Ongoing forest fires in California are mostly a function of poor forest management, particularly insufficient controlled burns to clear away accumulated fuelwood, explained Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of False Alarm, offering his remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
“It has fairly little to do with climate change, and it has almost everything to do with the fact that we haven’t managed our forest well,” said Lomborg of California wildfires. “We haven’t done prescribed burning. We haven’t ensured that these fires won’t burn out of control.”
Lomborg added, “We’ve just simply allowed fuelwood to build up to cause almost uncontrollable fires in California.”
Prescribed burnings are necessary to reduce the risk of uncontrollable forest fires, Lomborg stated. “If we did prescribed burning, we could, in a few years, reduce the fire risk dramatically and actually get people’s lives back to — pretty close — to normal.”
“Fires are mostly there because we’ve had fire suppression for more than a hundred years.”
Lomborg explained how California has used fire extinguishment in lieu of prescribed burns for over a century.
“Fundamentally, we have suppressed fires for more than a hundred years,” Lomborg said. “That obviously makes good sense that you’d rather not have fires than fires, but what happens is you build up lots and lots of fuelwood that is basically going to give you much hotter, much fiercer fires later on.”
Lomborg noted that California’s suppression of forest fires and abdication of prescribed burns led to a build-up of dry kindling in the state’s forests.
“From the 1950s to about 2000, California only saw about 250,000 acres of forest burn every year, so it was a dramatic reduction,” Lomborg remarked.
“It builds up all this fuelwood. There’s now five times as much fuelwood in the under storage of most California forests. You can’t keep that up. Eventually, these fires will break out, and that’s what we’re seeing now.”
Lomborg said the average area consumed by forest fires over the past ten years in California over the last ten years “is almost a million acres.”
He added, “It has fairly little to do with climate change, and it has almost everything to do with the fact that we haven’t managed our forests well.”
“We haven’t done prescribed burning; we haven’t ensured that these fires won’t burn out of control,” Lomborg determined.
Lomborg challenged claims that today’s Golden State fires are “unprecedented.”
“These fires are big, but we have to get a sense of proportion,” Lomborg stated. “We have good statistics all the way back to before 1800, and back in the 1700s, California used to burn much much more than what it’s doing right now. We estimate that it burned somewhere between four and 12 million acres — remember, the biggest burn of this year is 2.3 million acres — so more than twice as much and possibly even six times as much.”
The U.S. Forest Service describes controlled burns on its website. The agency explains, “After many years of fire exclusion, an ecosystem that needs periodic fire becomes unhealthy. Trees are stressed by overcrowding; fire-dependent species disappear; and flammable fuels build up and become hazardous.”
“More prescribed fires mean fewer extreme wildfires,” declares the U.S. Forest Service.
Scientific American cited Daniel Swain, an assistant researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, who claimed that “climate change” is a driver of today’s California wildfires.
It also shared a competing view from Jon Keeley, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center.
Keeley said, “We ought to be much more concerned with ignition sources than a one- to two-degree change in temperature.”
He echoed Lomborg’s analysis in identifying California’s focus on putting out forest fires for about a century instead of using controlled burning to remove flammable dead vegetation.
Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy, and Environment Sciences told the CBC: “We now have very strong evidence from those years of research that global warming is, in fact, increasing the odds of unprecedented extremes.”
Read more at Breitbart
Exactly correct. I have a National Parks Guide from my first Yosemite visit in 1978 first published in 1971, which says exactly this and makes it clear something need to be done to reduce the accumulation of flammable debris that had been accumulating for 30 years then, so 70 years now? Seems nothing was done by the green democrats who stopped nature from looking after itself by suppressing fires, so the eventual problems have just become larger and more dangerous due to neglect of the State government, who also allowed people to live in threatened areas. Given the lightning AND the humans building wooden homes ever further in these forests with their fireworks, barbecues and frontier standard overhead power cables combined with pervasively unimaginative stupidity, what could possibly go wrong?
The relevant page is here. I can scan the whole section and give full references if needed, in fact isbn is 0-916122-08-5
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lt9bbbr1v8kzhll/Yosemite%20Burn.pdf?dl=0
The guide is called “Yosemite The Story Behind the Scenery”
by Jones and Muench. There is one on ebay “Yosemite The Story Behind the Scenery Giude (spillong?)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Yosemite-The-Story-Behind-the-Scenery-Giude-1981-/224023040511
PS Perhaps it’s the Sierra clubs Malthusian attempt at natural population control by lax zoning laws? (their homes of the rich are built to be fire resistant in cleared areas, I doubt they have to ask if they can do this, or are stopped by the authorities from clearing their own land to protect themselves from fire, just buy the land to clear hence keep themselves safe while the poor people burn).
It is worse in Australia where the Federal authorities actively stop the local people from protecting themselves by laws stopping people from clearing their own land with controlled burns to protect themselves, and even stop the local fire authorities doing the same, , who used to do the controlled cool season burns of forest floors and roadside growth to provide fire breaks, but were stopped by city dwelling environmentalist law, BTW. You can’t make it up.
We need to get back to Logging and Contorled Burns t reduce the real Fire Hazard and not allow the Eco-Freaks to ruin the forests and burn us the nests of Spotted Owls and Marbled Murlets