Koonin: Climate change did not cause the LA fires

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RELATED THREAD: How well-intentioned policies fueled L.A.’s fires
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Climate change did not cause the LA fires
https://www.thefp.com/p/climate-change-d...eve-koonin

INTRO: Steven Koonin is a theoretical physicist and a leading voice calling for what he describes as “climate realism.” Koonin was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology for almost three decades. For five years he was the chief scientist at BP, exploring renewable sources of energy. From there he served in the Obama administration as under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. In recent years, he has engaged in policy debates about how much the climate is changing and what to do about it. He is the author of the book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. Here he discusses what caused the LA fires, and what they portend.

Emily Yoffe: Los Angeles is burning. President Joe Biden has said that climate change, which he just called the “single greatest existential threat to humanity,” is the cause. Many climate scientists agree with him. What do you say?

Steve Koonin: Nonsense. While climate might be playing a minor role, by far the greatest factor affecting how much damage results from a fire is the fuel available to it. Have you cleared the brush and other vegetation or not? Also, there’s the infrastructure that you’ve built. Are the houses fireproof? How close are they together? If we want to avoid the kind of disasters we’ve just seen in the Los Angeles basin, there are so many things we could be doing much more directly and easily than trying to reduce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions.

EY: You lived in Altadena—much of which is now ash—for almost 30 years when you were at Caltech. When you were living there, did you think something like this could happen?

SK: I remember one very windy night in the ’90s when our kids woke up and thought the sun was rising, but it was actually a fire in the hills above nearby Eaton Canyon. We didn’t evacuate, but we were prepared to. Day to day we were more concerned about earthquakes. As for fire, we thought the county was on it and would take care of it.

I have friends who’ve lost their homes, and the house we lived in is gone. The recent fires are a tragedy that’s due to ill preparedness, not climate.

EY: Let’s say that the earth hadn’t warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius over the past 120 years. Would that have prevented these fires?

SK: No, of course not. There have been fires like this for thousands of years. ProPublica did a story a few years ago about the dangers of our policy of fire suppression, which results eventually in larger, uncontrollable fires. That story cites estimates that in prehistoric California, between 4 million and 11 million acres burned yearly. Compare that with about 1 million that burned in 2024 and 325,000 in 2023.

EY: Can you understand that people who are saying about LA, “Here it is, you didn’t believe us about the existential threat. But it’s not in the future, it has arrived.” And the proof is the fires, and the flooding of Asheville, North Carolina, and all the recent hurricanes.

SK: How often does a hundred-year weather event happen? The answer is it’s a couple times a month somewhere around the globe. With modern news coverage that’s global and around the clock, the media are always going to find some unusual weather event. What you have to do as a scientist is to think about climate as the 30-year average of weather.

EY: But the people saying we have broken the climate are often climate scientists.

SK: I would refer you to the Working Group 1 of the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was issued in 2021. They have a wonderful table, Table 12.12, that shows 33 different kinds of what they call climate “impact-drivers”: floods, hurricanes, heat waves, cold, drought, etc. And for the great majority of those drivers, the table is blank. Meaning they couldn’t find any long-term trend, let alone one that could be attributed to human influences. This makes it hard to understand how people, including the UN secretary-general, keep saying the climate is broken.

Look at the work of Patrick Brown, a wildfire and climate expert at the Breakthrough Institute. It’s true that at the end of 2024 there had been almost no precipitation in LA. But Brown has a chart showing end-of-year precipitation in LA over an 80-year span; there were many years as dry as last year, even though CO2 was much lower... (MORE - details)

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..That story cites estimates that in prehistoric California, between 4 million and 11 million acres burned yearly. Compare that with about 1 million that burned in 2024 and 325,000 in 2023.

Could that be true?

.. the arrival of European settlers kickstarted the widespread razing of trees for timber and farmland, to the extent that a mere 5% of original forest, scattered in small patches of trees, is left across the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...%20country.

Is Koonin what you might call an honest witness (of anything)?

In fairness to climate change extremists I think they actually believe what they are saying is true and have some integrity whereas it seems (my opinion) Koonin is putting a story together with little or no integrity.

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..That story cites estimates that in prehistoric California, between 4 million and 11 million acres burned yearly. Compare that with about 1 million that burned in 2024 and 325,000 in 2023.

Could that be true?

With all the small fires continually generated by lightning and indigenous people back in the old days, it's unlikely that enough flammable material built up to cause the intense, gigantic fires of today. Millions of acres may have burned per year, but that was slow accumulation over the course of months, rather than single and multiple events bringing about massive destruction in concentrated time frames.

And we're assured by decolonization of knowledge movements and other social justice offshoots of critical theory that native science is the equal of Western science. Tribes knew what they were doing back then, and the European intruders messed it up and brought on the infernos of this era.

Even more of the California landscape used to be on fire.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...e-history/

EXCERPT: But here’s a fact that may seem surprising: Even more of the California landscape used to be on fire. Before the 1800s, when Europeans flooding into California outlawed fires set by Native Americans, at least 4.5 million acres — and sometimes up to 12 million acres — burned in California every year, according to UC Berkeley researchers.

That figure has only one modern equivalent: 2020. That year, California wildfires burned over 4.3 million acres — more than double the state’s previous record. One astonishing day in September, the sun never rose in the Bay Area’s skies, which instead glowed an eerie orange from smoke.

“2020 really shocked me because it was the first year ever that we actually approached 4 million acres; in fact, we reached it,” said UC Berkeley forest ecology expert Scott Stephens, the study’s author.

Before European colonizers arrived, the land experienced many small, frequent fires, mostly in the fall and sometimes through the spring and summer. These low-intensity fires were beneficial for the landscape because they cleaned out underbrush — which otherwise serves as fuel for larger fires — and helped native species regenerate. Anywhere from 4.5% to 12% of California was on fire every year from a mix of lightning fire and fires set by Indigenous peoples, according to Stephens’ study.

Today there are fewer individual fires, but each one is more likely to be destructive. Fires before the 1800s killed about 10% of trees, with 90% surviving; those numbers flipped in, for example, the 960,000-acre Dixie Fire of 2021, according to Stephens.

“That is devastating, because how do (the trees) regenerate? Where are the seeds coming from? How do you get a forest back?” Stephens said.

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have tended the land with fire. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, whose traditional land ranged from San Mateo County to Monterey County, uses fire in ceremonies and prayer and to enhance natural resources needed for food, medicine, clothing and craft-making, Tribal Chairman Valentin Lopez said.

“We did not look at fire as anything negative or harmful or anything else. We saw it as a way to cleanse and purify landscapes,” Lopez said.

Europeans first arriving in California found a landscape on fire and an airscape filled with smoke. When a U.S. government official visited the Northern California forests in 1898, he wrote: “Of the hundreds of persons who visit the Pacific slope in California every summer to see the mountains, few see more than the immediate foreground and a haze of smoke which even the strongest glass is unable to penetrate.”

Cultural burning requires deep familiarity with the land, said Ron Goode, chairman of the North Fork Mono tribe along the western edge of the Sierra Nevada National Forest. It entails understanding fire behavior, how specific plants respond to fire, how weather conditions factor in and the needs of particular ecosystems.

.. the arrival of European settlers kickstarted the widespread razing of trees for timber and farmland, to the extent that a mere 5% of original forest, scattered in small patches of trees, is left across the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...%20country.

Is Koonin what you might call an honest witness (of anything)?

In fairness to climate change extremists I think they actually believe what they are saying is true and have some integrity whereas it seems (my opinion) Koonin is putting a story together with little or no integrity.

Koonin acknowledged that climate could have contributed a minor role to the LA fire, and I'd agree with that. But the primary causes are policies that permitted and facilitated people building in high-risk areas, the failure of California to implement laws making homes more fire-resistant, and the faulty practices over decades of allowing flammable, natural materials to heavily accumulate.

Once Koonin steps outside the domain of the LA fire itself, and discusses climate change in general -- then his personal presuppositions can contingently come into play with respect to how they interpret data in biased fashion.

But zealotry can also become the case with those who automatically blame every catastrophic event today on climate change, as if natural disasters never occurred prior to discernment of global warming. The only scientists with potentially some degree of good objectivity are the minority without activist agendas, special interests, political grudges and ideologies, and personal careers that aren't dependent upon oppositely exalting and disparaging the reality of climate change.

In a broad context, those who assert that climate change is legit are correct, in contrast to those who totally deny it. But in terms of specifics and narrower battles transpiring at strata below that general level, the picture becomes more complicated and potentially contaminated. Theory-ladenness rears its head in ways that go beyond the framework of science, where again even presuppositions, publish or perish motives, and rivalries of the everyday society can corrupt set-up, selection, and the meaning of information and results.

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There are obvious similarities between the way the tobacco industry responded to threats and the way the fossil fuel industry is responding to 'climate change'. Politicians can choose (and profit) from a pool of 'experts' to support whatever view they wish to present as 'fact'. The only way forward I can see is for everyone to become their own expert .. this would (hopefully) make clearer which claims are reasonable and which are based on self interest.

Too late for adults but what follows is a suggested rough outline of a possible lesson for schoolchildren. First they'd be encouraged to look at 'Is the temperature actually rising?' and possible causes if it is. As this is a tree thread I'm going with trees.

Let's assume the global temperature is rising by 1 degree © every hundred years. We know the temperature falls by about 1 C every 300 feet higher you go. As a very rough conclusion we might expect the tree line (limited by temperature alone) to creep up slopes at the rate of about 3 feet a year (300/100=3 .. does that seem reasonable?).

And we have satellite data!
https://climate.leeds.ac.uk/news/mountai...20movement.

The researchers, led by a scientist at the University of Leeds, used satellite images to develop an algorithm that detects nearly one million kilometres of closed-loop treelines across 243 mountain ranges.

Is there any match between such a simple prediction and reality?

From 2000 to 2010, around 70% of these treelines moved upwards by an average of 1.2 metres [slightly more than 3 feet] per year.

Looks good.. but there are anomalies..

Other treelines receded as a result of wildfires such as in the western US, where vegetation and climate create conditions for fire to take hold.

For this to be a 'thing' surely there must be a lot of wildfires in the region and (guess what!) .. there are..

Forest fires in California per year + area burned per year..
Year Fires Acres
2020 9,639 4,397,809
2021 8,835 2,568,948
2022 7,490 362,455
2023 7,127 324,917

Homework .. ?

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Yes, the presupposition -- that climate change is solely responsible for the LA fire and other mega-fires -- selects data and outputs conclusions that can in theory relieve California from the responsibility of having to adjust its policies to keep people from moving into high risk areas, from setting fireproof standards for homes, and from indulging in prescribed burns and vegetation thinning management. In essence: "We are victims of the fossil fuel industry cabal. Under such oppression, there is nothing we can do other than locally restricting the operations of that hegemony, championing green energy, and warning of the impending doom of the planet."

However, so far the state instead does engage in token efforts of wildfire and urban fire prevention and gives lip-service to the total package of causes. So the fossil fuel industry conspiracy (FFI's tentacles pervade the world like Spectre or HYDRA) and the "climate change is the source of all menace" faction need to step up their efforts to drive California into total victim passivity. Purity with the respect to the approved source of woe must be established and maintained.

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https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...e-history/

EXCERPT: Europeans first arriving in California found a landscape on fire and an airscape filled with smoke. When a U.S. government official visited the Northern California forests in 1898, he wrote: “Of the hundreds of persons who visit the Pacific slope in California every summer to see the mountains, few see more than the immediate foreground and a haze of smoke which even the strongest glass is unable to penetrate.”

Cultural burning requires deep familiarity with the land, said Ron Goode, chairman of the North Fork Mono tribe along the western edge of the Sierra Nevada National Forest. It entails understanding fire behavior, how specific plants respond to fire, how weather conditions factor in and the needs of particular ecosystems.
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(UC Berkeley) Twenty-year study confirms California forests are healthier when burned — or thinned
http://news.berkeley.edu/2023/12/12/twen...r-thinned/

EXCERPTS: A 20-year experiment in the Sierra Nevada confirms that different forest management techniques — prescribed burning, restoration thinning or a combination of both — are effective at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California.

These treatments also improve forest health, making trees more resilient to stressors like drought and bark beetles, and they do not negatively impact plant or wildlife biodiversity within individual tree stands, the research found. The findings of the experiment, called the Fire Surrogate Study, are published online in the journal Ecological Applications.

“The research is pretty darn clear that these treatments are effective — very effective,” said study lead author Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley. “I hope this lets people know that there is great hope in doing these treatments at scale, without any negative consequences.”

[...] “Our findings show that there’s not just one solution — there are multiple things that you can do to impact the risk of catastrophic fire,” said study co-author Ariel Roughton, research station manager at Berkeley Forests.

[...] “Prescribed fire and restoration thinning are both surrogates for wildfire, a key process that happened frequently in California before European colonization,” Stephens said. “The impetus of this study was: If you’re going to implement these treatments at a large scale, is there anything that’s going to be lost?”
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(UCLA) Why are California’s wildfires getting worse? Experts explain what we know
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/exper...ting-worse

EXCERPT: While California wildfire history includes thousands of fires every year, we’ve seen an uptick in mega-fires that cover over 100,000 acres. From 1900-1999, 45 mega-fires burned through the state. Since 2000, we’ve already had 35 mega-fires. Officials still debate the causes, which include poor forest management, increasing populations in fire zones, and climate change.

While human sources are responsible for more than 90% of ignitions, the direct causes have changed over time. Settler colonialism disrupted and used oppressive policies to prohibit Indigenous cultural practices that stewarded ecosystems and effectively prevented catastrophic wildfires, said Beth Rose Middleton Manning, a UC Davis professor and paper co-author.

“The significant reduction of the use of fire by Indigenous peoples following colonisation, the introduction of grazing livestock (which reduced fine fuels and decreased surface fire activity), aggressive fire suppression in the 20th century, and early timber harvest practices (which removed large trees and increased surface fuels) resulted in stand densification by fire-intolerant species and increased fuel loading in some California forests, leading to increasingly severe fires in these ecosystems,” the authors wrote in the paper.

“A forest can’t be overgrown if you want to foster the species you need for basketry and medicine,” Middleton Manning said. In part because the forest was home to Indigenous communities, they cleared brush and used fire to hunt, harvest traditional foods and maintain paths for transportation.

Late in the 20th century, some wildfire-causing sources such as cigarette smoking declined. But human development also spread further into fire-prone areas, leading to more ignitions from cars, power lines and other infrastructure.

How can wildfires be mitigated and managed moving forward?

Mitigating and managing wildfires in the future will require better-tailored approaches that account for environmental complexity, MacDonald said. Prescribed burns and vegetation thinning can help prevent destruction in places where communities and property are at risk but because fire is a natural force in the western U.S., he says, letting fires burn is often the best approach in remote areas.

Efforts to effectively adapt to wildfire should also account for and support Indigenous cultural practices, Middleton Manning said.

While some political leaders have argued that governmental overprotection of forests has been the primary cause of worsening fires, the reality is more nuanced. Increased logging and clearing trees may help in some locations. But in other places, evidence suggests it can lead to worse fires. For instance, opening the tree canopy allows sunlight to dry vegetation, MacDonald said, increasing the amount of dry plant matter that feeds wildfires.[/color]
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Two fire experts describe inconvenient truths about L.A. wildfires
https://www.latimes.com/california/story...ging-times

EXCERPTS: Not quite six years ago, wildfire expert Jack Cohen, who lives in Missoula, Mont., visited Pacific Palisades to instruct firefighters and property owners on how to protect homes against wildfires.

[...] Respected by fire agencies across the country, Cohen and Pyne have found their straight-talk admonitions often disregarded or dismissed. Sensitive to losses and suffering, both said they are motivated by the belief that magnitude of destruction this week in Los Angeles and Altadena is not a foregone conclusion.

“I’m compelled to continue pursuing this issue because it is so solvable if we determine to do it,” Cohen said.

[...] While Pyne focuses on our cultural relationship with fire, Cohen looks at fire from a scientific perspective. Both suggest that we have more control over fire disasters than we think, and both begin by redefining the problem.

[...] When catastrophic fires occur, experts often blame the so-called wildland-urban interface, the vulnerable region on the perimeter of cities and suburbs where an abundance of vegetation in rugged terrain is susceptible to burning.

Yet the fire disasters that we’re seeing today are less wildland fires than urban fires, Cohen said. Shifting this understanding could lead to more effective prevention strategies.

[...] his fundamental misunderstanding has likewise led to a misunderstanding of prevention. No longer is it a matter of preventing wildfires but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing “home-hardening” strategies — proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding — and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing.

“If we think it’s wildfire, then we tend to maintain wildfire as the principal problem — with wildfire control as the solution,” Cohen said. “However, there is no evidence to suggest wildfire control is a reliable approach during the extreme wildfire conditions when community disasters occur.”