Their argument was that you’d have to build roads to get to the trees, which would by itself cause environmental damage. In addition it would tempt more people to use the roads after the logging, even if the roads were officially closed, causing more damage to the forest through offroading etc.
Wow, all risks that could be easily mitigated.
No wonder environmentalists (of which I am one) have a bad name. Too many idiots out there.
It seems to me the conclusion of that study was that climate change was the primary cause of the increased fires, not a “teeny bit”. The pine beetle problem is part of climate change, since drier trees don’t have the sap to protect themselves from the beetles. This is often cited as one of the primary dangers climate change poses to forests.
I agree with your points about the need for culling and controlled burns though, and certainly more houses in forested areas increases the dollar amounts of the damage caused by fires.
But doesn’t half the paragraph you posted have to do with issues caused by AGW? Catastrophic drought (your buddy’s words, not mine), jet stream parking and driving the moisture to the north east. Aren’t all these issues that are explained by AGW? So it seems that 2/3 of the reason is AGW, per your own post. (assuming each issue is equally weighted, which is not giving any points to the poster who said that AGW affects the tree sap which gives less protection from beetles.
Seems like of silly to me to try and blame this all on AGW deniers. Even if we accept that the fires were directly caused by climate change (I remain unconvinced…my, perhaps flawed understanding of the current weather cycle happening in the South West is that it’s a La Nina event), I fail to see how deniers are to blame. Put it this way…let’s pretend that there were never any deniers. Everybody was on board with climate change happening, and that humans are the major cause. What would be different today? Would the US have had sweeping cuts to it’s CO2 output (and the subsequent economic impact that would have caused)? I seriously doubt it. And would China and India and other emerging industrial nations have put their prosperity on hold or stunted to massively reduce their own emissions? Again, I doubt it. Europe, who afaik doesn’t have as many deniers and who is, by and large, on board with AGW and active participation in ways to mitigate CO2 emissions hasn’t managed to greatly reduce their CO2…not to the point where it would make a huge difference and have prevented the fires that are supposedly being caused by this change.
I am not a denier. I freely and unreservedly admit that climate change is happening, and that humans are a major contributor to that. But, realistically, I don’t think that humans are going to work to reduce CO2 emissions any faster than we already are doing so (the US’s CO2 emissions have pretty much flattened out for years now, and are even slowly declining). As a for instance, I hear a lot of folks wanting to seriously reduce CO2…but, are they willing to allow and massively subsidize nuclear power? From past discussions, I’d say the answer is ‘no’ for many of them. Yet, this is a technology that COULD have a major impact. When I see the general public seriously looking at things like nuclear energy without the foot dragging or even active blocking THEN I’ll believe that we could seriously start taking a bite out of CO2 emissions and dealing with climate change (and this is just one example of what needs to be done, from a practical consideration, to even begin dealing with the problem). Otherwise, we’ll ‘solve’ this problem the way we do everything…over time, with incremental change and sucking it up in the mean time and dealing with the mess we make.
-XT
I would expect trying to get money into anyone’s budget for such mitigation is a real challenge.
Also, here I’m getting WAY out of anything I really know anything about, but my (WARNING: dim and not necessarily accurate!) recollection is they’ve shown that decaying trees play a nontrivial role in the life cycle of a forest, and cutting down and hauling out the dead trees screws with this. (Hopefully someone more knowledgeable in this area will jump in and support or correct me, as appropriate.)
The natural and healthy way is to let the forest periodically burn down…same with the prairie fires and such we get out here. Trouble is that we have cut down a lot of the forest and plowed under a lot of the prairie, and encroached on what’s left, building all sorts of structures near or in those zones…so, letting it burn isn’t really a viable option because when it burns now it means there is that much less and it causes tremendously expensive property damage and potential loss of life (of humans of course). So, you can either let the dead wood, brush, tumble weeds, etc pile up (which increases constantly both the chance of fire and the severity of a potential fire) or move to mitigate this by removing it. Neither way is ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’…both have cost to benefit ratios involved. By and large though, at least from what the fire department tells me, removing the brush, dead wood and such is a LOT better than letting it pile up to provide more chances for a fire and more fuel if one gets started.
-XT
History shows otherwise, many bills and changes proposed have been stopped by people like Inhofe in the senate by relying on flawed science furnished by deniers.
And more recently it is thanks to denier efforts that republicans in congress are even attempting to gut the EPA, Republican congress critters are very active nowadays in attempting to do nothing.
You’re correct, but it also adds fuel for the eventual fire. Fire happens. We can’t stop it. Unfortunately we have, in the past, worked to prevent these fires. Add to that letting the dead timber build up over the years (which isn’t taken care of by the aforementioned fire) and you end up with a HUGE fire, like we see in Colorado.
So, as said, it’s a cost benefit issue, where the costs are not just economic, but also environmental.
This item needs also to be dealt with.
Differences are small alright, but they lead to an increase in the chances of heat waves, normally cold record highs and record lows were just as even, but in a warming world we are getting now 3 record high incidents vs 1 record low, and this is with just a close to one degree of increase in temperature since the start of the industrial revolution.
http://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/attribution/steroids-baseball-climate-change
And since we are very likely to get more than 2 extra degrees by the end of the century by doing nothing, I do not like the odds of what we will get with even more record highs.
I’d have to read the actual study before I agree with the conclusions in that article. The study won’t be published until July 6.
So, just to summarize, it’s not just the AGW deniers that are to blame, it’s also the environazi’s, the Department of Forestry (or whatever you call it), and those who build homes and live in heavily forested areas. Right?
Uh, the article from science daily does report that it will be published in July 6, but that article was published in 2006.
The point stands, what we are seeing now is was James Hansen also predicted in the 80’s.
Here is more from the article:
Ha, I didn’t see the 2006 at the top of the page, just “the research report will be published in the July 6 issue of Science Express…” Thanks.
I’m not much better versed than you, so take this for the wankery it is. When I first witnessed the huge patches of dead forest I thought to myself, “Firewood market!” and in my mind quickly became rich beyond the dreams of avarice as a firewood baron. Then I thought a little more. If we buzz up the wood and transport it to all corners, the beetle goes with it and the epidemic really spreads. Still, though, it seems remarkably weak-willed to be cowed by enviros into not resorting to drastic means to stem a drastic problem. Clearly, the climate/environment has changed and now the beetle is thriving beyond what the native trees have adapted to handle. We can let nature run its course, and in the process lose mind-blowingly huge amounts of habitat, or we can intervene and maybe save some habitat or create some close approximation that doesn’t doom the now homeless vertibrates in the area.
As for the OP: I love this place as much as anyone, but California burns from time to time as well and it’s not a giant scab. So I have some hope things will recover. But I’m also willing to leave if the place becomes like our neighbors to the south: fit only for stinging arthropods, venomous reptiles, and coyotes.
I read the article and I don’t see how they are accounting for the number of fires started per year. If in year one, they have 1 fire that’s over 1,000 acres on 200 starts and year thirty they have 10 fires over 1,000 acres on 2,500 starts are they saying that the increase in 1,000 acre fires was due to hot and dry conditions.
No, as the article points out. But I can see that indeed some of the items you mention, specially the last one, are a factor.
In 1978 the Forest Service abandoned the 10 AM policy to have fires out by 10 AM the day after being spotted. The 10 AM policy lead to a huge amount of fuels building up in the forests.
The annual cut on National Forest lands in Colorado from 1991 to 1996 dropped from 334 million board feet to 46 million board feet, due in most part to lawsuits.
Here’s a good summary of why we have these catastrophic forest fires:
From: Brow, Hall & Westerling. (2004). The Impact of Twenty-First Century Climate Change on Wildland Fire Danger in the Western United States.
While I am certainly more convinced that climate change does, indeed, amplify the risk of forest fires, the study focuses on a specific region/forest type (for instance the study points out that the increased risk does not apply to the Front Range and High Plains) and it only weights the increase of fires based upon ‘Fire Danger’, which excludes values such as land use, societal impacts and vegetation changes.
Still, they certainly predicted this. Climate change is a primary driver for wet and dry seasons, which seems to be the biggest factor.
Don’t feed the troll.