[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.