Very little to do with climate change. Mostly to do with lousy forest management.
No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA, and why it has nothing to do with the decades and decades of fire suppression they've been doing that have built up a huge tinder box in a drought-prone area.
This 'whistling in the dark' about simple explanations for climate change is not helping anybody.
<edit> Yes there was lots of thrashing around, and not all of it helped. But the last decade of drought created simultaneously 150 Million dead trees. It might have taken the combined industrial output of California for a decade to get them all cut, hauled and disposed. There was no time, most of the trees were in impassable terrain, and heck that activity would inevitably have created a few unintentional fires.
What was done or not done, couldn't have blunted the tsunami of dead wood that inundated the state. Arguing over a teacup in a tempest is fun but not informative.
More pesticides equal to less birds and bats. Not having birds and bats plus sucking all the water that trees need equal to more beetles. The disdain of politicians (and their voters) for this themes is the root of this problem.
It doesn't say that making the trees further apart prevents the movement of the beetles, it's saying that the tree density is so high that the individual trees can't draw enough water to produce the sap that protects them from the beetles.
>> Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem?
Thinning the tree population wouldn't solve it. Removing part of the dead trees could mitigate it but those trees are essential to beetle predators like woodpeckers. Things in ecology are complex and always connected.
The real problem here is the lack of water.
I had seen this narrative lots of times before. "Fix it for me for free whereas I take the money" because you like the trees, don't you?.
Not. Sorry. Is nor is my mission, neither I have the private resources to "draw any water" or fix the consequences of the greed of others.
I assume that US government could fix the problem if they wanted, so don't blame on the messenger, please. The current narrative seems to be "forests are expensive so lets remove them and problem solved". Will not work.
The state government made it a practice to stifle any potential wildfire for so long that a significant overgrowth and buildup of flammable materials has occurred, which otherwise would have burned in minor incidents over the years.
Mother Jones had a great piece on this - https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of...
And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. It's only been the last 20 years--when underbrush management was prohibited because of environmental concerns--that we've had this problem.
Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were. 100 years ago was during an unusually wet period of Californian history.
Which is my point. Modern industrial forest management figured out how to fix this problem. There were economic incentives for lumber, and cooperative regulation allowing controlled burns + underbrush clearing by loggers solved the problem. Industrial humans allowed there to be more trees, not fewer.
Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control.
There are direct policy consequences of disallowing controlled burns and underbrush management. And it's California's fault. People in the southern Central Valley have been complaining about these policies for decades. And it's because once all the Bay Area's pollution and fires get swept downwind, those people have the luxury of breathing it as it stays in the basin.
Californian climate is relevant, not just global climate. Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. This is for California, not the whole world. 100 years ago, when you say California's fire management was working well, California's climate was unusually wet. California is naturally more inclined to burn than most other parts of the world, up there with Australia and Siberia. Most of the rest of the world is not nearly so imperilled as California and it's not because everybody is is better at managing forests.
> Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet.
And the last 20 have not been. These patterns also have not shown up in other places with the same climate patterns but different policies.
Australia, for instance, has had nightmare fires forever. It's only been the last few decades that underbrush removal has been made more difficult or illegal in many cases.
Clear all the brush you want, California will almost certainly continue to get hotter and dryer than it was a century ago, and the fires will continue. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for California, only an orange glow on the horizon. Fire management strategies that worked a century ago for wet California will not continue to work. That was never maintainable.
California's prohibiting underbrush removal due to environmentalism was just the preview of Delta Smelt Dust Bowls last decade.
(The Dust Bowl, also being something that humans fixed with industrial policy, and the reason Oklahoma, despite no natural lakes, has more lakefront property per capita than anywhere in the U.S.)
Except for one thing. There was actually nothing keeping that water from flowing except for the delta smelt. The Central Valley went from green to brown in a single year. Nobody else was affected.
Irrespective of the politics of "who should get this water", the reality is that the people who were for protecting the Delta Smelt created an environmental disaster.
It's the same logic that they used to prevent thinning forests via logging and clearing underbrush--and lo and behold we have too many trees and when the fires burn, they're too hot!
It's the same logic that the U.N. used to ban mahogany exports, which led to those countries burning thousands of years of trees to make room for farmland, as it was their only economic recourse.
At some point, the environmentalists might want to ask themselves if "they're the baddies", given that other, supposedly less enlightened cultures have similar ecological situations and different outcomes.
> The Central Valley went from green to brown
This is a normal tactic of California water cranks, to use "Central Valley" to mean something else. The "Central Valley" is a huge, 400-mile-long flood plain, most of which is always ankle-deep in water. But the place you are talking about is just the bit of western Fresno County that you can see from I-5, what informed people call Westlands. Before 1968, the Westlands was never green. Not even once. Its natural hydrology is that of absence.
> Nobody else was affected.
Not sure what you could possibly be talking about with this sentence. The whole state was greatly affected by the drought.
You have bought into the propaganda of a Beverley Hills billionaire. If you are actually interested in the reality of this topic, i urge you to read Mark Arax's latest book:
https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California...
I've lived in Bakersfield for over 15 years. All of these arguments are things that people have been talking about when I was there 20 years ago.
There's no crankery about it. It's just now--all of a sudden the effete sensibilities of San Franciscans are affected by these problems. Oh we care now.
What is remarkable, and I know you won't listen, but is to consider that perhaps a certain worldview got this wrong. When information goes one way, from privileged to unprivileged, the unprivileged know more than the privileged. They know both the situation of the privileged (because the privileged are sure to tell them) as well as their own. People in the Central are directly affected by this stuff constantly. It's the reason they'd leave and make a new state if the Bay Area wasn't holding them hostage.
And not only that, but California didn't use to have this problem. It used to be that as a condition for allowing loggers to harvest trees (1 out of 200), they'd have to clear the underbrush.
It is zero cost to fix this problem. There would be more trees and fewer fires if CA just allowed the policies they had in the 90s. Unbelievable incompetence.
As a result, its forests can get real hot and dry.
A drive from the San Bernardino basin up highway 38 to Big Bear either in real life, or on Google StreetView will show how dry, hot areas very gradually transition into forest. This is how a stupid gender-reveal party ignited 23,000 acres of hot, dry transition zone between hot desert, and alpine forest, resulting in me not being able to see across the street.
Well for one thing, let's start with the fact that this is wrong. CA is not the only state experiencing dangerous and widespread forest fires. It just seems to be the only state that is actually being discussed here.
No, it does not have "very little" to do with climate change.
We just had the worst heat wave in the recorded history of CA. To suggest that climate change is an insignificant factor is just plain wrong.
> In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147256/california-h...
Source: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/8/602/305152