Back to semi-normal programming - wildfire policy in a Tweet

Finally feel like I can blog about normal life-and-death matters, so back to our benighted wildfire policies in the Western US.

In the overbroadly-defined, Wildland Urban Interface, what to do can be complicated, although it's not complicated to realize what you shouldn't do is scatter development in the WUI. Basically you want people relatively concentrated, or you want the lowest residential development outside of urban areas, something that conveniently is true for a large variety of land use issues.

The vast majority of the American West isn't in the WUI though. We've got a tiger by the tail in that we've left the land unburnt for so long that it's risky to let it burn. Ironically, once we've been burnt, we keep making the same mistake. While it doesn't solve every problem, one aspect of wildfire policy could fit into a Tweet, to stop putting out wildfires when we no longer have the prior reason of too much fuel because the area has been burnt:

In relatively-large post-wildfire areas that are relatively far from significant numbers of people, new wildfires should be allowed to burn from mid-autumn to early spring.

Should make sense, but for the most part we don't do it.

— Brian Schmidt (@BSchmidtTweets) December 7, 2020

 

I'll acknowledge some weasel words in there but it isn't meaningless if decision-makers used some common sense. The point is that the consequences of fighting fires for so long has been reached in the burnt-over areas, why start repeating the same mistake again?

There is one theoretical reason - some areas burn hot enough to kill trees but not enough to fully consume them. Those dead trees remain as fuel that can heat up a second fire after some years of brush and tree growth. The two responses to this is first, maybe that's a good reason to set a lot of prescribed fires to burn away the deadwood before too much additional growth occurs, and second, on National Forests I expect an exception for this condition would be over-interpreted to apply all the time. Better not to have an exception than to have it swallow the rule.

There is a climate aspect of this that's a little unclear - some claims came out during the fires in the US West this fall that the carbon released was greater than all the carbon reductions from recent climate policies. The problem with that claim is that this wasn't "new" carbon from fossil fuel, it was carbon that had been in the air, had been pulled out of the air in recent decades in overgrown forests, and now is back in the air to start cycling again. Relative to 30-50 years ago, it's not adding to the climate problem.

The forest/wildfire relationship to climate seems to be primarily about what percentage of time carbon spends in the air as opposed to in a tree, in some other plant, or in the soil. A healthy forest with few and big trees that gets plenty of low-intensity fire may not store as much carbon as a densely-overgrown forest in the moment before a fire sends it all up into the sky, but on average and over decades, the healthy forest keeps carbon out of the air longer.

For the same reason, I'm not impressed by the arguments that biomass takes too long because it'll be 30 years before that burnt carbon gets put back into a tree. We're playing a longer game.