Comment by reco98gg
1 day ago
The main reason the forest is burning is global warming. There were 3 punishing heatwaves before the fire, it was just a matter of time.
A part of the Fontainebleau forest, much more north, no pine trees, went in smoke earlier. Forests are burning near Madrid.
It may make some people feel better to think that it is an isolated, local problem, but unfortunately global warming is the main culprit and we at least need to acknowledge it.
Article explaining when pine tree forest resist well or not to fire. https://www.sudouest.fr/faits-divers/incendies/incendies-en-...
I don't think the person you're responding to was trying to deny global warming being a factor. I think they're just explaining why this fire is so bad compared to other fires we have seen in France before.
I know global warming plays a major role in this, but I still found it interesting to know why this fire seems so bad.
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.
> Not because pine trees, which have been around for a long time, and have never burned so badly.
Are you sure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Landes_forest_fire
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The elephant in the room is that many of those fires are criminal and that the French government has arbitrated budget restrictions against investing in fire-fighting equipment, especially planes.
It so happens that the current fire near Bordeaux is roughy in the same area as the historic fire of 1949 in which 82 people died (and currently still smaller, hopefully it will stay that way) [1], as someone else already mentioned.
Wildfires in Fontainebleau are not new, either, even if this year's one it is historically large. First laws against fires in the in forest and obligation of inhabitants to help in case of fire date from the 14th century [2].
Yes warming trends do not help and increase risk (hence need to invest in equipment and prevention) but there is also fabricated drama and lack of perspective, which are unfortunately how everything is reported nowadays.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendie_de_1949_dans_la_for%C...
[2] https://www.fontainebleau-photo.fr/2013/08/les-incendies-de-...
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And global warming reached a critical point of worseness specifically in Landes & Médoc?
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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.
I come from the Mediterranean region and locally we know many explanations for that.
Many of those pine forests are relatively new. Pine trees burn frequently, around every 20-30 years. In the past they used to be mixed with many other original trees, but during the recent century reforestation, pines were planted as the single tree species, making fires more prone to happen and more easily to spread.
In the past, way more population lived next to the forests, where lumber used to be part of their income, so trees were frequently cut, forests maintained and shepherds would bring their sheep to feed from forest lower plants. All of that is gone.
In the past, locals used to be able to build firewalls, clean forests and fight fire with fire (provoking small controlled wildfires to stop the big ones). Green policies forbid those actions nowadays.
Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%.
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They've actually been there for less than two centuries, just to be pedantic.
It's not, but the original comment never claimed that it was.
There have been 4 or 5 pretty massive wildfires in France that I can remember in the last 5 years, but this is the first time they've had to deal with pyrocumulonimbus caused by a wildfire. Global warming was likely a contributing factor for all of those fires, but global warming alone doesn't explain why this one is different. The first comment about the pine isn't answering "why is this happening now?", it answers the question, "why is this fire so much worse?"
Decades ago i was a big wall rock climber. We would often see old photos of mountains and cliffs and remark "where are the trees?" Areas we knew to be covered in forrest were bare only a century ago. This wasnt logging (climbing areas are too rugged to be logged bare.) There were just fewer trees. The general assumption was CO2. The combination of longer growing seasons and more plant food (co2) may mean there are simply more trees.
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But one pine forest in France has burned badly in the past as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Landes_forest_fire
Did you check for forest fires in the past?
You’re both right.
However OPs post is more useful than yours.
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.
>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.
It's not a single source problem anyway. There are many contributing factors, some are probably more important than others.
The most important thing is knowing what can be done in the short to medium term locally to improve the situation. If you tell the people living near those forests they need to fix global warming, you're not going anywhere. Can they monitor the forest beds better, do some preventive measures to limit the propagation of fires when they happen? Probably!
Unless you're on a major international forum or you have proper global reach and are a trendsetter, complaining about the obvious global warming isn't going to do much. And even if it's not obvious to some other people, you're not going to change their mind anyway on a HN discussion.
For me, it is more important to fight for human lives than fighting centrists or deniers tbh. You have to pick your battles.
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Some people will deny water is wet. Reiterating
“Centrists” (whatever that means) aren’t denying climate change.
Even if 99% of America accepts climate change that’s still 350,000 that don’t, and there’s a good chance many deniers are just doing it for the lolz.
The world was unwilling to enact the changes that were required. The mitigations of the damage to both the human and natural world are required now, and there’s lots of discussion about that. Not least what happens when a nuclear power of 1.5 billion people reaches a wet bulb temperature high enough to start killing tens of millions.
"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.
> Yes, pine is flammable. So what? Should we replace it with wood that doesn't burn?
Different trees react differently to fire. The forest fires of (e.g.) the American west are different than the forest fires in Canada:
> The forest-mismanagement argument was, in fairness, based on real evidence from some regions. In the frequent-fire dry forests of the western US that are dominated by ponderosa pine and mixed conifers the natural fire regime is low-to-moderate intensity surface fire returning every 5 to 30 years, historically stoked in part by Indigenous burning. A century of fire exclusion in those forests really did remove that frequent fire, let stands grow denser and more continuous, and build up a “fire deficit” that raises the odds of severe fire (Hagmann et al. 2021). And in that setting, fuel treatments work: Prichard et al. (2021) find wide agreement that mechanical thinning combined with prescribed burning measurably reduces subsequent fire severity. If you’re arguing about the Sierra Nevada, the management story is as important if not more important than the climate one.
> The problem is that the Canadian boreal is not the Sierra Nevada. It burns in infrequent, high-intensity, stand-replacing crown fires that kill the whole stand on natural fire cycles measured in many decades to centuries (commonly a century or more, and two centuries or longer in the east), not 5 to 30 years. It is, ecologically speaking, supposed to burn this way; black spruce is practically built for it. Fire in this system was never the gentle recurring ground-clearing that suppression interrupted in California. And the burning is astonishingly concentrated: across the boreal, something like 3% of fires account for about 97% of the area burned. This is not a landscape full of many small fires that “used to clean out the fuel.” Rather, its a landscape that waits, and then burns catastrophically under extreme weather.
* https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/canadas-boreal-wildfires-a...
> 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.
Except the entire forest is 'artificial' in that Napoleon III ordered the draining of the peatlands to create said forest in the first place. Perhaps actually having it as a forest should be reconsidered.
* https://globalpeatlands.org/zombiefiresareravagingpeatlandsi...
The forest was created for industrial purposes and so pine was probably chosen as it grew faster and that's what builders wanted, but is that what want we now? Perhaps the fact that pine grows best there shouldn't be considered at such a high priority, and that reducing the mono-culture, even if it is not "optimal" for growth, be bumped up in priority.
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Blaming everything on global warming is extremely dangerous. It fails to address many other reasons why we are experiencing fires and creates an easy to blame enemy and a sensation that there's nothing we can do.
We should really go way deeper than just blaming everything on an increase of temperatures, which nevertheless is actually happening.
We, locals, have been warning already for decades of the increase of fires due to an accumulation of reasons, which I have actually described already in another message down below but I can summarize here.
* Forest mass has actually increased a lot during the last decades, Spain has now around 50% more forest mass than in the 1970s.
* Part of the increased mass has to do with reforestation efforts done by governments happening since last half of last century, which basically planted many forests using pine varieties which grow very quickly but also burn quickly (Pines are biologically design to burn with their flammable design and dried needles, that's their feature).
* Historical local forest were composed of many varieties of trees, including oaks, holm oaks, poplar, which grow slowly, are way less prone to burn, and regrow again after a fire. Those varieties were never used in any reforestation efforts, which has resulted in many new forests being extremely prone to burn quickly
* Population has shifted enormously towards big cities, abandoning little villages where forests were part of their style of life. Lumber was part of their economical income, which resulted in continuous care of those forests and efforts in preservation. There are still some communities like that in some areas of Spain, and their forests have the lowest rate of wildfires in the whole country.
* Many techniques like firebreaks, counter-fires, low intensity burning to clear crop stubble, dry brush, and old vegetation to regenerate fresh grass for livestock and prepare fields are now forbidden, again increasing the risk and extension of wildfires
* Forest Grazing is also nowadays completely forbidden. Sheep used to roam everywhere in the country, consuming many burning-prone vegetation, reducing also the risk of wildfires.
But even despite all of that, countries like Spain for example, have nowadays the lowest proportion of burnt forest since the last 50 years.
> 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...
> Le sujet, c’est l’aridification du milieu. Pour revenir à cet incendie, ce n’est pas un problème de culture, mais de climat.
A bit of a distinction without a difference. The climate is not changing back, it's the new normal. In that climate, this particular kind of agriculture (huge pine monocultures) has become a problem.
It breaks my heart to say this, I've spent nearly all my childhood summers in my family's summer house down there. This year, I left just a few days before the evacuation order would have come.
It's going to be burning every year now and if we want to be safe there, the forest can't stay the same.
> 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.
To add to your point, it's also worthwhile to mention that there are stakeholders against solving the climate crisis of global warming (besides the usual suspects like producers of non-renewables like oil companies): some countries benefit from the climate change like the US and Mexico (they get higher agricultural yields IIRC) [0].
[0]: https://youtu.be/eRoU3whzX_Q?t=450
ETA: clarification
Agree about global warming.
However, Fontainebleau forest has many pine trees.
In fact there is an invasive caterpillar there that lives in pine trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_processionary
The caterpillars are also a consequence of warming.
Can confirm from my own experience that Fontainebleau forest is partly pine forests (40% according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Fontainebleau#Fauna,...).
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.
>The main reason the forest is burning is global warming.
I get where you're coming from but I don't think this is helpful.
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.
What the people of France can do is demand more resources for fire protection, build air conditioned locations for the poor and elderly, plant trees for shade and so on.
This can be done immediately and will actually help. It also engages everyone, even a climate denier can get onboard with fighting fires and having shelter for heat.
If we stop at "it's the global warming", the response is either apathy or policies. We should prioritize things that will help right now.
>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.
>You are falling for the voting fallacy
>See also: collective action problem.
I think you misread me - I'm not saying "Don't try to stop global warming", I'm saying "Don't focus on global warming when there is a forest fire".
The nation of France has a decent chance of preventing forest fires within their borders, but it won't happen by subsidizing electric cars or buying carbon credits. It will happen by adding firefighters, fire trucks, better training and such.
I'm not saying one thing has to exclude the other, but in this case they are competing for some of the same money.
Carbon credits and big conferences to discuss Paris agreements could pay for a *lot* of firefighters.
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.
> A part of the Fontainebleau forest, much more north, no pine trees, went in smoke earlier. Forests are burning near Madrid.
Small correction, but Fontainebleau is a fairly mixed forest including 20-30% pine.
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.
There’s also a significant amount of pretty sudden local warning in the North Atlantic region because of the sudden removal of sulphur emissions from ships a few years ago (thanks, IMO…).
And on top of that it’s El Niño.
Edit: Before anyone misconstrues what I'm saying: no, I'm not denying global warming. I'm just saying this is why this summer in particular was always likely to be a hot one in Europe.
And going forwards the sulphur thing has most likely caused a step change from temperatures in Europe before Covid, despite underlying warming continuing at the same rate
The current El Niño hasn't really had time to affect NW Europe yet, there's quite some lag there AIUI.
We have these fires in france since I was born in early 80s. As far as I remember we had them almost every year. Nothing new about it. Doesn't say that global warming doesn't exist. But to shut of any discussion because of global warming is just wrong
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...
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Regardless of your view on global warming, what's also vitally important is we don't do proper forest management anymore.
We used to thin the trees and clear the underbrush, which drastically reduces flammability and the ability for forest fires to rapidly spread.
But that's not seen as "environmentally friendly" these days.
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.
And in other areas, e.g. Canada, "cost prohibitive" is underselling the magnitude of the logistical task of doing anything to the overwhelming majority of boreal forests. There's just so much forest, and no way to access most of it, that it's effectively impossible to do any forest management or anything about most fires. (Most fires don't come near population centres, so nothing need be done about them.)
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> blame capitalism. If nothing else because it has so far stopped all effective measure to stop the climate crisis.
Growth-driven ecological harm isn’t unique to capitalism.
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