Wildfires are a natural part of the system balancing. Prescribed wildfires are for humans, controlling the environment to their liking, or in some well-intentioned cases "protecting" an environment we have made vulnerable due to our own previous actions. Prescribed wildfires will no longer protect us, because global warming has turned everything to tinder. Unless we keep oil in the ground, the situation will become increasingly out of control.
Hi Zeke -- thanks for this excellent overview and I really the appreciate that you and Andrew are doing in using Substack as a platform to engage in context-based discussions of climate science and policy. I also read with appreciation an equally valuable context-focused overview by Roger Pielke Jr at his Substack drawing on the latest IPCC report and Canadian government datas on area burned etc. Where do you see the overlap and differences in how you and Roger view the linkages to climate change and approached trying to distilling these down into a few thousand words and points of emphasis? https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-783
Perhaps the referenced papers have answered this question, but as a climate modeler, I am curious:
- More than half the warming we expect to happen has already happened to date (1.2C)
- There is no "clear signal in area burned in Canada to date"
- Do the fire model simulations reproduce this past (lack of) trend?
- If so, presumably climate change increased fire risk but some other factors countered it. Analyzing model simulations should be able to identify these past countering factors
- If area burned is going to increase in the future, then these countering factors must become less important in the future (or there is some strong nonlinearity)
- It would be good to what the main countering factors factors and how they are expected to change with time
- A similar analogy in climate modeling is aerosols vs. greenhouse gases
It should be within the brief of climate scientists working for forest management agencies. And more generally they need to be central to mitigation investments
Is Canada looking at indigenous fire management? This is something that's been important in parts of Australia where the native species are fire-adapted and where high fuel loads from fire suppression are part of the problem.
This has two implications. a) The fire observations imply models in which more and better forest management and other mitigation measures will be cost effective. b) They add data points to ongoing modeling of climate change for the purpose of determining the costs effectiveness of measures to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Thank you for a good balanced summary.
Thanks Zeke... wonderful summary. -ss
Wildfires are a natural part of the system balancing. Prescribed wildfires are for humans, controlling the environment to their liking, or in some well-intentioned cases "protecting" an environment we have made vulnerable due to our own previous actions. Prescribed wildfires will no longer protect us, because global warming has turned everything to tinder. Unless we keep oil in the ground, the situation will become increasingly out of control.
Hi Zeke -- thanks for this excellent overview and I really the appreciate that you and Andrew are doing in using Substack as a platform to engage in context-based discussions of climate science and policy. I also read with appreciation an equally valuable context-focused overview by Roger Pielke Jr at his Substack drawing on the latest IPCC report and Canadian government datas on area burned etc. Where do you see the overlap and differences in how you and Roger view the linkages to climate change and approached trying to distilling these down into a few thousand words and points of emphasis? https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-783
Perhaps the referenced papers have answered this question, but as a climate modeler, I am curious:
- More than half the warming we expect to happen has already happened to date (1.2C)
- There is no "clear signal in area burned in Canada to date"
- Do the fire model simulations reproduce this past (lack of) trend?
- If so, presumably climate change increased fire risk but some other factors countered it. Analyzing model simulations should be able to identify these past countering factors
- If area burned is going to increase in the future, then these countering factors must become less important in the future (or there is some strong nonlinearity)
- It would be good to what the main countering factors factors and how they are expected to change with time
- A similar analogy in climate modeling is aerosols vs. greenhouse gases
It should be within the brief of climate scientists working for forest management agencies. And more generally they need to be central to mitigation investments
Is Canada looking at indigenous fire management? This is something that's been important in parts of Australia where the native species are fire-adapted and where high fuel loads from fire suppression are part of the problem.
This has two implications. a) The fire observations imply models in which more and better forest management and other mitigation measures will be cost effective. b) They add data points to ongoing modeling of climate change for the purpose of determining the costs effectiveness of measures to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations.