Once again, it's not the climate, it's the fuel: More foresters step forward to correct the record on wildfires

By Jason Hayes of The Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

"The largest fire recorded in the U.S. was the Miramichi Fire in Maine, in 1825, which burned 3 million acres. Four of the ten largest fires reported in the United States occurred in or before 1910. The remaining six all occurred after 2000. The most devastating forest fire is the Peshtigo Fire, which occurred in October 1871 in Wisconsin. That single fire killed over 1,200 people and burned up to 1.5 million acres.

With several sources listing massive burns — more than one million acres —in the past two centuries, it’s interesting that the Fire Center’s data is limited to the past 40 years. For that additional information, the internet Wayback Machine is a helpful resource. A look at one past iteration of the Center’s website shows that up until December 2020, the National Interagency Fire Center showed wildfire data going back to 1926. This additional data reveals a great deal about the nation’s wildfire history.

U.S. wildfires have dropped dramatically over the past century, in both number and total acres burned.

 

Despite the wide variability in the fire record, forest managers and fire modeling experts who are willing to speak out have argued that climate both is and is not a major factor in wildfires. As the redacted data on the Fire Center’s website indicates, our perceptions of trends in fire behavior depends on when we start counting.

Published information on wildfires will often motivate trained foresters to reach out. McKitrick’s Financial Post article “prompted an interesting email…from an experienced forester,” he noted in a June 16 Tweet.

"As someone who works in forestry and has worked fires, and been evacuated due to fire, I have looked into the data, and it bothers me to no end how ‘the science’ is ignored.” They continue, “Climate change doesn’t make fires more intense, fuel loading does.”

The Mackinac Center has similar experiences. Our June piece on wildfires, “Only who can prevent forest fires?” explains, “Wildfire science confirms a basic fact: Dry weather tends to dry out materials that fuel and intensify wildfires. But climate change is not to blame for this year’s or any year’s wildfires.”

That is the case, even though “more and more, ostensibly settled climate science aches to point out that there’s nothing climate change can’t do. Whether you’re worried about increasing or decreasing temperatures, increasing or decreasing precipitation, increasing or decreasing wildfires, climate change appears to have you covered.” But “forest management policies play the key role in determining whether wildfires increase or decrease in number and intensity.”

We’ve received emails from foresters who say they agree with our forestry work. Refusing to allow active management and failing to suppress fires immediately have heightened fuel loading conditions. Heavy fuel loads ensure that, when a fire does start, and fire crews are not immediately able to stop it, it is likely to explode into an intense conflagration that burns everything.

These massive fires can effectively take areas back to the earliest of seral stages—bare mineral soil conditions, similar to when the glaciers retreated. From there, it can take decades for the land to transition from mineral soil back to grasses, to shrubs, and then to trees and forests.

People should be skeptical about the climate change hysteria that reemerges during every wildfire season. Instead, they should focus on active forest management practices, including harvesting, spacing and thinning, as well as prescribed fires. These practices implemented prior to dry years would reduce fuel loading and lessen the likelihood of a major fire. This would do far more to protect forested lands than locking them up in preserves and hoping lightning never strikes."