What the media won’t tell you about … Wildfires–Roger Pielke Jr
By Paul Homewood
Roger Pielke Jr’s take on the Canada wildfires:
Wildfire, common to many healthy ecosystems, is a particularly challenging problem for society because of its impacts on property and health. It is also challenging because people like to locate themselves in fire-prone places and do things that ignite fires. We have learned through hard experience that complete suppression of wildfire is not the best policy — despite what Smokey Bear says — as it can actually lead to even greater and more harmful wildfire events. These dynamics together make wildfire a challenging issue for policy.
This week, wildfire smoke from fires in Canada have drifted south along the eastern seaboard of the United States, affecting New York City and Washington, DC, and correspondingly capturing a lot of media attention. The event should offer a teachable moment on the complexities of climate and the challenges of adapting to a volatile world.
With this post I discuss some of the aspects of wildfires that I see as missing in the public discussion. I start with what the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says about wildfire, discuss readily available data on wildfire trends and conclude with the complexities of policy in the face of interconnected human-environment dynamics.
As we have come to expect from Roger, this is another thorough, well researched and objective analysis. He makes the following points:
- The IPCC has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change
- Globally, emissions from wildfires has decreased globally over recent decades, as well as in many regions
- Canada wildfire trends show no increase in recent decades
- Wildfires used to be much more extensive in past centuries
- Wildfires are a part of the natural eco-system.
You can read the full analysis here.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I wonder what impact, if any, forest management practices have had on the scope and reach of these fires? Australian wildfires in recent times have been made much worse in some Oz States, as reported, due in part due to predictably poor management which has prevented clearing and selected burning – two techniques which have subsisted since Aboriginal tribes husbanded forests for millennia. Exactly the same threat from so called Green ( or should this be renamed “Burnt Umber” so if these idiots protest it can be morphed to Burnt Umbrage”) led authorities has happened throughout North America where Native American Indians have been prevented from doing precisely what their Aboriginal counterparts did to limit fires?
I dont know – this “ancient forest management” might be illusory given the stats that wild fires have decreased in scope over the last ~100 years or so – it would be educational to see those forested areas across the globe which have been denied clearing and selected burning juxtaposed with temperature/wild fire incidence; but it appears to be stupid to allow increased access to forested areas which contain far more fire fuel in the form of brash – you cannot stop ignorant people having BBQ’s etc in tinder dry areas, eg.
Or am I grasping at fire lighting straws?
” ( or should this be renamed “Burnt Umber” so if these idiots protest it can be morphed to Burnt Umbrage”)”
It’s actually Green on the outside and Red on the inside, hence the soubriquet “Watermelons”.
Touche!
It is the attitude to forest managament that has changed. Where it used to be that forest management used to consist of clearing dead wood, creating firebreaks, coppicing and maintaining structural integrity of woodland close to roads, hills, railways and so on to prevent landslip (as the trees and their roots held the soil together), combined with controlled burning. This had the effect that uncontrolled burning such as forest fires caused by lightning strikes or bbq’s would quickly run out of fuel and be unable to spread.
That has now been converted to re-wilding and letting nature take its course. The result is what is seen today.
The EcoloonGreen delusionists will erase you from their Christmas card list (digitally produced , of course)
Last year I was doing some research that meant consulting old newspapers for a research project and just by chance happened to come across reports of the impact of severe wildfires on the east coast of America more than a century ago. I recall that newspapers in both 1903 and 1908 reported that there were major forest fires in various parts of the US and Canada and that the sun was obscured by smoke in New York causing a hazard to navigation in the harbour. I remember on article talked of the smoke being detected by boats approaching New York more than 600 miles out into the Atlantic. Another report I recall talked of a collision of two ‘liners’ in the St. Lawrence caused by the smoke from forest fires in Quebec. So that was twice in one decade. I guess there would be other incidents if anyone were to search the newspaper archives, but nowadays everyone assumes that nothing bad ever happened until the ‘climate catastrophe’ started!
Tony Heller does this all the time:
https://realclimatescience.com/2023/06/dark-days-in-new-england/
Very interesting. Thanks. Pleased to see someone has looked at this systematically .
And his “pulling back the curtain” destroys the EcoLoonGreen lobby every time – without fail in my experience.
I was listening to World at One yesterday as I drove along. Typically BBC linked the fires to climate change and they wheeled in a chap from the CC committee. In fairness to him he was lukewarm about a link.
It’s only because so many media outlets are on the CC bandwagon that people believe the nonsense.
• Wildfires are a part of the natural eco-system
This should be point #1
The adaptation to fire of some American Pine species is truly remarkable to the extent that they cannot complete their life cycle in the absence of fire.
I have Ponderosa Pine but on the edge of their native habitat. I am in the process (half done) of removing the “ladder fuels” that have grown under my largest one. The offenders are Washington Hawthorne and Popular. Many years ago, these smaller trees and brush would have been controlled by livestock (sheep and cattle), or occasional fires before settlement. Throughout the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI –>woo-E), the accumulation of fuels is a serious problem.
See a photo of fire at the base of a (smallish) one:
https://www.summitpost.org/wildfire-ponderosa-pines/788146/c-
“How did the fires in Canada start? Dry, hot weather also breeds more lightning. In a normal season, half of Canada’s wildfires are started by lightning, but those fires account for more than 85% of wildfire destruction. The other half are human-caused.”
Accidental fires. More and more people visiting the forests for recreation. Some for arson.
Boreal forest fires burn 40,000,000 acres EVERY YEAR in Canada, Alaska, and Russia.
What appears to be different this year is wind direction. Instead of the smoke staying in the upper latitudes, it has come south into the US.
‘https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/07/canadas-wildfires-new-climate-reality-experts-officials-say’
Colossally stupid.
“Solar Power Generation Cut In Half Due To Canada Smoke”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/its-really-unprecedented-solar-power-generation-cut-half-due-canada-smoke
But further down we see that “Solar accounts for about 3% of power generation in New England”
So it isn’t going to make much difference in the grand scheme of things…
Actually, it might. Smoke coming south means there may be less ash, soot, and other precipitate on Greenland this year. Hence, there could be less melting this year and next.