Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\
Previously, people raked the forest, and that worked OK for 1000’s of years. Before that, fires burned uncontrolled, which also cleared out the underbrush.
The problem we have now is due to almost a century of fire suppression. We stopped raking the forest and also stopped letting small fires clear out the accumulated fuel.
Of course, global warming doesn’t help. Neither does PG&E’s historic lack of line maintenance.
There used to be redwoods all over california. Hardy fire resistant trees, now they are relatively scarce. Second,wood is heavy. The economics to remove dead trees is not there, does not get done for reasons. Next, the area of the land is immense. Cutting fird brakes through it us tens of millions of acres. Further, fire breaks do little in high wind situations. What does move the needle are forest fires. Letting them burn. We've been practicing industrial scale fire suppression since the 50s. Next, immense areas of tree farms, second and third growth forests.
Best thing, get the hell out of the forests and let them all burn on a regular basis.
Indeed - the fact they were cut down nearly to the point of extinction is something of a tragedy. The trees that replaced them are not fire resistant. Thus is counter evidence for the idea that humans need to be cutting down anything to improve the fire resistant of forests.
Forest fires may be fine, as long as they are not catastrophic.
No need to prevent every fire. But it must be possible to prevent the fires from making air dangerous to breathe in cities, and certainly to prevent forest fires from burning down human settlements.
No need to terraform the whole land, but culturing it a little bit to make more habitable should be fine.
That is highly debatable. There are overhead electric cables that often cause the trees to catch fire. Installing cables underground or with stronger insulation and auto-power-shutoff could help prevent several of the fires.
I live in Oregon, another fire-prone state. While all human causes cause more fires than lightning, lightning causes more fires than any individual human cause.
I'll grant that having looked at the numbers, my earlier statement of "Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning" is untrue. It's only slightly more.
I'm unable to open your link (phone issue perhaps). I've heard that in WA state most fires (over 80%) are human caused. Given CA is at 95%, why is oregon so different? Are we talking different measures somehow? I'm wondering where the discrepancy is - I doubt that OR would be that unique of a situation.
As to your question, Oregon has just over half the population of Washington (4.2M vs 7.8M) but almost 50% more land area (96k sqmi vs 66.5k sqmi), leading to Washington having close to 3x the population density of Oregon (44 vs 118 people/sqmi). California has more than twice the population density of Oregon.
This feels sufficient to account for the discrepancy.
Thank you for adding the numbers (pretty sure the pdf issue is just me, old ass phone)
The population density explanation makes sense. Though, that density is very unequally distributed. Factors like square area with fewer than X people (how much total low density area exists), miles of forest access roads/rec sites - perhaps those numbers might give a very strong correlation. I wonder if you took just northern california, if the causes would even out to OR. (I agree pop density is likely a good correlating measure, just wonder if there is another that is even stronger)
Though, we were comparing apples and oranges! If we compare natural vs all human causes - assuming misc is human caused, then 70% of fires in OR are human caused. The percentage range for human caused fires being between 70% and 90% between different states makes sense.
Fires have their own cadence - they happen when the dead leaves and plants accumulate enough there’s sufficient fuel to maintain a forest fire. When we stop all fires the fuel piles up and the next fire is much worse and harder to stop. Up to a point we simply can’t stop it and it consumes all fuel and the forest starts from scratch.
There is also a second way of stopping fires, which is to create 10x more man-made lakes, ponds, and streams everywhere in the region. It will increase the local humidity, which will in turn diminish the risk of fires. The approach is to maximize the surface of the volume of water exposed to the air. This works because fires require dryness, which will be impossible with sufficient water evaporation and humidity in the area. It is a superior form of terraforming than controlled fires.
That’s probably a losing battle. The coast is already extremely humid due to fog drip.
The problem is that we get crazy weather patterns now due to global warming. For instance, it was ~100F for about a week a few weeks ago, which made everything nice and crispy.
Then, when it cooled off, we got hit with a long windstorm and 15-20% humidity. If that storm had brought lightning, there would have been widespread uncontrollable fires (too windy for helicopters).
It’s not just California. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the last few years in most states in the western US.
