My understanding is it definitely helps versus not having had them! But that historically the amount burned each year was very, very large, so I’m not sure if we actually better off next year than this year, or only less worse off than we could have been.
For frame of reference, looks like ~3 million acres burned this year, and in the past decade it’s ranged from half a million to 1.5 million or so.
So, while this is more than usual, and probably we’ll regress to the mean a bit anyway, it’s not like this year was so much more that we should expect it to dramatically change future years.
It’s been going up significantly over time—the trend-line goes from about 500k acres in 2000 to 1.5M acres in 2020, making me doubt a regression to the mean. Even excluding 2020, the trend-line goes from less than 500k acres in 2000 to about 1.1M acres in 2019. I’m expecting more years like this one in the future, although hopefully not quite as bad.
It’s worth noting that the R-squared value for a linear trend-line for 2000-2019 data has R2=0.07 so a constant prediction of 750k acres would only be marginally less accurate. (I think your excluding 2020 graph also excludes 2019 but the story doesn’t change much either way)
It looks like up until 2016 everything was fairly constant and since then 3 out of 4 years have been bad.
Are the figures for the past decade the total burned, the planned burn or just the wild burn?
I ask because I read something, not closely at all, sometime in the past week or so, that seemed to be saying for the past decade environmental policies and regulators have been preventing so much of the planned burn the west has a serious problem Based on that one might think that rather than some mild years coming up more of the same, and even more of that, might be more likely.
For those living there I just say “Hope that is wrong!”
I’ve heard mixed things about the “preventing the burn” – my current very very vague correct-me-if-I’m-wrong understanding is that “people actively preventing burns” was a 20th century thing, and nowadays there’s some kind of consensus of “okay we need to do more planned burns”, but, it’s sort of intrinsically tricky how to cause that or incentivize it. (because, it is still totally possible for people doing controlled burns to fuck up and cause major damage, and it’s some combination of ‘politically unpalatable’ and possibly also ‘actually a bad idea’ to just encourage people to burn things willy nilly)
Per the Wikipedia page this year more than 3% of the state has burned (and it’s continuing to burn), and thus a good deal more than 3% of the forestable land area has burned. Unless all the forests burned every 20-30 years, this would suggest that this year was significantly more than the historic average. Given that the past decade has averaged about 1 million acres, and the state is about 100 million acres, and not all the state is able to be forested, I’d guess that the last decade’s averages have been at least around the historic average if not more.
I think it’s the other way around: If your forest is burning every 20 years then the fire is relatively minor. There’s much less accumulated fuel so it won’t burn as hot or be as destructive as we see now.
Now that so much of California has burned, does that mean we’re in good shape for a few years of mild fire seasons?
My understanding is it definitely helps versus not having had them! But that historically the amount burned each year was very, very large, so I’m not sure if we actually better off next year than this year, or only less worse off than we could have been.
For frame of reference, looks like ~3 million acres burned this year, and in the past decade it’s ranged from half a million to 1.5 million or so.
So, while this is more than usual, and probably we’ll regress to the mean a bit anyway, it’s not like this year was so much more that we should expect it to dramatically change future years.
Looking at the acres of forest burned over the last twenty years:
It’s been going up significantly over time—the trend-line goes from about 500k acres in 2000 to 1.5M acres in 2020, making me doubt a regression to the mean. Even excluding 2020, the trend-line goes from less than 500k acres in 2000 to about 1.1M acres in 2019. I’m expecting more years like this one in the future, although hopefully not quite as bad.
(data from Wikipedia)
It’s worth noting that the R-squared value for a linear trend-line for 2000-2019 data has R2=0.07 so a constant prediction of 750k acres would only be marginally less accurate. (I think your excluding 2020 graph also excludes 2019 but the story doesn’t change much either way)
It looks like up until 2016 everything was fairly constant and since then 3 out of 4 years have been bad.
Hm, when I was making the excluding-2020 graph I was intending to include 2019 as well, but it might have been taken out accidentally.
Are the figures for the past decade the total burned, the planned burn or just the wild burn?
I ask because I read something, not closely at all, sometime in the past week or so, that seemed to be saying for the past decade environmental policies and regulators have been preventing so much of the planned burn the west has a serious problem Based on that one might think that rather than some mild years coming up more of the same, and even more of that, might be more likely.
For those living there I just say “Hope that is wrong!”
I was going off wikipedia California Wildfires (search for “Post-2000”)
I’ve heard mixed things about the “preventing the burn” – my current very very vague correct-me-if-I’m-wrong understanding is that “people actively preventing burns” was a 20th century thing, and nowadays there’s some kind of consensus of “okay we need to do more planned burns”, but, it’s sort of intrinsically tricky how to cause that or incentivize it. (because, it is still totally possible for people doing controlled burns to fuck up and cause major damage, and it’s some combination of ‘politically unpalatable’ and possibly also ‘actually a bad idea’ to just encourage people to burn things willy nilly)
Per the Wikipedia page this year more than 3% of the state has burned (and it’s continuing to burn), and thus a good deal more than 3% of the forestable land area has burned. Unless all the forests burned every 20-30 years, this would suggest that this year was significantly more than the historic average. Given that the past decade has averaged about 1 million acres, and the state is about 100 million acres, and not all the state is able to be forested, I’d guess that the last decade’s averages have been at least around the historic average if not more.
This Wikipedia page says the pre-1800 average was 4.4 million acres. So it looks like burning every 20 years was typical for a California forest.
Huh wild. I guess I have heard about redwood trees surviving forest fires, so that makes some sense, but man those’d be some big fires.
I think it’s the other way around: If your forest is burning every 20 years then the fire is relatively minor. There’s much less accumulated fuel so it won’t burn as hot or be as destructive as we see now.
That makes more sense—there would be more land on fire, but the fires would be weak fires, not the destructive fires that we’re getting now.