Thanks for the comments on my Roadless draft! I have been talking to people offline who have shared other concerns with me. I will have more to say when I come back from the Retiree Reunion in Missoula next week- I will be off next week.
Historical Perspective on Wildfire Smoke
Speaking of Missoula, I was at some kind of conference (Planning Rule?) in Missoula probably 15-20 years ago, and associates JR and PG and I couldn’t have our brewskis in the beer garden because the smoke was so thick. But back in the day fire was natural and we had to suck it up, so to speak.
“Let fires burn” article from 2017 (hasn’t aged so well..):
Scientists at the cutting edge of ecological research, Dr. Hanson among them, argue that the century-old American practice of suppressing wildfires has been nothing less than a calamity. They are calling for a new approach that basically involves letting backcountry fires burn across millions of acres.
In principle, the federal government accepted a version of this argument years ago, but in practice, fires are still routinely stamped out across much of the country. To the biologists, that has imperiled the plants and animals — hundreds of them, it turns out — that prefer to live in recently burned forests.
Human lives are at stake, too. Firefighters die, more than a dozen in some years, putting out fires that many scientists think should be allowed to burn. Conversely, a shift toward letting more fires rage is certain to raise fears about public safety in communities bordering forests.
Those pesky inhabitants… what’s wrong with them.. are they anti-science?
Scientists contend that if money were redirected from firefighting into projects like fireproofing homes, those communities could actually be made safer. But the politics of the shift would be difficult, at best.
In retrospect, it’s interesting that that article didn’t mention smoke at all.
But if we go farther back here’s an NYTimes article from 1999, apparently pre-climate change.
”The way the forests have been managed up to now can lead to more catastrophic fires than using a more rational approach,” said Michael Paparian, a Sierra Club representative, according to The Associated Press.
Dave Bischel, president of the California Forestry Association, which represents the timber industry, agreed that the forests needed thinning. But timber companies want the process to include more logging than the environmental groups support.
Environmentalists and loggers say the government should conduct more controlled burns and cutting to clear undergrowth that fuels wildfires. But government officials said the answer would not be simple.
”There’s no magic solution to the condition of the forests,” said Mr. Mathes, the Forest Service spokesman.
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Yesterday’s Times Piece
So yesterday, the Times moved on to describing (one) study published in Nature, apparently written by at least one USG employee but seemingly not available to us (NIH is working on this problem and the FS already makes its research available.)
The piece has a cool map of predictions for smoke between 2046 and 2055. I don’t want to rehash Patrick Brown’s critiques, but how can modeling take into account changes in vegetation from previous fires, new wildfire technologies and so on? I guess they would have to make assumptions or not consider them at all. Plus this is probably timed to coincide with policy discussions on the EPA endangerment finding.
I don’t like to be unduly critical.. but this is one of those.. “we made a great many assumptions about things and the results are really bad” papers.
From the abstract:
When monetized, climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the US 4,5. Our research suggests that the health impacts of climate-driven wildfire smoke could be among the most important and costly consequences of a warming climate in the US.
As if there weren’t enough assumptions, they had to add in economics (!) and apparently assumed that all wildfires are a consequence of climate change. Anyway, back to the Times article.
Pollution from fires, intensified by rising temperatures, is on track to become one of America’s deadliest climate disasters.
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Future deaths from wildfire smoke also depend on how humans decide to respond to climate change. The models don’t account for future changes to policies that could make air pollution worse, such as recent proposals to roll back air pollution regulations, or rescind the endangerment finding. On the other hand, they also do not anticipate ones that might mitigate wildfires or reduce exposure to smoke.
Strategies such as forest thinning, for example, might lessen the intensity of future blazes. Encouraging people to use air filters and wear masks during smoke events could help lessen resulting health problems, too. Because the data used in the study is based on current policies, Dr. Burke said, that means there’s room for improvement.
“These are projections. They are not what’s going to happen, necessarily,” he said. “But what happens is a choice, and so these don’t have to be an inevitability.”
I bolded the “decide to respond to climate change” because dealing with wildfires has predated and is not a subset of, “dealing with climate change.” If you or I were building a model, we might want to project fuel treatments, changes in wildfire technology, and we’d need to know the answer to this question that the Forest Service is looking at:
Plus estimate the proportion of prescribed, managed and indigenous fire into the future. But hey..
Anyway, another way of thinking about it would be “how can we protect people from wildfire smoke when there’s PF, MF and wild wildfires?” Which we would have regardless of climate change.
Wildfire and Safety Research at the Forest Service
Below is a nice summary of projects on Wildfire and Safety that FS R&D developed. Sadly I haven’t figured out how to copy these excellent round-ups with the links intact, but if you’re interested here’s a link to the same info with links that work. The Forest Service also makes all of its research available to the public for free.
