{"id":59794,"date":"2020-09-19T01:12:50","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T06:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=59794"},"modified":"2020-09-19T01:12:50","modified_gmt":"2020-09-19T06:12:50","slug":"59794","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=59794","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Bjorn Lomborg: California Fires Mainly Caused by Century of Suppressing Controlled Burns<\/a><\/p>\n

Ongoing forest fires in California are mostly a function of poor forest management, particularly insufficient controlled burns to clear away accumulated fuelwood, explained Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center ………..<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has fairly little to do with climate change, and it has almost everything to do with the fact that we haven\u2019t managed our forest well,\u201d said Lomborg of California wildfires. \u201cWe haven\u2019t done prescribed burning. We haven\u2019t ensured that these fires won\u2019t burn out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lomborg added, \u201cWe\u2019ve just simply allowed fuelwood to build up to cause almost uncontrollable fires in California.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prescribed burnings are necessary to reduce the risk of uncontrollable forest fires, Lomborg stated. \u201cIf we did prescribed burning, we could, in a few years, reduce the fire risk dramatically and actually get people\u2019s lives back to \u2014 pretty close \u2014 to normal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFires are mostly there because we\u2019ve had fire suppression for more than a hundred years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lomborg explained how California has used fire extinguishment in lieu of prescribed burns for over a century.<\/p>\n

\u201cFundamentally, we have suppressed fires for more than a hundred years,\u201d Lomborg said. \u201cThat obviously makes good sense that you\u2019d rather not have fires than fires, but what happens is you build up lots and lots of fuelwood that is basically going to give you much hotter, much fiercer fires later on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lomborg noted that California\u2019s suppression of forest fires and abdication of prescribed burns led to a build-up of dry kindling in the state\u2019s forests.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the 1950s to about 2000, California only saw about 250,000 acres of forest burn every year, so it was a dramatic reduction,\u201d Lomborg remarked. \u201cIt builds up all this fuelwood. There\u2019s now five times as much fuelwood in the under storage of most California forests. You can\u2019t keep that up. Eventually, these fires will break out, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re seeing now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lomborg said the average area consumed by forest fires over the past ten years in California over the last ten years \u201cis almost a million acres.\u201d He added, \u201cIt has fairly little to do with climate change, and it has almost everything to do with the fact that we haven\u2019t managed our forests well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t done prescribed burning; we haven\u2019t ensured that these fires won\u2019t burn out of control,\u201d Lomborg determined.<\/p>\n

Lomborg challenged claims that today\u2019s Golden State fires are \u201cunprecedented.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese fires are big, but we have to get a sense of proportion,\u201d Lomborg stated. \u201cWe have good statistics all the way back to before 1800, and back in the 1700s, California used to burn much much more than what it\u2019s doing right now. We estimate that it burned somewhere between four and 12 million acres \u2014 remember, the biggest burn of this year is 2.3 million acres \u2014 so more than twice as much and possibly even six times as much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. Forest Service describes controlled burns on its website. The agency explains, \u201cAfter many years of fire exclusion, an ecosystem that needs periodic fire becomes unhealthy. Trees are stressed by overcrowding; fire-dependent species disappear; and flammable fuels build up and become hazardous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMore prescribed fires mean fewer extreme wildfires,\u201d declares the U.S. Forest Service.<\/p>\n

Scientific American cited Daniel Swain, an assistant researcher at UCLA\u2019s Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, who claimed that \u201cclimate change\u201d is a driver of today\u2019s California wildfires. It also shared a competing view from Jon Keeley, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center.<\/p>\n

Keeley said, \u201cWe ought to be much more concerned with ignition sources than a one- to two-degree change in temperature.\u201d He echoed Lomborg\u2019s analysis in identifying California\u2019s focus on putting out forest fires for about a century instead of using controlled burning to remove flammable dead vegetation.<\/p>\n

Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor at Stanford University\u2019s School of Earth, Energy, and Environment Sciences told the CBC, \u201cWe now have very strong evidence from those years of research that global warming is, in fact, increasing the odds of unprecedented extremes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bjorn Lomborg: California Fires Mainly Caused by Century of Suppressing Controlled Burns Ongoing forest fires in California are mostly a function of poor forest management, particularly insufficient controlled burns to clear away accumulated fuelwood, explained Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center ……….. \u201cIt has fairly little to do with climate change, and it … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-econuts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59795,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59794\/revisions\/59795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}