[Randito]

[Ski]

[Ski]

Secretary Zinke Says Climate Change Is Not Responsible for California Wildfires, Blames Environmentalists Because, you know... Ryan Zinke said so.

[Chief Joseph]

Lol...^...no kidding. I believe that Global Warming is real, my question is, does human activity cause it for the most part or is it just the Earth going through changes? The Ice Age was obviously a huge global event and mankind had nothing to do with that.

[Jake Neiffer]

Despite what we're hearing from the media there's a lot of evidence that fire severity and occurrence are not actually increasing. Here's one example paper that gives a good summary: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1696/20150345

[Ski]

That's not making a lot of sense when looking at their graphic (Fig. 3) here Secondly, the paper is looking at wildfire globally, including Mediterranean Europe and Australia, two completely different places with completely different ecosystems and landscape management histories than the Western US. Third, this paper is taking a rather narrow view insofar as the time period studied, which seems to exclude the very recent past; the last decade during which wildfire events in the western US have unquestionably become more destructive in terms of inflicting permanent damage to soils. Granted, in the pre-Columbian era, aboriginal tribes used fire as a landscape management tool on a scale which to the unknowing would be unfathomable. I have pointed this out innumerable times on this site. Those practices stopped as the western US was settled by white Europeans, for the most part ending just after the turn of the 20th Century. I don't base many statements about fire on what I get from "the media", but rather credible sources like Washington State Department of Natural Resources, the National Forest Service, and statements made and articles written by degreed professionals in the field of forest management. What they are telling us is that there are more acres being burned currently than in past decades, and that the severity of the fires during the last couple of decades is causing more permanent damage than fires of the past (in some cases exceeding the damage sustained by pre-Columbian era fire events.) I'm not sure if your post was in response to mine above where I cited the article about Zinke's ill-informed statement to the press, but in any case it should be noted that there is no panacea for the issue of wildfire events in the western US. Suggesting that logging everything is going to take care of the issue is delusional; there aren't enough fallers trained or mills operating to have much of an effect over the short term; the inventory of standing timber exceeds our current ability to process it in short order. While commercial thinning operations have proven to be effective, they are costly and time-consuming, and Congressional appropriations for those activities have been inadequate. (The cited reason for the large fire a few years ago near Yosemite.) Moreover, they can only address a small portion of the landscape - it simply isn't practicable to conduct thinning operations on every acre of public timber lands. To reiterate a statement I made previously: We can look forward to more fires, more frequent fires, and more destructive fires in the future. It will get worse before it gets better. My best wild guess is at least three or four decades (maybe longer) before a point of equilibrium is reached. Just my lousy two cents, of course.

[gb]

[gb]

[MtnGoat]

[thunderhead]

There is no evidence of any statistically significant change in observed jet stream speed, direction, or precip patterns. Many theories propose minor changes one way or another but the reality is any such change that may or may not be there is not large enough to detect, and thus, is not worth crying about. Its dry during the dry season. Weird.

[thunderhead]

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/public/2016-07/drought-download1-2016.png The actual data showing no change to us drought conditions with time.

[gb]

[gb]

[gb]

[thunderhead]

Gb the us averaged drought severity is quite relevant as the westerly longwaves you talk about are about of the same size as the 48 states. If they were changing much we would see it. We dont. Furthermore you can break it down by region or even single stations and see no change either. The relevant precip data is already posted. Also the un has released a study showing that us fire activity was much worse 100 years ago and has massively decreased as the forest service got larger and more capable. While we are increasing the planets temperature but we are not having a significant effect on moisture or drought. The data are clear.