California wildfires have grown more destructive and lethal over the past half-century, but climate change has little, if anything, to do with the increase in damage.
The less-settled areas have more space outside of crowded population centers but come with significantly higher risks of fire and plenty of fuel to burn, according to a report by Villanova University geographer Stephen M. Strader.
Strader’s study was published Feb. 15 in a scientific journal on natural disasters, Natural Hazards, and his work was found and reported by The Mercury News.
“This is a people problem,” U.S. Geological Survey fire scientist Jon Keeley told The Mercury News. “What’s changing is not the fires themselves but the fact that we have more and more people at risk.”
The number of homes at risk of wildfires in the western United States increased from about 607,000 in 1940 to 6.7 million in 2010, a roughly 1,000-percent increase.
Fire risk is variable and sometimes inaccurate. The California state fire department, Cal Fire, labels areas at risk of wildfire by the amount of fuel readily available and estimating whether an area is at low, medium or high risk. Focusing on the fuel, however, leaves out other important factors, such as wind, Keeley told Climate Feedback.
Climate change plays a negligible role in the number of fires that start and burn through the West, however.
“Direct effects of seasonal temperatures over the last 100 years do not show any significant correlation with fire activity,” Keeley told Climate Feedback. “However, warming may have indirect impacts, particularly on recovery patterns that may alter vegetation succession trajectories.”
Building homes in more rural environments have taken a toll on fire prevention, as well. Controlled burns, an effective technique for removing fuel before it builds up, cannot be held in areas and forests dotted with residences. The space between homes collects fuel and increases the risk and severity of wildfires burning through.
“If homes are sprinkled through the landscape, you take that key tool off the table,” University of California wildfire specialist Max Moritz told The Mercury News, referring to controlled burns.
Read more at Daily Caller
My uncle once made his helicopters available for fighting fires in Colorado. Smoke was spotted, the fire quickly extinguished, paper work filed and he was paid.
Then something changed. No one was sent to extinguish a fire until the expense was approved. Too late, you have a wildfire. It’s a people problem alright.
Wildfires are natural with a very healthy ecological process to regenerate forests and grassland. Wildfires have long been nature’s method of forest management. The US Department of the Interior explains:
Fire has always been a natural process that is essential to healthy ecological systems. In the early 1900s, land management agencies sought to suppress all fires in an effort to preserve the timber supply. Over the decades, fire exclusion led to more living and dead vegetation on the landscape, increasing the fuel and as a result, the risk of large wildfires in our forests, rangelands, and near communities
Pearce is right the data everywhere shows a decline in wildfires, yet the media play dumb under the spell of ‘confirmation bias’ and just plain bias. Negative stories not positive ones sell newspapers. Right now fires are burning across the US and Western Canada.What’s causing all these fires?
Of course, the headlines are all breathlessly claiming that the fires are due to climate change because that’s the current agenda in the straw-seizing, politically correct world.
But the fact is, they’re caused by people. 90% of the fires that are burning and have burned in the United States have been caused by the carelessness or deliberate intent of human beings. The US Department of the Interior says:
Wildfires can be caused by nature – mostly due to lightning strikes – but the vast majority are caused by humans.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-03/90-wildfires-are-caused-people-not-climate-change
Seems callous to me. Billions of creatures live in that brush, and die horribly in the fires. An acre of ashes is a loss, not rebirth.