[rsj_hn]

Indeed

"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres[...] California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."

https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire-california-climate-...

[njarboe]

Well, 4.4 million acres burned in 2020 and 1.7 million in 2018, so were a third of the way to that 20 million already.

[rsj_hn]

> Well, 4.4 million acres burned in 2020 and 1.7 million in 2018, so were a third of the way to that 20 million already.

Unfortunately this article was written in Sept 2020 so I think (but don't know) that those are baked in. But in the big picture, yes, nature will eventually burn what needs to be burned. However the hope is for controlled burns, not burns that destroy lives and property. The Camp Fire in 2018 alone killed 85 people. That's a steep price to pay for refusing to do controlled burns.

[njarboe]

The article states: "In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."

So the data the article is using is from before the 2020 fire season. Only 15.4 million acres to go.

[bart_spoon]

The issue isn’t just the quantity but they type of burning. Historically, wildfires would burn out underbrush and younger trees, but would leave the older, larger trees alive. This would clear out the underbrush so that there was never too much at any given time.

But over the last century or so, well intentioned environmentalism has meant that these fires get put out before they get going. This has led to a very dense accumulation of this underbrush and young growth trees, which essentially have turned California forests into tinderboxes. Now when a fire starts and gets out of control, it gets so intense that it takes out old growth trees with it.

We’ve managed to turn natural forest fires from something that was a rejuvenative part of the ecosystem’s life cycle into an apocalyptic death blow.

[edoceo]

old nature wanted ~5MM acres a year, we messed with it, then nature figures out a way to get what it wants (after some delay). I thought we'd learn our lesson with that firestorm in 1991 (my first big fire memory). silly me.

[scriptkiddy]

Who are these "academics"? The article you linked uses politically biased language and provides no sources.

Seems like you're talking out your ass about something you don't understand. To make the claim that "90% of California's forest shouldn't exist"(paraphrasing, correct me if I misinterpreted) as you did in one of your other comments is absolutely absurd. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding regarding the extremely varied and countless ecosystems present in California. California is not "a desert", California "has a lot of desert".

To be clear though: It definitely HAS been proven that the absurd amounts of fire suppression California has engaged in over the past several decades has indeed increased the severity of wildfires[1].

[1] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES14...