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California can either manage its forest better or watch them burn for another 200 years

California's Droughts and Fires



California's Droughts and FiresCalifornia baked in two droughts about 1100 years ago, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. It's important to note that this was long before there were SUVs or coal fired power plants. The findings suggest that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur.

Drought

The water levels dropped during these periods—as much as 50 feet in some cases. The droughts were not only much longer, they were far more severe than either the drought of 1928 to 1934, California's worst in modern times, or the more recent severe dry spell of 1987 to 1992. Since 2000, the longest duration of drought in California lasted 376 weeks beginning on December 27, 2011 and ending on March 5, 2019. Note that all of these droughts since 1928 have been considerably less than the really long droughts from earlier times. 1 All of this in an area that is 25% desert and these days has a population of 40 million.

Fires

In prehistoric California between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year. Between 1982 and 1998, California's agency land management burned on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this alone will lead to significant change. We live in a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres –an area about the size of Maine—to restabilize in terms of fire. 2 The fires these days are about frustration, about watching the West burn when you fully understand why it's burning—and understanding why it did not need to be this bad. The pattern is a form of insanity. We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. There's only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load, reports Elizabeth Weil. 2

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Long before climate change severely parched California, priming it to burn at a record pace, federal foresters made an inventory of trees in the southern Sierra Nevada. The year was 1911, and the goal of the fledgling US Forest Service was to document the amount of timber in the area. More than a century later, however, the historical data set proved invaluable to researchers with a far different purpose: assessing how much the forest and the inherent threat of fires within it, had evolved. Vegetation had grown far denser, a team from UC Berkeley and the Forest Service found in 2015. the number of trees per acre had doubled or tripled in some places. It wasn't a total surprise, since firefighters had spent decades trying to extinguish any blaze that might have otherwise thinned the forests. Though fire has long been a fixture of the landscape, so much so that Native American tribes would regularly burn places intentionally, state and federal officials in California did not embrace that practice in the 20th century. 3 Then an unsparing years-long drought raised the environmental stakes. In recent years, nearly 150 million trees died around the state as their roots delved fruitlessly for water and a devastating bark beetle infestation took hold. Now those trees, like so much else in the American West, are burning as California contends with a reckoning more than 100 years in the making. To better contain the risk of mega-fires going forward UC Berkeley professor Scott Stephens thinks California will need to drastically expand its prescribed burning and sustain the practice in perpetuity. Authorities are already coming around to Stephens' point of view. The state and federal government have inked a new partnership through which they will aim to treat 1 million acres of California forest annually, with intentional burns making up a key component of the regimen. 3 Governor Gavin Newsom said that he was pushing his administration to hasten the state's shift to cleaner energy, He also suggested the state's 2045 deadline to get all of its electricity from renewable sources may need to be moved up. He blames it all on global warming. This, in spite of the fact that he earlier admitted that the state had to 'sober up' about the fact that renewable energy sources had failed to provide enough power for the state at peak demand and needed 'backup' and 'insurance' from other sources. 4

Conclusion

California can either manage its forest better or watch them burn for another 200 years. As there were no SUVs or coal fired power plants 1,100 years ago, California may want to start thinking now about some serious forest management before nature takes her own devastating course. 5 It is time for California to wake up to reality about its wildfires and its renewable energy pursuits. Its renewable energy mandates will result in economic collapse and power failures unless the state changes its strategy by ensuring sufficient back-up power to deal with the intermittency of its renewable energy. The state also needs to allow utilities to secure the power lines and reduce fire hazards, rather than riding them to invest more and more money in trendy, but flawed renewable energy. Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden also needs to learn from this lesson since he is pursuing a national 'clean energy' standard by 2035 which is 10 years before California's 100 percent renewable standard. The only exception Biden is making is to include nuclear power, but nuclear plants are being shuttered in this country every year due to poor economics resulting from federal and state policies which force renewables into the system and wreak havoc with the 24/7 dependable power the nation's citizens have every right to expect. 6

References

  1. William K. Stevens, “Severe ancient droughts: a warning to California,” The New York Times, July 19, 1994
  2. Elizabeth Weil, “They know how to prevent megafires. Why won't anybody listen?”, propublica.org, August 28, 2020
  3. J. D. Morris, “Are climate change or poor forest management worsening California fires? Yes, sfchronicle.com, September 13, 2020
  4. Joel B. Pollak, “California Governor Gavin Newson: Time to sober up about green energy's flaws,” breitbart.com, August 17, 2020
  5. Steve Milloy, “New York Times debunks climate-caused California wildfires,” junkscience.com, September 11, 2020
  6. “California wildfires raise the risk of more rolling blackouts,” instituteforenergyresearch.org, September 15, 2020


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Jack Dini -- Bio and Archives

Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology.  He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.


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