California IS Dreaming

[_canpakes]

OK. So you got nothin', here. SSDD with you.

Oh, i thought you were aware of the fires and their consequential damage in California.
Must just be "act of God" stuff...but just there...God just acting up in California in spite of their superior natural resource management policies and procedures.

Perhaps forest fires never occurred before human habitation in this area?

Are you incapable of defining, even in the most rudimentary terms, whatever you think you mean by 'effective forest management'? Or are you just going to keep pumping out strange, verbally spastic posts?

[_Brackite]

How The Smokey Bear Effect Led To Raging Wildfires

August 23, 2012 6:30 AM ET

The history of fire in the American Southwest is buried in a catacomb of rooms under the bleachers of the football stadium at the University of Arizona.

Here rules professor Thomas Swetnam, tree ring expert. You want to read a tree ring? You go to Tom. He's a big, burly guy with a beard and a true love for trees.

Tree sections are stacked floor to ceiling. They're like rounds chopped from a carrot, the carrot being a tree trunk. They're the size of dinner plates. When the football team scores, they rattle on their shelves.

Growth rings tell how old the sectioned tree was. But when Swetnam holds up one, he points to something else: fire scars. They're black marks, about the size of a fingernail clipping, left by fires.

"The first time here, back in the 1600s, it looks like, and it created a wound there. Basically the fire was hot enough to burn through the bark," he says. But the fire wasn't hot enough to kill the tree. So the next few rings show normal growth.

"Until the next fire occurs, and it creates another scar," he says. "And another, and another, and another, and another, and another."

Scars from thousands of sections show how often fires burned in the Southwest. It was every five or 10 years, mostly — small fires that consumed grass and shrubs and small seedlings, but left the big Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir just fine. This was the norm.

Then something happened.

"Around 1890 or 1900, it stops," Swetnam says. "We call it the Smokey Bear effect."

Settlers brought livestock that ate the grass, so fires had little fuel. Then when the U.S. Forest Service was formed, its marching orders were "no fires."

And it was the experts who approved the all-out ban on fires in the Southwest. They got it wrong.

That's the view of fire historian Stephen Pyne.

"The irony here is that the argument for setting these areas aside as national forests and parks was, to a large extent, to protect them from fire," Pyne says. "Instead, over time they became the major habitat for free-burning fire."

So instead of a few dozen trees per acre, the Southwestern mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah are now choked with trees of all sizes, and grass and shrubs. Essentially, it's fuel.

And now fires are burning bigger and hotter. They're not just damaging forests — they're wiping them out. Last year, more than 74,000 wildfires burned over 8.7 million acres in the U.S.

That included the huge Wallow Fire in Arizona.

"It burned more than 40,000 acres in the first eight hours," says Swetnam, the tree ring expert. "A tornado of fire."

Fires in the Southwest have been getting bigger and bigger over the past two decades.

"Now the fire behaviors are just off the charts," Swetnam says. "I mean, they are extraordinary. Actually, I think in some cases, they're fire behavior that probably these forests haven't seen in millennia or maybe even tens of thousands of years."

Over the past several years, even as fewer fires have struck the Southwest, they've burned more land. The U.S. Forest Service now spends about half its budget on firefighting.

Many fire experts embrace controlled, or "prescribed," fires — purposely set fires that do the cleanup job that small natural fires once did. It takes the tinder out of the tinder box.

But people have built homes and towns close to forests; they don't like the smoke, and prescribed burns sometimes get out of control. The Cerro Grande Fire in New Mexico in 2000 was a controlled fire — until it jumped fire lines and destroyed hundreds of homes.

I talked to veteran fire manager William Armstrong of the U.S. Forest Service about that, sitting on a ridge near Santa Fe, where he has done prescribed burns himself. Armstrong says people must accept fire in their lives.

"Large blocks of forest — if they want those — then what they must understand is that fire is inevitable," he says.

He says to save forests from total annihilation — and the wildlife and water supplies they protect — you have to set some fires and let some natural fires burn.

"The choice is not whether or not these forests burn," Armstrong says. "The choice is how they burn. What kind of intensity are we going to see those burn at?"

But as fire experts like Craig Allen, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico, are now discovering, fire is increasingly out of their control.

"Basically, the mountains in the Southwest — you can almost think of them as caskets of fuel," Allen says. "Gunpowder has been building up in these things for a century, and now it's dangerous to try to defuse."

https://www.npr.org/2012/08/23/15937369 ... -wildfires

[_huckelberry]

And Trump said it was water being sent to the wrong place a few months ago. If you are Trump you have the solution to the most difficult problems at the tip of your tongue.

The problems created by fire suppression have been under consideration for some decades now. The fire suppression priority developed in response to the early 20th century big burn when large portions of Northern Idaho and western Montana went up in flames including towns. That was the natural forest prior to management responding to wet spring followed by no rain drying the forest. The fires were monstrous.

Learning better management is a good idea but warmer dryer air dries everything and a strong wind from the desert heats and drives a fire along. Those are not erased by spouting Twitter cliches.

[_Markk]

Ok, its no argument that California poorly manages its natural resources and that it heavily suckles at the Fed teet.
So, is there some valid criticism in the following statement? and is his remedy a long time coming?

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted Saturday from France. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Living here for 60 plus years and going through a fire season every year, it is just unavoidable. What would help is getting back to or more controlled burns, at least from talking to friends in Cal Fire. It's tough with the Santa Ana's and a nut with a match.

They just close off most of the mountains here and require a wilderness permits to take a hike... and do nothing anymore. When I was a kid they use to have the prisoners cut fire roads and fire breaks all year long, but I haven't seen that in years in my local mountains ( I live 10 minutes from a National Forrest.)

And....CA isn't Dreaming...it has it's head up it's arse. The gas tax says it all...the ad's were s deceptive for the illiterate. These poor folks can't even afford rent and they vote yes to a 15 cent a gallon tax on gas thinking it is a tax to save lives.

[_subgenius]

So California water policy (eg growing rice) and development practices are "unavoidable" with regards to the devastation of fires ?

[_canpakes]

So California water policy (eg growing rice) and development practices are "unavoidable" with regards to the devastation of fires ?

This comment makes no sense. But perhaps you meant to ask if California water policy makes fires there more devastating, to which the answer is, “no”.

Perhaps you know of some terrible rice paddy fires that have erupted in the state?

[_Gunnar]

It is unfair to denigrate California in particular for any perceived mismanagement of forest lands when the policies of forest preservation and suppression of even naturally occurring fires has been at least as much a product federal policy as of California politics and governmental policies. Keep in mind that Of the approximately 33 million acres of forest in California, federal agencies (including the USDA Forest Service and USDI Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service) own and manage 19 million acres (57%).

[_moksha]

Is this all about California tending to vote for Democrats?

[_Chap]

This sheds light (rather than tweet) on the thread topic.

Basically:

California has huge amounts of forest - hence more chance of fires.

California is suffering from unprecedented heat and drought - hence more chance of fires.

Because of the above, plus the arrival of a tree-killing pest, there are unmanageably large numbers of dead trees in forests - hence more chance of fires.

People, who start 84% of fires, are moving into forested zones because they like them - hence more chance of fires.

Of course none of that would have happened if California had had a Republican governor.


Why are California wildfires so bad?

The 2018 wildfire season is shaping up to be California's most destructive and expensive on record, with $432m already spent on firefighting and containment. Cal Fire asked lawmakers for an additional $234m in early September - the earliest the agency has ever requested emergency funds - to prepare for the peak of the fire season, which traditionally runs through the fall.

A report released 27 August, the fourth in a series of climate change assessments commissioned by the state, found that if global warming continues at its current rate, California residents can expect more deadly weather patterns, including longer droughts, higher temperatures and bigger wildfires. But how did the most populous state in the US get to this point?

California is a heavily forested state
Forests and grassland cover about a third of California's 100m acres. The state contains more forest than any other in the country except Alaska.

Source: University of California Forest Research and Outreach

Climate change is making the state hotter and drier
Hot temperatures and dry conditions caused by global warming are taking a toll on west coast forests. The past five years in California have been the hottest on record, and the state recently came out of a nearly six-year drought, its second worst in history.

A lack of rainfall coupled with disappearing groundwater increases the likelihood of tree death. Dead trees act as explosive fuel when wildfires start.

Source: California Fourth Climate Assessment

There are millions of dead trees in California
Because of drought, rising temperatures and a growing epidemic of migrating bark beetles that prey on trees, an alarming number of trees, nearly 129m, have died since 2010. California has removed only 1.3m of these trees in that same period: the rest litter the state's forests with tinder.

Source: Cal Fire Tree Mortality Map

Much of California is a time bomb
The large number of dead trees, combined with California's already dry, hot and windy climate, has made much of the state susceptible to wildfires. It doesn't take a lot to start one - humans are responsible for 84% of them - and with about a quarter of California counties facing severe or worsening drought conditions, rain and groundwater are often unavailable to help put out fires.

Source: California Fire Hazard Severity Zone Map

People are moving into high fire-risk zones
California's population grew by 3 million between 2000 and 2010, and according to the risk management company Verisk, in 2017 over a quarter of the state's population lived near moderate or high-risk fire corridors.

With this increase in population comes a higher possibility of a human-made wildfire. And as people move into these high-risk area, more buildings are in harm's way: structures generally burn longer than vegetation, allowing fire more time to spread.

Source: Verisk Wildfire Risk Report

What's being done?
The California governor, Jerry Brown, and other state Democratic leaders are attempting to impose regulations to combat climate change. The state recently passed a bill that doubles down on sustainability and renewable energy targets across the board, requiring that the state get 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2026, 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2045. With those efforts and a commitment to more prescribed burns to reduce the amount of flammable material on public lands, the state hopes to rein in future out-of-control fire seasons.

Source: California Fourth Climate Assessment

[_Kevin Graham]

Ok, its no argument that California poorly manages its natural resources and that it heavily suckles at the Fed teet.
So, is there some valid criticism in the following statement? and is his remedy a long time coming?

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted Saturday from France. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

You're obviously regurgitating Trump's idiotic tweet.

As Walter Shaub responded,

"You are a sick, petty little man. Americans are dying and you're using the fires as an opportunity to attack them because you hate the state in which they live. You are unfit for public service. Also, by the way, dummy, the federal govt manages national forest is that state."