I have not heard of extensive controlled burns in any western state. It is just too large and the forests here burn too hot and fast in terrain that is too rugged. Of course there are some controlled burns in California and other states, but the large scale burns required are not practical by any measure. California is considered to have one of the most advanced firefighting forces in the world. They inform the fire control decisions, and know the importance of controlled burns. Maybe it is just a tougher nut to crack rather than assumed incompetence?
> I have not heard of extensive controlled burns in any western state. It is just too large and the forests here burn too hot and fast
...Because of the lack of controlled burns combined with weather conditions.
California is not larger than the eastern US. We do very large controlled burns here in rugged terrain. As far as I can see, it's a lack of political will and funding, combined with the reality that it's gone so long that its much more difficult than it should be. There are a few prescribed burns done in California, they're just not anywhere near the necessary scale.
California can either bite the bullet now and dramatically increase the number and area of controlled burns, or watch as things get worse and worse. There is no alternative. I'll repeat again: fires are a natural part of the ecology, with or without human intervention. You can either do it yourself and lessen the impact, or wait for nature to do it and have regular disasters.
EDIT: Just to get a sense of scale, the southeast burns eight million acres in prescribed burns annually. The west burns about three million. California looks to be only in the tens of thousands. The Camp fire has burned approximately 138,000 acres at the last report I can find.
Vast majority of California’s forests are fossils. If you burn them they don’t grow back, you get something else. Climate change is reducing the length of the rainy season, worsening summer droughts, expanding the range of bark beetles, and moving snow lines uphill. Under these conditions our existing forests can survive but not become established.
You discuss this issue as if there is some steady-state solution that can be applied. This is not the case. The climate is in now in transition from one state to another, much warmer and drier state. Controlled burns are difficult or impossible to apply under such a transition, with the number of dead standing trees (hundreds of millions in California) and the unprecedented soil moisture levels and evaporative load.
Secondly, if that is what you believe, then the solution is to burn now, not later. You cannot save forests already damned by climate change, and the longer you wait, the worse it will be.
> Vast majority of California’s forests are fossils. If you burn them they don’t grow back, you get something else.
Then how did they get there in the first place? Human-started fires have been a normal and natural part of California's ecology for thousands of years. Waiting for the weather to get even warmer and drier will just result in more forest being destroyed, more homes being burned, more people dying, because there will be fires, no matter what you do. You can choose to limit their fuel now and save some forest, or you let natural fires have more fuel and burn even hotter and wider and lose all your forest.
The climate conditions of today are not dramatically different from those historically. There have been many, and much longer, dry periods throughout the past few thousand years. In fact, the past century has been unusually wet.
> Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.
Fires have similarly been a natural part of the ecology for thousands of years.
What's new is not very dry conditions or fires. What's new is the California fire management over the past century or so. The biggest different climate condition isn't the weather, it's the lack of regular fires burning up fuel. Now, tons of fire-fuel has accumulated and fires burn hotter than normal. But there is no way to solve this other than by ripping off the band-aid now. If you don't, things get worse.
> What's new is not very dry conditions or fires. What's new is the California fire management over the past century or so.
Sounds like you don't accept that climate change is exacerbating these fires. As others have noted, average and historical rainfall isn't a direct indication of fire risk.
London [1] has the same annual rainfall (23") as San Francisco, but they have very different fire risks.
Timing of the rainfall and other weather events matters a lot more when it comes to particular events - and the ever later onset of rains in CA is a big factor.
Even then, the fire management practices you point out are in part a response to increasing populations near fire-prone areas. People expect fires near their homes to be suppressed. Unless we stop building homes in such areas, or build fireproof homes, that demand isn't going to go away.
Climate change is absolutely exacerbating these conditions, just as climate change in the past exacerbated these conditions. The climate is not regular in the absence of modern human activity. The timing and amount of rainfall have varied throughout history.
These dry conditions are not abnormal when looking at any longer timeframes. The severity of the fires is abnormal, but only because both humans and nature were regularly setting fires and letting them burn until they burnt out for many, many thousands of years. Only recently did mankind intervene in the natural ecology by stopping fires.
> People expect fires near their homes to be suppressed.
Then they will have to readjust their expectations. I would also say they should pay attention to the Cal Fire messaging about the necessity of fires. ( http://www.calfire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/live_w_fi... )In the rest of the country, we have prescribed fires even in and near residential areas. Clearly they must be managed more carefully now that Californians have allowed the situation to get so bad (e.g., fires started in wetter conditions which won't burn enough, followed by a second fire in drier conditions), but they are the only thing short of everyone leaving that can resolve the situation.
I'm not sure why Californians believe they are special and different. People in this thread keep citing terrain (mountainous areas are burned in the rest of the country), wind (the highest-wind states are actually those with the most controlled burns according to the wind map posted and the forestry website I linked), dryness (not out of historical norms, just recent history.)
Human-driven climate change is a factor, but what we're seeing is Californian climate returning to recent (in a relative sense) historical norms, not some kind of incipient Armageddon. We're not seeing something that's never been seen before. Again, the entirely dominant factor is the insufficient amount of prescribed burns.
Regardless of the cause, the only long-term solution is more controlled burns. The climate is going to get drier and hotter. Fires will happen. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this. Even if you waved a magic wand and took fire away from mankind, fires still occur naturally. The longer you wait, the more dry fuel you accumulate and the worse the fires will be. It might hurt in the short term, some houses may indeed be destroyed in controlled burns (it happens elsewhere, too), but the alternative is more houses burned and more ecological destruction and more people dead. You cannot get around this.
I think we're basically in agreement, although I don't think the issue is about California's thinking they are different. California just has large populations in fire-prone areas.
There is a significant risk in building in these areas, exacerbated by all the aforementioned factors. This will probably be accounted for in insurance rates going forward, which will hopeful deter people from building flammable houses in wildfire zones.
Weather in the Mono basin is irrelevant to conditions in the Feather River canyon. California, it turns out, is a large state with multiple distinct climate zones. As you note, it is the length of the summer drought which is increasing. This is not even contradictory with increasing or stable annual precipitation. It just means more of the water is coming in a shorter, rainier season.
