It’s the climate/weather, stupid!

During the 1992 election campaign, Bill Clinton famously coined the phrase:
It’s the “economy, stupid” to admonish George H.W. Bush for his failure to understand the real problem facing voters.
Today the timber industry and Forest Service continuously advocate logging to reduce fuels and assert that this will reduce large wildfires. But fuels don’t drive large wildfires.
It’s the climate/weather, stupid.
There is a well-documented correlation between wildfire and extended drought.
For instance, in the years from 800 to 1300, known as the Medieval Warm Period, the western Sierra Nevada experienced the greatest number of wildfires in the past 3,000 years.
This was the same time that the Anasazi Indians abandoned their cliff dwellings due to extended drought that also engulfed the Southwest.fa
As the study’s author Tom Swetnam notes: “This is one line of evidence that it was very fiery on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada — and there’s a very strong relationship between drought and fire.”
California and the rest of the West have experienced some of the worst droughts in the past thousand years. Is it any surprise that we are seeing large wildfires?
When there is drought, along with low humidity, high temperatures and especially the wind, wildfires are impossible to control.
Even though we have thinned millions of acres of the West, the acreage burned by wildfire continues to climb. Many scientific review studies have documented that when you have extreme climate/weather — like a thousand-year drought — thinning and other fuel reduction projects don’t work for two reasons.
First, the probability that a fire will encounter a fuel reduction during the very limited time it is effective is extremely small.
More importantly, extreme weather overcomes most fuel reductions.
For example, one review found: “Extreme environmental conditions … overwhelmed most fuel treatment effects. … This included almost all treatment methods including prescribed burning and thinning. … Suppression efforts had little benefit from fuel modifications.”
Another review study concluded: “… area treated (by fuel reductions) has little relationship to trends in the area burned, which is influenced primarily by patterns of drought and warming.”
A third study states: “… fuel treatments … cannot realistically be expected to eliminate large area burned in severe fire weather years.”
The non-partisan Congressional Research Service determined: “From a quantitative perspective, the CRS study indicates a very weak relationship between acres logged and the extent and severity of forest fires.”
And the CRS went on to note that logged areas appeared to increase wildfire:
“The data indicates that fewer acres burned in areas where logging activity was limited.”
This agrees with another review study published this past year that “found forests with higher levels of protection had lower severity values even though they are generally identified as having the highest overall levels of biomass and fuel.”
In other words, “active management” advocated by the timber industry and its lackeys actually appears to increase fire severity and extent.
Most wildfires are human-ignitions, and it’s well documented there is a strong correlation between logging roads and fires. Thus, logging our forests likely increases the number of ignitions.
These studies suggest that thinning/logging is a poor strategy in part because it fails to acknowledge that climate/weather are the driving force in large wildfires.
When the climate/weather conditions are “ripe” for a large fire, nothing we humans can do will have any significant influence on such fires.
Should we do nothing? No. We don’t need to be helpless victims.
The first line of defense is not to allow home construction in the Wildlands Urban Interface.
Those homes already constructed need to adopt fire wise practices that reduce the flammability of homes and communities. Metal roofs, screened vents, green lawns, and a reduction in fine fuels like dry grass and shrubs immediately adjacent to homes are well documented to save homes.
The current advocacy for more logging/thinning (except within a hundred feet or so of home) is misguided. Research has shown repeatedly that under extreme climate/weather conditions we can’t stop or suppress wildfires. We need to learn to live with them..

4 thoughts on “It’s the climate/weather, stupid!

  1. I have been saying, since the “W” administration…

    “It’s the biosphere, stupid.”

    Nice article, George.

  2. Wild horses eat Cheat Grass and other dry grasses that fuel wildfires, so keeping them inside holding facilities is costing Americans far more than holding fees. The modern horse appeared on the scene about the same time grasslands replaced boreal forests. They teeth are unique created for both dry, fibrous grass as well as younger tender grasses. Modern Equus appeared about 1.78 years ago at precisely the (geological) moment grasses emerged. Removing them from these grasses has resulted in loss of a species specifically created by God or nature to fill an ecologically niche in N. America. The horse temporarily disappeared after the last major glaciation followed by an abrupt, sudden increase in temperature began melting glacial ice leading to two glaciers breaking off in the Beringia. This warming period was interrupted by a much shorter, but very cold glacial period which put a temporary end to the melting glacial ice. This period was once again abruptly ended by a sharp rise in temperature that unleashed the melting of glaciers that extended from most of Canada to as far South as Illinois. This melting temporarily flooded N. America unleashing vast rivers and lakes while moving others, turning NA into a watery bog for a few thousand years until temperatures became more temperate and the land began producing grass came to life again. Dr. James Leidy who first found the “very close” modern cousins of the European horses returned by the Spanish t their homeland in the Badlands, found it an amazing and mystical phenomena that the horse could disappear from N. America only to return to the very places it had been before–filling the same niche as his ancient ancestors had in the very same places through both time & space. Not only do horses consume some of the fuel that help wildfires spread, but they also add moisture to the soil through their manurer. Nitrogen is helpful developing good soils, yet these very simple facts and others, well-published in credible scientific literature appear. to be lost on the agencies that manage western lands as well as coastal barrier islands.

    1. “Wild horses eat Cheat Grass and other dry grasses that fuel wildfires, so keeping them inside holding facilities is costing Americans far more than holding fees.”

      Yes!

      “Not only do horses consume some of the fuel that help wildfires spread, but they also add moisture to the soil through their manure. Nitrogen is helpful developing good soils, yet these very simple facts and others, well-published in credible scientific literature appear.”

      Yes. This is why I have to eyeroll when ‘wreckreationists’ complain about horses out on the trails, doing damage. I love to see horses and riders out on the trails and happily yield the right-of-way to them.

      I think of these things a lot also. It is so painfully obvious that special interests want the land for their own reasons, and nothing to do with what they tell the general public.

  3. Past fire map jpegs, from the Active Fire Maps website, have now disappeared. I had saved links for personal reference to review some of the worst fire years in Montana-Idaho (2012) and one year in Alaska (2015) when there were hundreds of fires.

    Also mysteriously disappearing from the web are the BLM’s Wilderness Study Areas in Wyoming’s Red Desert. In previous years, including 2016, there were web pages with maps and descriptions on every WSA. Now they have evaporated.

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