Thank you for the reply. I plan to re-read it a few times and go into details tomorrow. I appreciate the effort and will look through it.
Meanwhile, a few quicker responses:
> Regarding your comment on chopped down forests not being fire resistant - it’s actually the other way around. Non-existent trees and brush can’t burn.
True, but if we are trying to regrow a forest to capture the next round of resources & sequestration benefits - that area has to go from being a non-forest to a young forest. During that time it's very susceptible to fire. Even worse, if the area is being re-grown as tree farm, AFAIK it'll never become fire resistant.
Though, really the question is how do you continuously regrow trees and never have the area eventually burn and turn into a savannah? Given so much forests have been chopped down a few times since the 1800s in California. We are looking at maybe 2 to 4 rounds of trees being chopped down and regrown. Lots of younger forests create a component for larger forest fires.
> It’s why california (and other western states) keep catching on fire so badly, because logging has been so heavily restricted.
My understanding is fire suppression is more to blame. I'm curious where exactly our views differ & why.
For tinder box fires, I think it's a bit more complex than one factor & the combination of factors is not good. Essentially, forests were logged with impunity and at mass scale (still kinda true today) for a few hundred years, then in North America we started fire suppression on an industrial scale circa 1950. A lot of forest is young'ish and/or doesn't have the same fire resistance as what was before it - and combined with mass fire suppression & young'ish age -> it's a huge tinder box.
Though, you point to the lack of logging as the cause for the tinder box. To what extent would you say fire suppression has played a role in current western fires?
I'm a bit surprised we might disagree here, perhaps I'm ignorant how logging has kept the situation in check. My very (tersely stated) impression of things is essentially Europeans came, logged the crap out of the area, stopped letting the fires burn 70 years ago because we could do something about it and secondly there were then enough people in the area to care. Fast forward, the west coast is now very populated and the forests are kinda young and are regrowing in a full fire-suppression environment. Do you disagree with that (frank) assessment?
> In California’s climate, it requires cutting down a significant portion of trees and removing built up brush (or doing a controlled burn), or the whole thing turns into a mini-nuclear explosion waiting to go off.
I agree. Otherwise when a fire does comes through, it will potentially turn the area into a savannah (mini-nuclear explosion'esque). I've seen a few examples, it brings back memories. There certainly are forest fires, big ones, then even bigger ones that damage the forest, and then there are the ones in California that remove the forest..
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Again, thank you for digging up numbers & references. I want to go through those in a bit more detail before sharing any thoughts/questions