hOw Do YoU KnOw iT’s cLiMaTe cHaNgE??
--
Every once and awhile, when I write about my experience in the 2018 Camp Fire, someone on the Internet thinks they can outsmart me by asking how I know the fire was “caused” by climate change, usually in a snarky, know-it-all, condescending tone.
It’s a typical denier tactic. “How do you know?” “Show me the data.” “You’re not an expert.” It often devolves into sealioning.
So, I’m writing this mostly to put — if not an end to it — at least a response out there that’s close at hand, when I need it. It isn’t required reading, or anything like that.
You never know when you’ll be attacked by a sea lion!
“How Do You Know?”
How do I know that there was unprecedented fire behavior in the Camp Fire? Because I was trapped in it for nearly four hours. And nearly died. And lost my home. And my town.
But, of course, you won’t take my word for it. Nor should you.
“Show Me the Data”
First of all, deniers don’t actually care about data. There’s so much data out there from all fields that any reasonable person would be convinced. They really just want you to exhaust yourself.
But, I’ll throw out a couple of relatively obscure points that I sometimes use to demonstrate the effects of climate change on fire behavior.
The first thing deniers like to do is say “The fire wasn’t caused by climate change!”
I never said the Camp Fire was caused by climate change. The fire was caused by the failure of a 100 year old C hook on a transmission line, which was in turn caused by corporate greed that put profits over safety and lives.
However, it’s clear that the behavior that the Camp Fire and other recent fires have exhibited is something new, something way more extreme than documented historical fires.
We know from direct observation that factors that directly impact fire behavior have changed over time, regardless of whether or not you want to admit that “climate” conditions have “changed”.
For example, we know that the fire season is hotter and drier than it was over a century ago (Yes, yes, I’m sure they were faking climate data even back then. 🙄)
We also know that nighttime temperatures have increased (which also impacts relative humidity), which has led to extreme nighttime fire behavior on many recent fires — something almost unheard of 30 years ago.
These and many, many other changes have led to a sudden and dramatic increase in the size of large fires in California.
For 71 years the largest fire in California history was the 1932 Matilija Fire, near Ojai. That was eclipsed in 2003 and again in 2012 and then again in December 2017 by the Thomas fire, in the same area as the Matilija Fire.
And then again, 7 months later, in 2018 by the Ranch Fire, which was much larger than the Thomas fire.
And again in 2020 by the August Complex, which was more than twice the size of the Ranch Fire — over 1,000,000 acres. And in 2021 the Dixie Fire set a new record for largest single ignition fire at over 960,000 acres.
In the past 20 years in California…
- 18 of the 20 largest fires have occurred
- 12 of the 20 deadliest fires have occurred
- 19 of the 20 most destructive fires (structures lost) have occurred
In only the past 20 years!
That’s a mere coincidence? A deep state lie? Is it because we haven’t been raking the forests??
Show me YOUR data.
“You’re Not an Expert”
So, at this point, trolls and deniers, running out of room, declare, “Well, you’re not an expert!”
Funny thing about that, though. I actually am an expert in fire behavior.
Or at least, I was, back in the day… which honestly makes me even more qualified to compare extreme fire behavior between then and now.
This is going to be a long section about “me, me, me”, but unfortunately that’s what you have to do to establish your credentials.
Street Cred
Here are the gory details of my short but — if I do say so myself —brilliant career in fire ecology and behavior analysis.
To start off, I have a Bachelor’s of Science in Natural Resources Management, emphasis in Environmental Science from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. My main focus was on fire ecology and vegetation management.
In 1984, I received a small research grant from the BLM (Bureau of Land Management — BLM didn’t mean the same thing back in the day) to study the ecology of the Tecate Cypress, a rare tree, native to southern California, that only reproduces after fire.
After over a year of field work, I published a 158 page report titled Population Dynamics of the Tecate Cypress that basically determined that the trees did not reach reproductive maturity (i.e., they didn’t have enough cones to reseed after a fire) until they were at least 40 years old. Fire frequencies higher than that would extirpate the species. The only remaining copy of the full report burned in the Camp Fire, though an abstract was published in Conservation and Management of Rare and Endangered Plants.
I immediately started taking flack from some of the old US Forest Service fire eaters (old school firefighters) who maintained that fire frequencies were decreasing due to fire suppression, not increasing due to human development in the wildland urban interface.
So, I got a job as a seasonal firefighter on the Cleveland National Forest, as well as a small grant to study the fire history of San Diego County. I spent over a year digging through boxes and boxes of dusty old fire reports, aerial photos, sketches, news articles — whatever I could find — reconstructing maps of the fire perimeters of every large fire from 1910 to 1985. There were hundreds of them.
In 1986 I published a report titled An Atlas of Large Fires in San Diego County, California, 1910–1985. It demonstrated that while there were, on the whole, fewer truly large fires (40,000+ acres), there were many more smaller fires (300–5,000 acres) in the wildland urban interface, and that this interface had moved and expanded over the 75 period.
That led to some heated discussions about the role/value of fire suppression (the largest part of the Forest Service budget in California is for fire suppression), so I got yet another grant from the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station in Riverside, CA (usually referred to as the Riverside Fire Lab) to study the role of fire suppression in fire behavior and perimeter formation.
I used the 1985 Wheeler Fire (near Ojai) as my case study, and spent over a year studying every piece of data collected during the fire, interviewing fire fighters, pouring over satellite photos, perimeter maps, news reports, weather records, etc., etc.
The resulting report was titled The Wheeler Fire in Retrospect: Factors Affecting Fire Spread and Perimeter formation. It basically said that when fire weather and fuel conditions were severe enough, fire suppression — as well as prior burns — had limited to no impact on fire behavior.
Though everyone goes “duh” to that conclusion today, back in the late 80’s it caused a proverbial fire storm of controversy. It was honestly a rough go, but I stuck to my guns… and it turns out that today I’m merely mainstream.
So, I wrote another paper titled The Effects of Prescribed Burning on Fire Hazard in the Chaparral: Toward a New Conceptual Synthesis, which basically concluded that prescribed burning has limited impact, particularly under severe fire conditions.
I also conducted a detailed analysis of the dominant fire behavior computer model used by the US Forest Service which resulted in a paper titled An Analysis of the Rothermel Fire Behavior Model: Inputs, Outputs, and Sensitivities. I had to teach myself FORTRAN and BASIC for that, and that’s how I got into IT.
But, I was essentially living off of grants. I never had a permanent job, so I ended up leaving the fire behavior field for a full-time IT position at Cal Poly, and eventually ended up at CSU, Chico and living in Paradise.
So, yeah, I know a tiny bit about wildfire behavior in California.
Most likely, way way more than you do.
So when I say that I saw fire behavior during the Camp Fire that fire behavior experts from the 1980s and 1990s believed to be flat out impossible, I literally know what I’m talking about.
I was one.
_____________________________
Selected Publications
- Population Dynamics of the Tecate Cypress (the ecology of a tree that requires fire to reproduce) (grant from Bureau of Land Management)
- An Atlas of Large Fires in San Diego County, California, 1910–1985 (grant from US Forest Service)
- The Wheeler Fire in Retrospect: Factors Affecting Fire Spread and Perimeter formation (grant from US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station in Riverside, CA)
- The Effects of Prescribed Burning on Fire Hazard in the Chaparral: Toward a New Conceptual Synthesis (grant from US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station in Riverside, CA)
- An Analysis of the Rothermel Fire Behavior Model: Inputs, Outputs, and Sensitivities (grant from US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station in Riverside, CA)
