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California Wildfires- a climate bellwether?

Threegoofs

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The causes of the wildfires in California are very complex, and climate change probably plays a background role, although, much like other extreme weather events, one can’t say climate change directly caused a particular fire or even a particular bad or good year for fires.

It’s a long term issue, and one that deniers love to pretend doesn’t exist.

But here’s a nice signal of what is going to come in the US from climate change. Insurance companies are going to assess risks more carefully and just stop insuring properties.

Allstate is a company that has been pretty clear about the increased risks due to climate change.

Climate Change – Allstate

And now, it looks like they’re taking action- just simply not insuring people.

So here you go folks- the consequences of climate change on your pocketbook, which will soon be made much worse by climate denial.

Reality check below:

 

Not surprising. Insurance companies as well as wildland fire organizations have been preaching Firewise. In many areas politicians and homeowners in fire prone areas have ignored the warnings.
 

It's happening, and it's gonna snowball. 'Course, every step down the road will be deniable and changes that should take many centuries will be called normal.
 
I know an insurance company who sent a letter to a policy holder and stated you will not be renewed unless you mitigate the following items on your property. Basically it was saying Firewise your property and home and we will issue a policy. If not, sorry. The home was not in CA but in AZ.
 



One for sure mitigation would be to replace a wood-shake roof with tile. Forget "fireproof" treatment.
 
There are trees and shrubs in California that need fire to reproduce. The fire burns away the plant's competition, while the plant's seed have evolved to survive a fire.

That tells you something about California.

Look up the knobcone pine for example. It has pine cones big enough to kill a man when they fall, the cones are covered in pitch and during a fire drop from the tree and bounce down the hills spreading fire as they go. After the cones are burned they open up a day or two later and release it's seeds.

The increase in fires comes from fuel piling up. When there's enough fuel, dead branches, etc, a fire is sure to start. The longer the span between fires, the more fuel builds up.

They should control burn it once ever other year or so.
 
It is not new, I have lived here since 1962 and these fires are a yearly occurrence. Nothing to do with climate change, it is poor land management. Cut a twig in the forest and you will be fined, no one clears out the dead brush. The loss of homes is because every year they build homes deeper into known fire areas, many even rebuild a burned down home in the same spot, maybe they think everything has already burned away but, after the rains new brush sprouts all over the burned out areas and the cycle repeats the following summer. Like hurricanes on the southern east coast and tornados in the Midwest, it's a given to happen.
 
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[h=1]California Wildfires, Climate Change, and the Hot-Dry-Windy Fire Weather Index[/h][FONT=&quot]Reposted from Dr Roy Spencers Blog California Wildfires, Climate Change, and the Hot-Dry-Windy Fire Weather Index November 1st, 2019 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. Summer and early Fall are fire season in California. It has always been this way. Most summers experience virtually no precipitation over much of California, which means that the vegetation…
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1 day ago November 3, 2019 in Wildfires.
 
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[h=1]Here’s How State Regulators Played A Role In California’s Rolling Blackouts, Wildfires[/h][FONT=&quot]REUTERS/Jessica Orellana Chris White Tech Reporter November 02, 2019 7:34 PM ET California Gov. Gavin Newsom railed against the state’s public utility company for blacking out large portions of the state, but some experts say regulators are partially to blame. Regulators in the state are too preoccupied with solar panels, climate change and keeping customers’…
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1 day ago November 3, 2019 in Wildfires.
 

Roy Spencer.. the guy who believes Jesus will not let wildfires get too bad.
 
Yup before the invention of climate change/ global warming we were doing just fine .... and still are :thumbs:
 

I live in the Mountain West, and I directly witnessed the incredible Waldo Canyon fire outside Colorado Springs. I watched from a distance as one match, after another ignited on the mountain side - actually it looked like matches - it was pine trees. Yes, the West has always had wildfires. There are actually fewer fires in the US, but the acreage burned is much greater. That tells you that the fires are getting harder and harder to control. It is a simple fact that Climate Change extends the dry season. Also, temperatures in the West have risen more than the the East or Central US. These higher temperatures also cause more drying.

 
Why Worse Wildfires? Part 2

Guest post by Jim Steele, from What’s Natural? column published in Pacifica Tribune, December 4, 2019 Why Worse Wildfires? Part 2 Figure 1 Managing forest ground fuels Why worse wildfires? The short answer is more humans cause more wildfire ignitions in altered landscapes. Since 1970, California’s population doubled, adding 20 million people. As more human…
Continue reading →

Why worse wildfires? The short answer is more humans cause more wildfire ignitions in altered landscapes. Since 1970, California’s population doubled, adding 20 million people. As more human habitat was developed, the increasingly disturbed landscape quickly became covered in easily ignitable invasive grasses (see part 1). To protect human habitat, fires were suppressed and ground fuels increased. Development also expanded a vulnerable electric grid. Furthermore, more people increased the probability of careless fires and more innocent accidents. And sadly, a larger population added more arsonists.

During a typically warm and dry July day, a rancher was innocently driving a stake into the ground to plug a wasp’s nest. Surrounded by dry grass, the hammer’s spark ignited a devastating inferno named the Ranch Fire. Despite sensationalist’s hype, global warming had not made the grass drier. Grass becomes highly combustible in just a few hours of dry weather. And like most of northern California, there has been no warming trend for maximum summertime tempertures. Based on Western Regional Climate Center data, maximum summer temperatures in the Mendocino area had cooled by 3°F since the 1930s. The rapidly spreading Ranch Fire soon merged with a different fire to form the Mendocino Complex Fire, California’s largest documented fire. . . .

 
It kind of helps to see the rest of the graph.

The actual data source is,
National Interagency Fire Center
Both the number of fires and the area burned has dropped since the 1930's and 1940's.
Some quick numbers, the decade average area burned for 1926 to 1935 was 41.46 million acres
the decade average for 2010 to 2019 was 6.84 million acres.
 
Sorry, NY Times, Forests Are Expanding, Not Shrinking

[FONT=Muli !important]PLANT LIFE SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

[/FONT]Showing up among the top Google News results today under “climate change” is a letter published by the New York Times titled, “Protecting Forests From Climate Change.” The subtitle of the Times letter is, “A conservationist argues for a more proactive approach in the face of decline.” The problem is, forests are not declining. As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise and the climate warms, objective data show forests are expanding, not shrinking.
The letter, written by Jad Daley, president of the activist group American Forests, claims “climate change is fueling our wildfire crisis” and that “management [is needed] to make existing forests more climate resilient, and quickly replant forests that have been lost.”
Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires shows that the annual amount of land typically burned by wildfires in recent decades is less than one quarter what was typically the case during the first half of the 20th century. So much for Daley’s claim of a “wildfire crisis.”
Also, there has been no “decline” or net loss in forest lands during recent decades, despite the false claims of Daley and the Times. The percentage of U.S. land covered by forests bottomed out in 1920. Substantially aided by the transformation of a wood-fired energy economy to a coal-fired energy economy, pressures on forests have declined even as the U.S. population more than tripled since 1920. The U.S. federal government reports “Forest area has been relatively stable since 1910, although the population has more than tripled since then.”. . . .
 

Allstate is actually a pretty good company, but like all insurance companies they often need to re balance their risk exposure as conditions change. If you have been with Allstate for decades with no claims, they generally will keep your policy. But if you are only with them for a short time, or have had other claims in the past... well, it is a different situation. I have a family member who owns a home in a wooded high fire risk area in California who has been with Allstate for 40 years and they have told him they are willing to renew his policy. But if he ever leaves they will not write a new policy; they aren't writing any new policies right now in his area either. The worst thing about that is that if you are selling your home mortgage companies require fire insurance. In an area where companies won't write policies, any buyers of your house need to be cash buyers.

My advice when it comes to homeowners insurance is find reputable company and stick with them. People who jump around every few years looking to save a few bucks aren't viewed the same way by insurance companies. Sometimes the company offering the cheapest deals aren't the best.
 
They need to do more controlled burning in non fire season to create fire breaks.
 

Yes the extreme weather events that the scientists warned about are now starting to become reality.

"Right on the heels of arguably the West Coast's most intense heat wave in modern history comes the most ferocious flare-up of catastrophic wildfires in recent memory. Meanwhile, just a few hundred miles east, a 60-degree temperature drop over just 18 hours in Wyoming and Colorado was accompanied by an extremely rare late-summer dumping of up to 2 feet of snow.


It's not coincidence, it's climate change.

These kinds of dystopian weather events, happening often at the same time, are exactly what scientists have been warning about for decades. While extreme weather is a part of the natural cycle, the recent uptick in the ferocity and frequency of these extremes, scientists say, is evidence of an acceleration of climate impacts, some of which were underestimated by climate computer models."

Wildfires and weather extremes: It's not coincidence, it's climate change - CBS News
 
[h=2]They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?[/h]
The sitation in California is just like the one in Australia
Tim Ingalsbee has been fighting fires or trying to prevent them since 1980. He founded Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
[h=3]They know how to prevent megafires[/h]Elizabeth Weil, ProRepublica
So what’s it like? “It’s just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said. “Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”
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.
This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. 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.”
[h=4]Modern Californians are burning 0.1% of what indigenous California’s used to do:[/h]Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers 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 with 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.
..is there is any meaningful scientific dissent about controlled burns? \
“None that I know of.”
The incentives are all wrong. There is a risk in doing cool burns, but no immediate risk in foregoing them. And among other things, fires are big business. Cal Fire may spend $1 billion this year. Full time Firefighters earn $148,000 a year.
A lot of the money though, goes on late afternoon planes dumping fire retardant to save a few wild trees:
Keep reading →
 
I heard this morning that 10% of the residents of Oregon have been evacuated due to wildfires there as well. Isn't Oregon the state where it's so damp and rainy that people grow mold between their toes?
 
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