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Climate Change Doubled the Size of Forest Fires In Western US, Says Study (time.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: Man-made climate change has doubled the total area burned by forest fires in the Western U.S. in the past three decades, according to new research. Damage from forest fires has risen dramatically in recent decades, with the total acres burned in the U.S. rising from 2.9 million in 1985 to 10.1 million in 2015, according to National Interagency Fire Center data. Suppression costs paid by the federal government now top $2 billion. Now a new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that a significant portion of the increase in land burned by forest fires can be attributed to man-made climate change. Other factors are also at play, including natural climate shifts and a change in how humans use land, but man-made climate change has had the biggest impact. That trend will likely continue as temperatures keep rising, researchers said. Climate change contributes to forest fires in a number of ways. Fires kill off trees and other plants that eventually dry and act as the fuel to feed massive wildfires. Global warming also increases the likelihood of the dry, warm weather in which wildfires can thrive. Average temperatures in the Western U.S. rose by 2.5 degree Fahrenheit since 1970, outpacing temperature rise elsewhere on the globe, according to the research.
The only man made problem here is the fact we've stopped forest fires in the first place. They are worse because of all the underbrush that didn't burn in the first place.
Climate change has nothing to do with it, except it got the author a new grant.
There's also been a big change in forest management practices during that time. How were those factored in?
Could have had a discussion without trump or hillary but you've already ruined it.
Anyways, if I wasn't so busy out dicking bimbos...... I'd just grab climate change by the pussy.
It's a hoax from China.
I mean, "Gyna".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Here's the raw data, the article itself is behind a paywall. Choosing 2015 is kind of cherry-picking for the headline, since in 2014 there were only 3,5 million acres burned.
There's a fairly strong correlation between temperature and wildfires, so, this finding seems reasonable.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Firefighting also increases forest fire size. Attacking nearly every fire allows flammable materials to collect, we end up trading a series of small fires for a very large conflagration when an area eventually burns.
... as a scuba diver ... recovering and hooking up buckets helicopters dropped (if a lift doesn't feel right its a safety precaution, quick detach cable and try again) into a lake being used as a water source. Take that myth busters, scuba diver in a tree at a forest fire, plausible. :-)
There is some debate about being less aggressive and to allow a process closer to natural, but development and the protection of structures complicates things.
So man made causes, those of a climate change variety and others are both at work. It would be interesting to see how they separate the two. Plus increased human activity in an area also increases fire risks, from unsupervised campfires to bad mufflers on dirt bikes and atvs. Its not as simple as saying there was an increase from 3M to 10M acres over the last 30 years. I've witness a lot of increased development and increased human activity in southern california hills that are prone to wild fires.
I also worked a wild fire once
Uhm, I think it's the fires that cause the warming, not vice versa.
[No whooshies, please!]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Average temperatures in the Western U.S. rose by 2.5 degree Fahrenheit since 1970, outpacing temperature rise elsewhere on the globe, according to the research.
Western North America was cooler than normal for the period running from about 1949 to 1972, IIRC (I used to work in a lab that studied past climates using 13C from trees and 18O from ice cores). You could just as easily flip it and say 1970 was 2 or 3 degrees cooler than 1940.
I'll put this one on the article writer rather than the scientists, but - sloppy work like this just give the denialists more ammunition to keep ignoring actual valid data. Cooking the books in an attempt to provoke a stronger reaction ends up back-firing, more often than not.
#DeleteChrome
More carbon dioxide and warmer, more humid temps should also means an explosion of plant life right?
Why is this horseshit even posted? The tiniest glance at actual temperature change data show this is complete BS.
It's the case in Australia if you believe this document from some well respected government scientific institutions (see the second page under Recent Trends)
http://www.climateinstitute.or...
I can't speak for other countries.
It's turtles all the way down.
Global warming stole my brother's pickup! True story.
Trump 2016.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Which should we blame, poor land management or climate change? Hmmm, climate change is popular, lets go with that.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
As far as I can tell, the paper shows that temperature increases are correlated with more wildfires. Up to this point it's solid science. Then they then define "Anthropogenic climate change" to mean "temperature increases since 1901" and "climate variability" to mean "fluctuations about the trend since 1901" and conclude that the anthropogenic climate change has been the cause of wildfire. Here I call shenanigans.
When most people say "climate variability" (especially in contrast to "anthopogenic climate change") they don't simply refer to short-term fluctuations about the warming trend -- they refer to the part of the warming trend which represents long-term variability/change in the climate independent of human action. This paper doesn't try to separate warming due to human CO2 emissions from warming due to other causes, so it can't tell us which drives the trend in the wildfires.
rapid increase in global population=more co2=climate change kill 1/2 the population=fighting climate change
am i doing it right?
No. People's biological processes are part of a short-term closed loop. The CO2 they exhale has been recently extracted from the atmosphere by plants (and maybe went through an animal or a few). If you don't understand that, your opinion is entirely spurious. See carbon cycle and Dunning-Kruger effect.
Stephan
And yet you'll vote for someone who's demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that you cannot safely leave him alone with your wife or teenage daughter, *ever*.
Maybe you don't have a wife or a teenage daughter. I have both. So do numerous Republican Senators, Representatives, and Governors, apparently.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It just struck me how absofuckinglutely hilarious it is that we see all the Trumpers going round wearing "You're a cuck if you're not for Trump" T-shirts when it's *Trump* who's aiming to make *them* cuckolds. The ones who actually have wives or girlfriends, that is, assuming that any of them do.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No, but people who have some semblance of a clue will continue to mock you regardless of who wins the election.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Well, he's not entirely wrong. More people use more fossil fuels, so fewer people would mean less introduction of CO2 to the atmosphere.
We should start with the biggest polluters, though. Nuke the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
True, but that's only part of the story. Every time the climate shifts big time, the top dogs of the food chains got fucked big time.
Guess who this is this time around.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Energy in has to equal energy out. Plants take in CO2 and H2O, and use sunlight to convert it to (C6H10O5)n - cellulose. Energy from sunlight gets converted into energy stored in cellulose. That energy is released during fires. So for global warming to be causing a two-fold increase in forest fires, it must first be causing a two-fold increase in the creation of cellulose - growth of plant matter Any increase in fires without a corresponding increase in the creation of plant matter is just a transient blip in the data.
By conservation of energy, the long-term average of plant matter destroyed by forest fires has to be proportional to the long-term average rate of plant growth. But the people trying to blame these things on global warming are also usually the same ones decrying deforestation. The first implies an increase in energy storage by plants, the latter implies a decrease in energy storage by plants. These two assertions are self-contradictory. So in all likelihood, this is nothing more than a transient spike in the data caused by too-aggressive firefighting of brush and forest fires during the last century.
In the Valley Fire (on Cobb, CA) the firefighters were literally seeing behavior they have not seen previously. In particular, the fire produced its own massive updraft and inversion layer, the combination of which was lofting burning coals into the sky and throwing them great distances -- which spread the blaze. We literally had little bits of charcoal land in OUR yard, and we live miles away. Of course, exploding propane tanks don't help...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As usual Slashdot totally fucks up the headline with a clickbait headline that in no way represents the research. Forest fire size have doubled, but the research DOESN'T say this is from climate change, it says this has occurred due to many factors including increased fuel from mismanagement of undergrowth and climate change being a contributing factor as well/. It is embaressing, you can't even link an article on this site anymore as you will get laughed at for the tabloid amateur headlines that are created here.
Yeah, pretty much. I'll be glad when the election's over, and I can resume worrying about lighter matters, such as the Russian submarines that keep getting sighted within 20 km of my home.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't have a daughter and my wife is perfectly capable of defending herself. The idea that Trump is bad because we have wives and daughters is insulting to women who aren't related to you. Sexual assault is wrong whether it's against a wife, a daughter, a teacher, a UPS driver, a homeless women, or even an illegal prostitute.
Before anyone brings up Hillary (also a known defender of sexual assault), I'm a freaking Libertarian. Good luck finding something Gary Johnson has said that degrades women.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
What if global warming is actually saving us from the next ice age. What if humans liberating a lot of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere is "Gaia"'s way to liberate itself from an ice ages cycle?
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Well, he's not entirely wrong. More people use more fossil fuels, so fewer people would mean less introduction of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Agreed, but the problem is not the CO2 they exhale, it's the CO2 they make by digging up fossil reserves of C and adding atmospheric O to.
Stephan
The climate scientists who see man-made global warming in every move of the thermometer or barometer claim those who disagree are denying science. Yet they deny fire science. As others have pointed out, allowing smaller fires to clean out undergrowth makes the possibility of mega-fires much less likely.
Greg Raven
As long as there's any left, I'll take mine first.
How strange, I wonder why they chose 1985 as the starting point for their analysis. It couldn't possibly be cherry-picking for a local minimum, could it?
We call that fuel management and should be practiced by more people who own forest land. I do but a lot of people don't and it is a shame. I have started convincing some of the property owners around me to also clean up the dead wood on their property but some just don't want to do it or just don't care.
Time to offend someone
One of the huge concerns especially if you look at xkcd's representation of the development of modern man and civilization vs Temperature is that the arrival of modern man and the development of civilizations occurred at a relatively flat plateau in temperature. It's uncertain if we'll be able to thrive as well if the temperature shoots up beyond this plateau which we seem to be rapidly accomplishing. I'm not saying we'll completely die out or anything but if you look at that graph a few degrees below average temperature and we're in the last ice age where most of north america is uninhabitable! The US and Canada wouldn't really exist as countries. Who knows what a few degrees above that will accomplish?
That was part of the back-plot of Niven, Pournelle and Barnes' "Fallen Angels": As soon as we STOPPED putting out Greenhouse Gases, a Continental Glaciation began. . .
PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is an easy place for National Academy members to publish their papers. While their papers are externally reviewed, I don't think their papers always get the same rigorous review process that might happen at some other journals. It's a way for NAS members to publicize what they think is important.
Living things sequester carbon while they grow.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The Obama administration has already used political imprisonment in two well-publicized cases. Given her nasty personality, in a Hillary administration the number is likely to skyrocket.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The fact that the argument keeps changing should tell anyone everything they need to know.
Not to mention we're still in a cold period.
And the notion that there's some global temperature that climate is "supposed to be' is patently unscientific and ignorant of history.
The data shows we SHOULD be in a cold phase but the Earth has been warming rapidly compared to the last 10,000 years. The last time the average temperature rose 1c rapidly it took 900 years. Since the Industrial Revolution( roughly 1850s) the average temperature has risen a bit over 1C.
You can insist that given the great complexity of the Earth's ecosystem, scientists could not possibly know what will happen. They can theorize about weather change and some are right and some are wrong. But there is no doubt that the average temperature is rising and some areas close to the equator will start to be come uninhabitable in 20-30 years.
http://xkcd.com/1732/
Here's the main journal article xkcd referenced for that comic.
You've noted, in different words, that the trend since around 1900 is unprecedented in the entire time frame of the temperature reconstruction, last 20k years or more. You are absolutely correct, the journal article re-confirms that the graph trend from 1900 onward is unlike anything in the 20,000 years prior in the entire dataset.
If you read closer though, there is another potential explanation beyond human CO2 emissions that must also be accounted for. If you check the article, you will find that the data set from 1900 backwards is a DIFFERENT data set than the one graphed from 1900 forwards. The data graphed prior to 1900 is reconstructed from proxy sources, the data graphed after 1900 is the instrumental record.
When temperatures averaged over 100+ years, it's tough to average the tail end last 100 years well so using the instrumental record isn't wrong. Drawing conclusions SOLELY on the divergence that happens at 1900 though is to say the least, nuanced. Plainly, the most important and probable factor that must first be thoroughly ruled out is that the change in data sets is having an impact. There's a possibility that thermometers measure temperature more accurately than proxy records that are statistically analyzed and averaged over hundreds or thousands of years.
You start with a good and logical statement, that stopping forest fires increases underlying brush and other fire accelerants.
And then go into La La Land with a false statement that climate change has nothing to do with forest fire acceleration.
Many forest fires are the result of:
a. drought (impacted by climate change)
b. lightning (storm frequency and lightning strikes increased by climate change, increased energy in plus growth patterns from climate change)
c. migration of people due to climate change (who build in forest adjacent or in forests, increasing fire risk dramatically)
That is Science.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The paper is paywalled, so there is no way to check if the claims that 50% of the dryness is human-caused are valid. This is undoubtedly a statistical statement, and who knows what real or bogus assumptions went into those statistics.
Incorrect, it's open source, try reading the original link at the UW or WSU, in their news links, two of the institutions doing the research.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sure. A higher temperature has nothing to do with the chance on wildfires. Everyone knows that!
Oh, yes. I forgot. You don't 'believe' that average temperature has risen by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit...
Compared to:
- Something like an order-of-magnitude increase in fuel load, due primarily to environmentalist driven legal action.
- Injunctions against cutting fire lines or re-clearing existing ones.
- Substantial delays in reporting the start of wildfires, due to similar activity - closing roads, limiting access, stopping logging. (Hint: Loggers are one of the main sources of reports of wildfire starts in remote places. They may be the only people working outdoors in a particular valley, and they have a lot of incentive to avoid becoming trapped in a forest fire, or lose both their livelihood's raw material and their tools.)
- Substantial interference with access for firefighting equipment and personnel - again by such things as road closures and road maintenance interference. You can't build much of a fire engine on a Jeep or other 4x4 chassis, and when that's all you can GET to the fire line you have a problem establishing containment before things get out of hand.
There are thousands of wildfires every year. In the absence of human activity they get started by lightning. The issue isn't the chance they get started. It's how they spread and what it takes to put them out. The change in that is well documented, and it's all a matter of how the management of forests and fires has changed, mainly thanks to environmental legislation, regulation, and environmentalist-driven legal activity. A couple degrees change in the global average temperature, even if it exists, is buried in weather-noise compared to these interventions.
But how convenient: First turn the continents' forests and planes into tinderboxes. Then, when they burn up (destroying more homes and killing more firefighters), deflect the blame from your own groups' activities onto "global warming", and use it for MORE interventions against your political opposition.
Government has been said to be a disease masquerading as its own cure. It seems to me that, with this pronouncement, the environmental movement had graduated to the same status.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Another trick to make disasters look bigger is to denominate them in dollars of damage. This boosts them in two ways:
- It multiplies them by inflation. (They're talking "decades". Damage costs of $100 in four decades ago dollars, in current dollars come to $219.46.)
- It ignores increases in target size: How many more, and more expensive, houses, vacation/retirement homes, suburbs, and other pricey buildings and infrastructure have been built out into formerly "wild" areas - still subject to wildfires - in the last 40 years?
We were warned that this trick would be used to inflate the damage from Hurricane Matthew. Now here it is being used to inflate the perception of the severity of wildfires.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Are we talking about the same CO2 that we use in fire extinguishers?
To quote Babbage: "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question". But yes, the CO2 we exhale and the CO2 we produce by burning hydrocarbons and many other carbon-based materials is chemically the same substance that is used in some kinds of fire extinguishers, that is used to carbonate soda pops, and that is released by baking powder to raise a cake.
Stephan
There is no doubt that man-made CO2 emissions contribute significantly to the warming seen since the 19th Century, so that most of the warming since 1901 may be due to man-made emissions. Please clarify where in my post I asserted otherwise.
In other words, we both agree that "man-made CO2 emissions would warm things up". But the authors of the paper are relying on the assertion "all warming up is due to man-made CO2 emissions" and that is something else entirely.
The authors of the study claim they can separate the contribution to wildfire rates from "anthropogenic climate change" and "natural climate variability", but then it turns out that what they call "contribution from anthropogenic climate change" sensible people would call "the sum of contribution from anthropogenic climate change and natural variability" and what they call "contribution from natural variability" we would call "short-term fluctuations".
Please do me the courtesy of
1. Explaining why you think all warming since 1901 is due to man-made causes; or
2. Showing that I am misreading the paper's definition of "anthropogenic climate change"; or
3. Explaining why you think the authors are correct in their conclusions despite points 1 and 2.
Nice attempt to detract from my point.
I'm a Southern boy, and I was raised up old-school: I was taught to regard and to treat ALL women as if they were my own wife, sister, daughter, mother, or grandmother. Because every woman is one or more of those things to someone.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Thank you!
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
I admit, Gary isn't the best at live interviews, but his policy on Aleppo is solid even if his immediate response was facepalm worthy. No one is actually arguing about his foreign policy, just his ability to deal with pop quizzes. For those concerned about Gary Johnson because of an Aleppo question, I would encourage you to consider that the POTUS never has to answer questions without a cabinet of experts to advise them.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
No, your point is still bad. Southern and old school is a nice euphemism for benevolent sexism. Every woman is one or more of those things, but that's not what gives them human value. The fact that women are related to a man somehow is not why they shouldn't be abused, it's because they are people.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?