shelter, to reduce fire risk, to encourage new shoots and attarct animals to hunt. It really was quite a sophisticated regime.
Google ‘an English gentleman’s park’ and there ae many books on the subject. Bill Gammage’s ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ is the one that opened my eyes the most.
It seems to me this is just better resource allocation strategy. The most bang for the buck?
But, was it necessary to toss in the “climate change grenade”? unfortunately so it seems, [sigh]
What they aren’t mentioning is that the high risk zones are also the same areas that are the most expensive to clear, namely steep loose arroyo walls. They use goats in many areas to clear the underbrush out here in CA, but they emit so much methane.
On a similar note it seems the dreaded eucalyptus is playing a big role in Portugal’s fire woes.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-portugal-eucalyptus-fire-20170620-story.html
“In Scenario A, researchers mechanically thinned the entire area that is operationally and legally available – an unrealistically expensive endeavor in practice. Scenario B employed an optimized approach, thinning only the most at-risk portions of land, about two-thirds less than in Scenario A.”
I’m sorry to be so incredibly dense, but haven’t foresters figured this out years ago with generations of experience instead of a few months of university work done by undergraduates, probably from cities?
Perhaps they’re right, but did they think to work with foresters before they undertook another unnecessary, expensive, taxpayer funded research project?
I hope so.
Every major inquiry into Australian bushfires, going back to 1939 – and our history of major fires goes back much further than that – has concluded that we are not doing enough fuel-management burning.
This is NOT a “climate change” issue. Every area that experiences hot, dry summers (even if they are only really dangerous during occasional droughts) will have conditions in which major fires occur.
What this article ignores, is indigenous Fire-setting practices.
Ask yourself what it would be like to live in a dangerously fire-prone environment, with no refuges, no firefighting equipment, and no mode of transport faster than your own two feet. The obvious response , and the one that early European explorers and settlers in Australia recorded, is to burn early and often. The landscape does not dry out evenly, so burning in spring as soon as any area is dry enough, results in a mosaic of self-extinguishing fires. Low-intensity fires that kill neither wildlife, nor trees, but which provide safety as well as easier hunting, gathering and travel.
And the indigenous people probably had a good sense of the weather and when it was likely to rain, so starting fires within a frequent-rain window would contribute to that mosaic effect. I follow that practice a lot.
This topic consistently ignores the pre-historical and historical evidence. Native Americans (and indigenous people everywhere) consistently used fire as their primary land management tool for a number of very pragmatic reasons including the prevention of the kind of fires we see now. When the Spanish first saw Los Angeles (and the rest of southern California) they commented on all the smoke. Now we have ‘scientists’ discovering the obvious. Of course, things are now completely different due to all the built infrastructure but one might expect somebody to at least mention this critical fact.
There is an abundance of (mostly ignored) literature on this topic.
It is the amount of fuel that is today’s problem. All this babble about ‘hotter and drier’ is convenient for the CAGW gang but that is not the key factor.
“Global warming, due to human-caused carbon emissions, has worsened the already hot and dry climate in the most at-risk areas, like California”
All the rain they just had…grew all that friggin underbrush……these people are agenda driven morons
What timing! PeterW just made the same point.
Awahnee tribe in Yosemite Valley burned a part of valley floor every year, to grow enough grass for deer. Meadows are changed to forests today. “Primitive” tribes were better scientists than our ecologists.
Not better scientists, better managers, with “skin in the game”. They’re lives actually depended on getting it right.
“Global warming, due to human-caused carbon emissions, has worsened the already hot and dry climate in the most at-risk areas, like California.”
I would like to see proof of that statement. California has a 200 year long megadrought 900 years ago. I haven’t seen anything that bad recently.
Presently (knock on wood) the fires are not in the Sierras, but in developed poorly managed woodlands and leveled off dry chaparral arroyos.
But, don’t you know, climate change only dries out populated areas.
I wonder if in the fire damaged area of california, there are lots of eucalyptus trees, if so they are a menace. The oils naturally in the leaves are a source of fuel for fires, and without clearance of the natural leaf drop and branches which they also have a tendency to drop adding the the fuel load.
Here in australia we have a winter brush clearance program, especially on the outskirts of cities, much to the disgust of the greenies, they have a policy of these fires damage the forest, small low fires that clear out the leaf drop and saplings & brush, does not harm the trees themselves, although never enough clearance achieved every year with nasty results.
Never fails to amaze me to see the trees post a fire, within a few weeks the blackened trees are sprouting new leaves from the apparently dead looking trunk, and a few months later you would be hard pressed to know there had even been a fire in the area, except looking through the base of the forest no leaf litter.
Many of the australian trees need fire and or smoke for the seeds to germinate, without that fire they are not viable.
I am sure there are many others that follow this site that will be able to give you better information than I can.
All you have to do here in the Santa Cruz mountains is look at the old virgin timber stumps of the massive redwoods. They were much farther apart than the forest that we have here today. That would have dramatically limited the spread of fire. I can see it right out of my window.
Me too. For every old growth stump I have 5 or 6 trees. We call them “cathedral” growths, they’re like starfish.
Why this is opaque to educated “foresters” continues to elude me.
Think I said something about this in an earlier comment on a similar issue. Most of the forest and grasslands in North America are fire driven habitats. The periodicity is location dependent but fire generally impacts each area far more regularly than humans would like. So we have had since the 1950s a policy of fire suppression. Remember Smokey the Bear taught us all forest fires were bad and they killed Bambi. (I am actually not trying to be humorous with those references.) Florida had a policy of fire suppression but a lot of research demonstrated that fire suppression ultimately caused more damage environmentally, economically and was a far greater threat to human lives, structures and activities than allowing things to burn or better yet doing controlled burns. Problem is when we suppress fire for a long time we create a disaster in the making. In the early 1990s Florida burned. We had agencies that had good fire management plans that had failed to implement them and had catastrophic fires, including federal agencies. Other agencies had followed their management plans and had significantly less problem. Why did some follow their plans and others not. To do a controlled burn requires understanding the land, the weather, appropriate personnel management AND holding timely public hearings to advise adjacent property owners. The reason most agencies that had not followed their management plans besides it being hard work they didn’t like holding public hearings required by rule. Some in the environmental community were supportive some not so much. Those that were a hindrance believed that they understood fire management better than our trained staff. I pretty sure I commented that if we are told the truth, we will find out that the California fires could have been either prevent or didn’t needed to be catastrophic as they became.
“Global warming, due to human-caused carbon emissions, has worsened the already hot and dry climate in the most at-risk areas, like California.”
They couldn’t prove that claim if their lives depended on doing so.
A Huge assumption. There is no evidence of human-caused Global Warming. A good scientist would know that. How? By going and looking for evidence and finding none.
So Smokey the Bear is at fault for the “mega-fires”?
Only _you_ can increase the size of forest fires…
Old Smokey was created by the US Forest Service and the lumber industry. Smokey began in the 1950s. His message was fine up to a point. It caused a misperception about natural fire, especially as people moved away from the land to big cities. During the 1990s fire some of our worst “fuel” build up problems were on lands that had been owned by the lumber industry which the state had purchased and now manages as environmental lands. Some had fire suppressed for decades. When they did/ do catch fire they burn extremely hot, hot enough to explode trees dispersing more fuel and burning even hotter, ultimately creating their own “weather.” Ironically some old lumber company forest lands that didn’t burn in the early 1990s we found it hard to control burn them later. Humidity and temperatures were such that were tough to burn. Interestingly once burned plants that had not been seen, some believed extinct, suddenly sprouted, grew and bloomed. I know of at least one bird that went extinct due to the failure of USWFS to follow their management plan which called for semi annual control burns.
Kb…..
We do not have a choice to not have fires…… only when.
If we do not have fires when conditions are mild and fires are easily controlled – which is also when we CAN put them out, so we do under current policy – we will eventually have them when conditions are so extreme that we cannot control them, so we get “megafires”.
It’s not that hard to understand, surely.
It has been suggested several times that Smokey the Bear should have been euthanized when found. To end suffering.
Clear the under brush, problem solved. California has millions of convicts, put them to work clearing under brush. Prior to the environf*ckbags running anything people cleared under brush and wildfires were NOT as destructive as they have become in the last 35 years. The environf*ckbags need to be held criminally, financially and personally responsible for the deaths and destruction their sick assed, anti-human ideology has caused.
Zhotel9: “California has millions of convicts, put them to work clearing under brush. ”
Just what I was going to say. Their locations could be tracked by ankle bracelet monitors. Brush cutting would do them more good than being cooped up all day.
Does not have to be chaingangs and dogs and whips. Ankle bracelet works quite well.
The hand crews in red or orange coveralls working on fire lines in N. California the past 10 days are the CDCR prison crews.
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Conservation_Camps/
How did they manage to get THAT past the liberal crybabies?
Over a year ago we went to this presentation: https://www.eraofmegafires.com/
Land managers in Washington State have known what is needed, for years.
Tough country, little money, and scream of air pollution mean only a very little gets done.
Expect mega-fires in our future.
Individual home owners need to “Firewise.”
Yu
Baloney! I doubt it has anything to do with CO2. Try forest management neglect. As suggested, fuels have built-up over the past 20-100 years. Better forest management seems to be the best means for preventing or at least mitigating the destructive nature of these wild fires.
Farmers, ranchers and woodfolk have known this for generations. Native people have known it for 10,000yrs. WUWT had an article on this in which an Ozzie farmer went ahead against the law to clear brush around his farmhouse and barn getting fined $50000. Shortly thereafter, a wildfire ripped through the district destroying several farms and killing two people- his farm was safe from the fire.
“Sciency” research especially from long corrupted biology and climate science is so naive and high school. Don’t these envro-mentally-challenged “Dick heads” see this?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/11/weve-lost-two-people-in-my-family-because-you-dickheads-wont-cut-trees-down/
When I move back to California in 1987, a piece of property in the Sierra foothills I looked at was so overgrown that you had to find a tall ponderous pine to climb to see if had a good view.
I was a little shocked at how much clearing was being done to put in a road, well, and building site. I talked to the D8 Cat operator. He told me after the first wild fire, I would be working my ass off to clear more brush with a chain saw on steeper places that he could not get to with a bull dozer.
A few months later, some idiot drove through Amador County pitching lit match books out the window. When I saw how fast fire raced up the side of hills, a started clearing more.
My niece lives in Santa Rosa and had to evacuate in the middle of the night but her neighbor survived. I talked to my sister who was telling me the fires was so intense that they were creating fire storms that jumped well established fire breaks.
Retired Kit P, I think you mean “ponderosa” pines, not “ponderous” pines. 🙂
Ponderosa pines can be rather ponderous. Spell check tried to change my spelling on the first word right up until I hit post comment. 😉
well, the pines are heavy an slow moving… 😉
Nothing new here.
Wild fires made worse by past forest ‘management’ practices is the biggest environmental problem in the US now.
We also know what needs to be done. Modeling to identify optimum solutions are a waste of time unless you can come up with a way to stop groups like the Sierra Club from fighting everything in court.
There are lots of people and local groups who work hard to improve their local environment. However, I can not think of any examples where groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientist, ect rolled up their selves working up a sweat outside of court.
So long as lawyers representing the environmental organizations get a piece of the action we will continue to have lots of law suites. Tort reform is long overdue but the Democratic Party will scream with all sorts of bizarre reasons how it will impact the disadvantaged. The single largest group funding the Democratic Party are attorney and attorney organizations. Remember almost everything we do is more expensive because of law suits and too many attorneys. We have only a couple of vaccine producers left because of the fear of law suits. Drugs are more expense because of law suits. Malpractice insurance is through the roof. Even a doctor who has never had a claim filed against them pay large premiums. We were threatened with law suits when planning controlled burns and some agencies backed off until our elected officials reminded them the law suits could be even bigger if a wildfire happened and their organization had not followed their own statutorily mandated management plan.
law suites in Fu Major
Lordy. I guess it was only a matter of time before climate scientists thought their models could tell fire-fighters how to do their job.
They are apparently so expert at everything that even sewage workers and refuse collectors must now be trembling at the thought of the approach the climate scientists. Will no one rid us of these troublesome priests?
Of course forest management is the answer. I don’t think you could find a rational argument against it.
But, from where do the funds to accomplish it come?
Therein lies the rub. It’s not inexpensive or without risk, but it still needs to be done. Shall we mandate that homeowners in high risk zones clear their property or it will be cleared for them at their expense? That seems a bit onerous, as we do not require homeowners in flood plains to erect levees at their own expense. This is arguably a common good, but where do you draw the line for risky development and how much is the public willing to subsidize for eccentric lifestyles.
We have a choice we can prepare through wise management to avoid catastrophes, e.g. better building codes, land management, etc or we can spend lots more money cleaning up the mess after an almost guaranteed coming disaster. President Reagan’s Secretary of Interior, James Watt, lambasted and hated by the Left and environmentalist, strongly pushed for a change in how we managed lands, development, prepared for and cleaned up after a natural disaster. Just one example, if you lived in a flood zone and were flooded government would pay for damage to your structure or pay for you to build somewhere else. You could even build back in the same place but when you were flooded again that would be it. In other words the risk was all yours. Don’t forget a large percentage the buildings and other structures in California are far from earthquake proof and the San Andreas is long overdue for a really big one. Though no one can say when it happened they didn’t know it was coming. I would rather deal with fire management or even hurricanes.
Forest management? Just bring back logging. Clear-cutting swaths through heavy woods is an excellent way to put in fire-breaks. It doesn’t cost the public any money at all, produces a bunch of jobs, and is an excellent to way to reduce the price of lumber. Pine forests, which cover most of the Western states, have a very limited life span. They actually do better when they are logged back on a regular basis. About a fifty-year cycle.
Janice, unfortunately these fires are not occurring in large federally owned parcels, but in poorly managed private lands and state lands. These areas are the untended road side canyons and neglected “parklands” where dead wood and detritus have been allowed to accumulate due to neglect. They aren’t huge parcels, but connect the various developments with “green ways” that have also been neglected.
Large clear cutting is probably not cost effective because access is limited and vehicular traffic is not possible because of terrain.
You could start by opening public forest land to selective logging and require the loggers to clear underbrush in the process. There are some amazingly agile machines for both operations. A tracked skidsteer with a brushhog attachment can clear a lot of brush in a day and leave behind a layer of chips that will decompose quickly and not burn easily. The value of logs removed could be sufficient to cover the brush clearing. Once this is done, regular control burns would be sufficient to reduce the risk.
Of course allowing private enterprise to make money from extracting resources from public land is totally unacceptable to greens and libs. So nothing will be done unless it’s funded by tax payers and done by politically connected contractors. I think that’s why the authors of this study concluded mechanical clearing is cost prohibitive.