Lotta folks say the weather anomaly there is from el nino which afaik is a "naturally caused" weather phenomenon.
It is a good counter point you make Jim. But some scientists say the pace of burning is much higher than it has been for 1000s of years based on evidence found in core samples from lake bottoms. And as a fire guy, you can probably appreciate that the fire season is 78 days longer now than it was a 'few' years ago
I also know that money not spent fighting this years fire will not be allocated for next years fire. Not saying everything is screwed up, but a lot of fires are managed as revenue streams.
Anyway, I get that things look bad right now. There have been REAL slow years in the last twenty as well. Last years fire season was not extreme. The lower 48 had some bad fires, we always do. Alaska had a doozie, but thats what happens in AK. They dont fight much fire in AK, no people and no reason to stop mother nature from her work. You might have 8 jumpers on a 10,000 acre fire.
Lots of decisions have been made in the last 100 years. Nearly none of them have decisions that work in harmony with Mother Nature. So, a lot of what I see is nature trying to fix the f ups of humans for the last century and a half. We are just starting to figure out how things work, but have been doing it wrong for a long time, plus now people live where they should not.
My only question about the 1000 year old trees would be how would they be able to tell if there were other trees that burned completely away? Or how would they be able to tell if 100 years earlier there were vast forests that were reduced to ash?
Studying a tree in the bottom of a lake would seem to me to be a mere snapshot in time. I feel that we are looking at a snapshot right now. Humans have made drastic differences, thats for sure, but we are always sure that what is happening right now must surely be WAY worse than it was yesterday. We have very short memories, we have seen nothing like what was happening in the 1870's.
