Comment by baxtr
21 hours ago
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.
It is centrists and deniers who are stopping us in implementing effective measures that would fight for human lives.
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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.
And you think the peatlands were natural? In France, in 1857, a stone's throw from Bordeaux?
It was already a huge product of human activity: the forest there was cut for firewood, great colds killed the rest in the XVIIe century and grazing sheeps kept it treeless. Pine was chosen because it is endemic and one of the few species able to grow on such poor soils, washed out by rain and sea salt.
You have to love all the people on this website giving advice on Europeans and Canadians on forest management, and that they should abandon any economic use of forests, while they see no problem with the rest of their economic choices fuelling global warming.
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