[pvaldes]

> do not have accurate records of forest fires that occurred 800+ years before

In fact we have incomplete, but detailed, records since 7000 years ago. The remains of 2000 Yo trunks can be found on swamps and peat bogs. Ancient wildfires left marks on the grow rings, that had been read for scientists since generations.

Dendrochronology and dendroclimatology, two entire science fields, had been created around this.

[alexk307]

Right - and that data does not suggest anything close to what OP was saying.

[1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

[aurelius_v]

They actually do. You just don't know how to read the data properly.

Here are some papers that might help you understand it better:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1305069110 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38934256/

BTW, the researcher you quoted, Justin Waito, explicitly warns against reading his historical data to mean modern fires are normal. He concluded that modern temperature increases are driving fire frequency to levels higher than anything seen in the last two millennia. Here is one of his papers on that:

https://winnspace.uwinnipeg.ca/handle/10680/1749

You can believe the consensus of the vast majority of scientists (99%) who have collectively spent 10's of millions of hours researching this space, or you can pretend you know better.