[gwerbin]

But are they supposed to? For example I have heard it said that in the northeast US (New England, NY, NJ) the forests pretty much evolved around humans (and rarely lightning) burning them periodically to control undergrowth. Is the same true in central Ontario? If not, then nobody is "supposed" to be doing anything? Unless catastrophic massive fire cycles are just a thing that happens every 500 years or whatever in that region...?

It's one thing to claim that bad forest management and not climate change is responsible, but it's consistent with climate change, and there are many areas in the USA that have adopted better fire and forest management practices in recent years and are still burning like crazy in seasons when they historically did not burn.

[remarkEon]

Yes. A mature society manages its natural resources for the betterment of its people. It doesn't throw its hands up and say "well shit, guess it's that 500 year cycle again". As a meta comment, climate change is this very odd thing on this website. On the one hand, more or less everyone agrees that a vast amount of time and effort should be spent on renewable energy generation (though transmission infrastructure doesn't get mentioned enough) to "combat" climate change. On the other, almost no one thinks about the 2nd and 3rd order effects of climate change and whether or not dropping carbon emissions actually does anything on a timescale that matters. Suppose we did this. Do we think the impact is immediate? Probably not! Therefore, more time should be spent on technologies and means to manage what changes in the climate are already "baked in", so to speak. That's part of why climate change discourse is so tiresome to me. So many people will tell you the end of the world is around the corner, but they sure as hell don't act like it.

[gwerbin]

What in the world are you talking about? This gets discussed all the time. The impact is not making it even worse at this point. And you talk as if posting on HN was equivalent to starting a coal-fired power plant in your backyard.

[remarkEon]

Yeah great example of what I’m talking about. Technology people on the technology website don’t seem interested in figuring out how to use technology to mitigate any effects of a changing climate. All they care about is “carbon number go down”, as if turning off power plants magically reduces the amount of fires.

[gwerbin]

Well it sure sounded like you were arguing that climate change was not a causal factor, which is ridiculous.

Of course we are going to need to use technology to mitigate the effects, even if we stop all carbon emissions tomorrow we are already dealing with an altered climate. You can't just vacuum up all the carbon and put it in the ground, and you can't get all the warm freshwater out of the oceans. I don't think I've ever seen a claim that we only need to stop carbon emissions and everything will be fine, here or otherwise.

You're arguing against something that people don't really say, and in the process you're making arguments in support of climate change denial. Are you really surprised people are pushing back on you?

[remarkEon]

The initial claim here was that these fires are the result of political leadership in my country deciding to not nuke the economy to make a number on a chart go down, or at least stabilize. I'm not going to argue the finer points of how much carbon release actually matters, because I think the right way to think about it is "increasing carbon release in atmosphere is not a good idea". I am in fact not arguing against something that people don't really say, because, again, this whole argument was started by people claiming that my country is responsible for Canada's inability to do basic forest fire prevention.

>and in the process you're making arguments in support of climate change denial

I am in fact not. Climate change "denial", such as this is even a real conviction that exists, is simply a phrase used as a hammer to get people to agree with a particular political program. Do you support declaring war on China and India and grinding their economies to a screeching halt? Because that would actually be the most effective way to drop carbon emissions back down to pre-1990s levels. The only countries that care about this stuff are the ones where their carbon emissions are a rounding error. The ones that don't care about this are the actual problems.

[defrost]

> Canada's inability to do basic forest fire prevention.

Australian here. What makes you think the "forest fire prevention" methods you outlined upthread are "basic"?

Have they ever been performed at the scale required in the history of European occupation of North America?

Normally dry lightening doesn't cause so many strikes to spark, nor do sparked fires normally spread so far and fast. Regardless of cause there are vast areas of remote forest covered land with extremely low moisture indexes - ie. dry as a tinderbox.

Clearing that land area of dry under brush and criss crossing it with wide firebreaks is no casual undertaking.