Tentative Optimism

            Hello, readers! To my own shock and surprise, I’m feeling uncharacteristically optimistic about the future. This is probably a fleeting phenomenon, but I figured I should explain why I feel as though we might yet succeed in regional and local wildfire mitigation.

            Just last year, California drafted a Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan that will be executed by a Task Force of the same name. You can read the full plan here: https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/ps4p2vck/californiawildfireandforestresilienceactionplan.pdf. This plan identifies four overarching goals: 1.) increase the pace and scale of forest health projects; 2.) strengthen protection of communities; 3.) manage forests to achieve the state’s economic and environmental goals; and 4.) drive innovation and measure progress. Successfully implementing this plan will require widespread cooperation between state, tribal, federal, regional, and local organizations. We have only just begun flexing the full force of our combined strength!

California spends billions of dollars reacting to wildfires, desperately responding to repeated disasters after the conflagrations have already begun. With this action plan, task force, and a huge influx of funding to the tune of billions more dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, we are aggressively shifting to preventative measures.

I just recently learned from an excellent expert panelist discussion that for every dollar spent on preventative efforts, $3-$8 are saved in damages and losses from wildfire. Watch the full webinar here if you want to “nerd out” as hard as I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqvrxsC1ta0. Mind you, the webinar is two hours long but it is absolutely jam-packed full of information, valuable perspectives, and achievable solutions that can be accomplished with existing technology, indigenous tribal knowledge, and scientific understanding. After watching, I couldn’t help but think, “Hey, we might actually stand a chance! We can do this!”

First and foremost, as identified by the first goal of the Action Plan, California must scale up forest treatments (thinning, prescribed burning, reforestation) to a landscape level. Currently, projects cover only localized areas on the order of magnitude of several thousand (10^3) acres, but what we really need are projects that span tens or hundreds of thousands (10^4 or 10^5) of acres. This is a massive gap in what we’ve been doing versus what we need to do, but with enough people-power in a burgeoning workforce, we can strive toward a prosperous, healthy forest.

Such massive workloads will require conservancy collectives and cooperatives to pool their resources, share their data, streamline their forest treatments and wildfire responses, share funding rather than compete for it, and standardize reporting metrics so that all stakeholders and key players can measure progress in the same way. All of this is possible!

To any and all young people (or older folks looking for a new career path) I implore you to get involved in land and water management. There is no way to sustain any economy of any kind without nourishing a viable ecosystem around and within us. Everything we have, Earth has provided. Without salmon, we have no fisheries, no food. Without forests, we have no lumber or paper products. Without habitat, we have no game to hunt, no beautiful opportunities for recreation. Scaling up treatments to a landscape level requires ALL HANDS on deck. There is no shortage of work and all levels of land management are experiencing a huge influx of capital.

Trinity County is already tackling goal #2 (strengthening protection of communities) with rigor. The Resource Conservation District and Watershed Research and Training Center have been scaling up fuels reduction, chipping, and burning projects in the WUI (wildland urban interface/intermix) all across the county. Some insurance companies are being legislatively pressured to offer discounts to homeowners who take preventative measures against wildfire. CAL FIRE has tons of information on home hardening and creating sufficient defensible space (https://www.fire.ca.gov/dspace/). And if you really want to dig your heels in and rage back against the blazes, VOLUNTEER for your local fire department!

We always need more folks becoming familiar with the tools and techniques to manage the flames. Knowledge is our most powerful tool for dispelling fear. There is a paradigm shift unfolding, and someday we will learn to cohabitate with good, frequent, ecosystem-enriching low-intensity fires. Let’s GO!

Global Warming Exacerbates Wildfires

Some background on this article: On September 29th, a confused and stubborn 86-year-old climate-change-denying man (one of the original two who inspired me to write Megan’s Climate Corner back in June) submitted a letter to editor that was so piss-poor in its climate and fire science comprehension, that it doesn’t deserve to be re-published. Especially not here. The letter writer claimed, “Wildfires are not getting worse and global warming causes greening of the Earth.” These blatantly wrong conclusions provoked me to write a retort. My response was as follows:

Greetings, readers! Let’s debunk some poppycock and balderdash!

Let’s recap a few key concepts. First, global warming does NOT cause wildfires, it exacerbates them. ‘Exacerbates means ‘to make worse’. Only an ignition source like lightning or a spark of anthropogenic origins can cause a wildfire. As the atmosphere, oceans, and landmasses warm, the hydrological cycle becomes more energetic. Evaporation increases in some places while other areas receive record-breaking rainfall and floods.

Second, the American West is aridifying, which is different from drought. Evapotraspiration (the movement of water from vegetation and soil into the atmosphere) will, in the long term (over decades), vastly outpace precipitation, thus altering this local ecosystem to become more drought-adapted. Oaks and scrubby shrubs will dominate this Northern California landscape in the future. If we’re lucky.

Third, the Wintu people burned this landscape every single year for thousands of years. They managed the forests better than we do today. We’ve allowed fuels to build up in the understory, and that means there’s more energy available for fires. Although the number of fires in the USA shows a slight downward trend in the last 30 years, overall acreage shows a slight increase (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244). Megafires didn’t exist before now because the fuels were never this dense. This is more a result of direct human mismanagement, rather than a strict byproduct of global warming.

Fourth, the “greening” of Earth observed since the 1990s is largely due to reforestation and conservation efforts in India and China (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows/). We will talk more about this momentarily.

Mr. Jeans (hereafter referred to as ‘LW’ for ‘letter writer’) slightly misrepresented reality in his September 29th submission. Let’s deep dive into the paper he cited: ‘Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Global Burned Area in Response to Anthropogenic and Environmental Factors: Reconstructing Global Fire History for the 20th and Early 21st Centuries.’

“Fire regimes are largely regulated by climate [Morton et al., 2013] and human activities [Marlon et al., 2008]; meanwhile, burning of biomass can speed up climate change through altering atmospheric radiative characteristics and land surface albedo [Andreae, 1991; Langmann et al., 2009; Levine et al., 1995; Randerson et al., 2006; Y. Liu et al., 2013].”

This means that humans have used fire to clear forested landscapes for crops and livestock for millennia. When a forest has been cleared, this results in a higher albedo. Albedo is the shininess of an object, and Earth actually bounces light back out into space just like the other planets we observe in the sky. Without dark, heat-absorbing forests dominating Earth’s surface, light-colored soil can bounce light and heat back out into space. At the same time, wildfires release MASSIVE amount of CO2 into the air, thus exacerbating the positive feedback loop of warming.

“In the future, the global fire regimes may be quite different from the present pattern due to rapid climate change [Bowman et al., 2009], and anthropogenic effects on fire might become less important than climatic influences [Pechony and Shindell, 2010].”

Again, the fact that we have had fires in the past doesn’t really matter. The last time carbon dioxide concentrations were this high (409 parts per million) was THREE million years ago (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide). Humans have only existed for two million years. The tight link, the positive correlation between carbon dioxide and warming, has been scientifically proven since the 1850s thanks to the unsung chemical work completed by Eunice Foote (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20210823a/full/).

We are careening toward temperatures we may not be biologically capable of surviving. (We might be able to adapt with the assistance of technology like air conditioning . . . for a time).

The study LW cited uses something called ‘process-based fire modeling’ to enter many variables (relative humidity, aboveground biomass, fires spread rate, etc.) into a computer model to then compare to old, charred, carbon-dated biomass. It’s a tricky objective, and these estimates are significantly less precise than our modern-day satellite imagery and data.

In the authors’ own words: “Model simulated fire patterns are not often consistent with each other. For example, Kloster et al. [2010] estimated global fire patterns based on the modified CTEM-Fire model and found a declining trend in burned areas from the 1900s to the 1960s and an increasing trend from the 1970s to the 1990s. However, the estimation by Li et al. [2013] based on CLM-Fire model presented a declining trend from the 1870s to the 1990s.”

The 1870s to 1890s was a time of great industrialization. Much of the forest was intentionally cleared away for timber, the development of large residential units, and for agriculture. Fewer trees, fewer fires.

Global warming does not cause “significant greening of the earth.” Greening can only be accomplished with sufficient water. In contrast, the West is browning up due to aridification. Rather, global warming increases the length of the growing season by warming earlier in the year and delaying the first frost of autumn later in the year. As previously mentioned, the reason we have observed overall greening since the 1990s via satellite imagery is due to India and China planting more trees. My alma mater Boston University led the study! Read about it here: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/humans-are-officially-greening-the-earth-is-that-a-good-thing/.

“In the western United States, wildfire frequency has increased since the mid-1980s in response to the climate warming and extended fire season [Westerling et al., 2006].” It is well-understood that fires are growing larger, more severe, and more destructive with massive acreage as the fire season lengthens. Maybe as our forests burn away, we will have fewer megafires. Our trees are burning faster than they are regrowing. And of course, we are increasingly short on water: tree mortality by desiccation and beetle damage are also on the rise.

            “It isn’t true that facts never change minds. They just don’t change minds that are already made up. If you see your ideas as identities to defend, you twist and resist data to rationalize your views. If you treat ideas as a hunch to test, you embrace data to update your views.” Adam Grant.

            LW cited an article that uses imprecise methods for past fire reconstruction and cherry-picked the ONLY two sentences that supported his false claim, “Wildfires are not worsening.” Dude, they totally are.

Indigenous elders used to consider potential environmental, ecological, and cultural impacts seven generations down the line. Our society refuses to consider the welfare of even the presently living and breathing. I face insults and slander quite regularly for writing this article, but I’m doing it because I know for a fact that I have former students in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades reading it.

Those kids need to hear a voice roar for them, they need to see someone going to bat for their right to exist on a habitable planet. I cry often, because I feel that elders like LW are actively opposed to the welfare of everyone currently in existence, and everyone yet to come. Then I wipe my tears away, and put my fingers to the keyboard.

Next time, we’ll debunk Mr. Jeans’ claim that ‘because ice ages used to occur, this extremely rapid, planet-wide heating can’t possibly be caused by humans.’ Or some illogical balderdash. At long last, we’ll learn about the Milankovitch Cycles and how they drove the ice ages to a steady rhythm for the last two million years. Stay tuned.