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800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

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Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#61

Post by amazingman »

remarkEon wrote: post #53
amazingman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that individuals behave wildly differently to the same stimuli, and therefore your belief that "revealed preferences" put the lie to stated beliefs is specious. Individual humans can believe that a broad ecological collapse is coming and still live their day to day lives in ignorance of this belief. Self-assess honestly and you'll find examples in your own life.

>Individual humans can believe that a broad ecological collapse is coming and still live their day to day lives in ignorance of this belief. This sentence is contradictory. How could one believe a particular thing, and then intentionally live in ignorance of this thing? >Self-assess honestly and you'll find examples in your own life. Okay. I did the assessment. I found that when I have deeply held beliefs I live my l…

You've smuggled in a "deeply held" motte to move your goal posts. Seems like this conversation is over.

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#62

Post by alexk307 »

pvaldes wrote: post #55
alexk307 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down You cannot possibly know this, you do not have accurate records of forrest fires that occurred 800+ years before Canada was even founded. Wildfires abide by power law distributions [1][2] meaning that enormous outliers like the one in 2023 (and maybe even this year) are not unexpected with a long fat t…

> do not have accurate records of forest fires that occurred 800+ years before In fact we have incomplete, but detailed, records since 7000 years ago. The remains of 2000 Yo trunks can be found on swamps and peat bogs. Ancient wildfires left marks on the grow rings, that had been read for scientists since generations. Dendrochronology and dendroclimatology, two entire science fields, had been created around this.

Right - and that data does not suggest anything close to what OP was saying.

[1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#63

Post by remarkEon »

defrost wrote: post #60
remarkEon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial claim here was that these fires are the result of political leadership in my country deciding to not nuke the economy to make a number on a chart go down, or at least stabilize. I'm not going to argue the finer points of how much carbon release actually matters, because I think the right way to think about it is "increasing carbon release in atmosphere is not a good idea". I am in fact not arguing against…

> Canada's inability to do basic forest fire prevention. Australian here. What makes you think the "forest fire prevention" methods you outlined upthread are "basic"? Have they ever been performed at the scale required in the history of European occupation of North America? Normally dry lightening doesn't cause so many strikes to spark, nor do sparked fires normally spread so far and fast. Regardless of cause there a…

>Australian here. What makes you think the "forest fire prevention" methods you outlined upthread are "basic"?

American here. They are basic where I come from (the midwest). We learned about them as children. Australians used to have a similar sense of adventure and appetite for what would otherwise be considered difficult projects.

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#64

Post by remarkEon »

amazingman wrote: post #61
remarkEon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Individual humans can believe that a broad ecological collapse is coming and still live their day to day lives in ignorance of this belief. This sentence is contradictory. How could one believe a particular thing, and then intentionally live in ignorance of this thing? >Self-assess honestly and you'll find examples in your own life. Okay. I did the assessment. I found that when I have deeply held beliefs I live my l…

You've smuggled in a "deeply held" motte to move your goal posts. Seems like this conversation is over.

Your point appears to be that my deeply held belief is more reasonably attainable than as an activity someone can engage in that what should result from "I believe the world is going to end unless all global economies cease activity in order to drop carbon emissions to zero". In which case, yes I agree and the conversation is over.

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#65

Post by aurelius_v »

alexk307 wrote: post #62
pvaldes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do not have accurate records of forest fires that occurred 800+ years before In fact we have incomplete, but detailed, records since 7000 years ago. The remains of 2000 Yo trunks can be found on swamps and peat bogs. Ancient wildfires left marks on the grow rings, that had been read for scientists since generations. Dendrochronology and dendroclimatology, two entire science fields, had been created around this.

Right - and that data does not suggest anything close to what OP was saying. [1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

They actually do. You just don't know how to read the data properly.

Here are some papers that might help you understand it better:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1305069110 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38934256/

BTW, the researcher you quoted, Justin Waito, explicitly warns against reading his historical data to mean modern fires are normal. He concluded that modern temperature increases are driving fire frequency to levels higher than anything seen in the last two millennia. Here is one of his papers on that:

https://winnspace.uwinnipeg.ca/handle/10680/1749

You can believe the consensus of the vast majority of scientists (99%) who have collectively spent 10's of millions of hours researching this space, or you can pretend you know better.

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