Comment by Dibby053

You may be absolutely right about the OP, I cannot know.

Still, I believe it is important to highlight the elephant in the room first.

For example to your point: "I still found it interesting to kmow why this fire seems so bad compared to [...] before", I think it is important to state: "because global warming is getting worse over time". Not because pine trees, which have been around for a long time, and have never burned so badly.

The pine forests have been there for centuries, so it being pine is no explanation at all for why it's burning so badly now.

>By now, everyone knows about climate change. But I assume most didn’t know the fact about the pine trees in this area.

>Nowadays it’s much more about how we deal with climate change and not so much about the fact that there is human made climate change.

Well said!

The problem isn't who believes in global warming, the problem is a forest fire. It doesn't care if there are 0% or 100% believers. Moving the needle on that percentage has no effect on the problems we will face due to global warming.

Here and now it's possible for a small community or country to take actions that will help the next time there's a forest fire. Or a flood, or a drought, or a heat dome, or a blizzard where blizzards shouldn't be.

Such efforts should clearly be priority 1. A doctor dealing with a gunshot wound doesn't start by urging politicians to reduce crime rates, they start by stopping the bleeding.

> By now, everyone knows about climate change.

Not true, I have seen people deny it on HN recently.

And looking at other debates, yes it is necessary to reiterate the primary cause. Because centrists will absolutely use the lack of that reiteration to do the "well actually it is the pine trees" in two days.

"Aktchually, forests burn because wood is flammable" is not the "useful" fact you think it is.

Yes, pine is flammable. So what? Should we replace it with wood that doesn't burn? And grows on already very dry soil? Because what the "informative" OP hasn't told you is that pine growsso much there because other woods don't do as well.

> Blaming everything on global warming is extremely dangerous

I don't think it's blaming on global warming. Global warming is just making those problems a lot worse.

It is just the beginning, on average it will get worse every year. Every kilogram of CO2 we emit makes it worse, so it won't stop worsening until we reach zero emissions.

> a sensation that there's nothing we can do.

On the contrary, I think there too much we must do because of global warming. There is so much that we certainly won't be able to do it all, meaning that the situation will get "more complicated" anyway. The more we do, the more we preserve.

To make a comparison that stays in the theme: saying "we won't stop it so there is nothing we can do" is like saying "this burning tree is dead anyway, so there is no need to save the rest of the forest". The tree is dead, it won't come back. And we know for sure that many other trees will die. But we should fight to preserve as much as we can from the forest. The less we do, the more we lose. But we will lose a lot anyway, maybe just not everything (depending on how well we fight).

Hola!

While I think this is mostly correct, I don't think it's OK to downplay climate change as just a "blame target". These current and extreme wildfires result from hotter and drier conditions, too. That is a major reason. And yes, we can do something about it.

Also, I know that controlled burns, grazing and firebreaks are widely used today in Spain, they are not universally forbidden.

Sheep and slow growing trees of course don't get along well, you have to choose one or the other at least while the trees establish, which for oaks is measured in decades.

In Wales and Ireland we have the opposite problem, the sheep strip everything bare, the old trees die and the forests cannot regenerate.

And cats. Don't forget cats.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/22/europe/arson-cats-italy-w...

> The climate is not changing back, it's the new normal.

Climate won't get any "new normal" until we reach strictly zero emission.

As long as we emit CO2, climate will get worse. There is no new normal: every year it will get worse.

It doesn't invalidate your point though, that it cannot stay the same and we have to do something. I'm just nitpicking on the "new normal". There won't be a new normal until we stop emitting CO2, it will just get worse and worse.

And it does burn, but here are the history of fire:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendies_en_for%C3%AAt_de_Fon...

Notice how the last was worse by one or two orders of magnitude.

You can handwave all you want the this and the southwest forests are particularly flammable, but what you are pointing out are only "canaries in the coal mines": they are the first to burn, but other forests will follow suit if global warming continues.

>Everyone with any sense knows global warming will cause heatwaves and they increase the risk of fires, but nobody in France can do anything about it. Even if everyone in France would do everything they can to stop global warming starting tomorrow, it would change nothing. It wouldn't help even if they got all of the EU on board.

You are falling for the voting fallacy: "my vote had a miniscule effect on the final result, why should I vote?". The paradox is that at the end, if everyone thinks so, nobody votes.

See also: collective action problem.

Moreover, because the warming is global and the whole world needs to be part of the solution, we need all the governments of the world to agree to some universal plan of action. This is governments that have trouble agreeing on most things within their respective borders, let alone globally.

Small correction, but the area of the Fontainebleau forest where the main fire occurred doesn't have this balance : les Trois Pignons, as name says, has a much higher density of pine trees.

The current El Niño hasn't really had time to affect NW Europe yet, there's quite some lag there AIUI.

Absolutely not. I've spent nearly every summer in the last 30 years in that region and it never was like this; it also wasn't that warm.

Occasional fires, sure. But very clearly nothing approaching the current scale and frequency.

The last really big one in that region was in 2022; and there are currently not one but 2 parallel fires in the same forest.

Not shutting the discussion of course, but it's important to realise that in the early 80s, that was exceptional.

Now it will happen more and more every year, there is no stopping that trend.

Depending on the area that has always been the case, indeed.

In fact, in the most historically prone areas, the Mediterranean part of France, number of fires and surface area burnt have tended to decrease over time since the 1970s [1], which shows that being prepared works and this experience must now be used in more areas of the country.

[1] https://observatoire.foret.gouv.fr/themes/l-historique-des-f...

I am also French, I am also born in the early 80s and I can't understand how someone like you could have such an asinine take. This isn't of the same magnitude. Get out of "vibes" and burying your head in the sand and look at the total surface burnt, look at water levels in nappes phréatiques, look at temperature records and total days of canicule...

Well, Denmark is I believe a country very big on being seen as "environmentally friendly" and they thin trees, generally to restore habitats and increase diversity of species. What gives?

The best way to prevent forest fires is to cut all the trees. No forest means no forest fire, right?

The problem (as always) is that it is complicated.

We are living in a mass extinction right now (orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs), mostly because of habitat loss. It has nothing to do with the climate (of course the climate is making it worse, but we screwed the biodiversity before that).

Is thinning the trees and clearing the underbrush good for the biodiversity? Probably not. Is it good to reduce flammability? Probably yes.

But I don't think it is fair to say that those who care about biodiversity are obviously wrong because preserving the biodiversity make forest more flammable. If you think like this, the solution is to go live in a bunker. Many people find that attractive (just look at how many dream about living in a bunker on mars), but I don't.

Don't put this on the environmentalists when the simple explanation isn't short term cost effective to do this. If you need to put some big blanket blame, then blame capitalism. If nothing else because it has so far stopped all effective measure to stop the climate crisis.

The water was likely redirected for agricultural purposes and the farmers won't/can't surrender it on top of drought, if it's anything like the US. Would be real cool if we could make investments like this though.

Looking at what this group is slowly doing all over the world I don't think it is impossible tough but possible. https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth

Let it burn then?

From Le Monde:

> Some efforts have begun to diversify the Landes forest and to maintain or promote deciduous trees, particularly along the edges of plots. The major difficulty, according to foresters, is that very few species are able to grow in this region, where the sandy soil is very poor and very acidic (it is one of the poorest soils in Europe). Foresters describe the maritime pine as a "miracle species" in this regard.

> While other species can still grow, it is much more slowly and with greater difficulty. Radically transforming this vast forest, currently 80% dominated by maritime pines, therefore seems complicated, and there is also a significant economic stake involved in timber production in the region.