No it wasn’t. You brought up the frequency before he did. You haven’t explained how it refutes the idea that climate change is a factor, which was Mr. Fudd’s original statement. In fact, his original post was on the increased flammability of forests, not fire frequency.
It was.
- I mentioned the 13-year average spacing indicated by the sequoia tree.
- Elmer Fudd noted that recent serious fires have been much more frequent than 13 years apart.
- I pointed out that the sequoia evidence indicates a 13-year spacing for fires at one location, so it’s in no way inconsistent with more frequent serious fires statewide.
No it wasn’t. This was Elmer-J.Fudd’s first post:
Fudd was talking about flammability. Then, in response, you brought up the 13 year average in one particular place, which was a non-sequitur relative to his post. It is well known that fires regularly occur in western forests, so the particular frequency in one place is not really relevant. You have still failed to indicate what the relevance of your first post was.
In some areas, the trees may not come back any time soon. Which merely exacerbates global climate change, because forests are massive carbon sinks. The fires are releasing that carbon, allowing it to build in the atmosphere, making more forests vulnerable to the warm drought conditions that make fires more likely, which will end up putting more carbon in the air, leading to, well, a spiral.
One method for assessing lighting strike risks is the “rolling sphere” model. Imagine a sphere, 300 feet in diameter, rolling across the landscape. Anything it can touch is vulnerable to a strike. So if you want to protect the largest possible triangular patch of land with three lightning rods, each would have to be at least 150 feet tall (measured from the tops of the trees), and the largest distance you could have between them would be 300 feet. The area so protected would be 19,486 square feet (this ignores the protected margin outside the triangle of towers). With a fourth lighting rod acting in conjunction with two of the first three, you add another triangular patch of protected land. So if you have 10,000 lightning rods, you can protect 9,998 triangles of land, with a total area of 7 square miles (slightly more than that actually, if you count the margin of protected land outside the perimeter of your array).
Seven square miles of forest land is virtually nothing. For reference, the Klamath National Forest in northern California covers a total land area of 2715 square miles. And that’s just one national forest. The US has dozens of national forests covering hundreds of thousands of square miles, and a lot of the land isn’t conducive to the installation of lightning rods. There’s also a lot of burnable land that isn’t national forest land.
Ponderosa pines can be 200 feet tall, so your lightning rods would need to be at least 350 feet tall in many places. SWAG here that you could erect guyed masts of such height for $100,000 each. Might be more or less depending on the logistics, but it’s probably not $10K, and it’s probably not $1M. You can see that the math gets out of hand pretty quickly, and that’s also ignoring the ongoing cost of inspection and maintenance. Lightning protection is really only economical when it’s short rods installed on the roof perimeter of existing buildings, like this.
You need to allow a lot of small fires, either natural of man-made to stop big ones. Manage your underbush, use science and not politics.
Those types of forests need fire as part of their natural cycle.
It was to note that there’s at least 2000 years of evidence that WRT fire, California fires is a figurative powder keg.
What does the actual science say about “managing the underbrush.”?
That’s not what your statement showed, It only indicated that fires in one single location occurred regularly, not that all of California was a powder keg. Like I said, it was irrelevant to Fudd’s point.
Thank you, Machine-elf.
Let it burn in a controlled way so it doesn’t accumulate for years.
Usually controlled burning is used - fires in conditions where it will not spread, to burn out areas where fire needs to travel to threaten people or assets. In practical terms it might be rolled out every 5-10 years around some assets, but usually its done when there has been no fire for a long time and there is hightened risk anyway.
After the Australian fires earlier this year there has been renewed interest in indigenous fire management. Aboriginal people burnt bush in small patches to create a mosaic of patches that were fired over the course of a decade or so. They did this to promote new growth, which preferentially attracts grazers. The consequence was a much more park-like forest structure, which was well-documented when whites arrived, and was generally all turned into dense bush within a generation of Aboriginal people being kicked out [or worse]. While wildfires could still break out, this massively reduced fuel loads and the risk of fires fro lightning strikes.
it is still practiced in some parts of Australia and now being investigated much more seriously as a major change in the way fire risks should be managed.