On 18 Feb 2003 18:00:46 -0800, (Scott Murphy) wrote:

Larry Caldwell wrote in message t...
(David Ball) writes:

Jesus Murphy! Would you two kindly do a little thinking,
especially about the meaning of cause of effect. The fires were CAUSED
by lightning or a careless camper or god-forbid...a MATCH! Think about
it! Global warming is an effect. It cannot CAUSE anything. In the case
you speak about Larry, the fire load in the forest EXACERBATED the
fires, but it sure as hell did not cause them. Long periods of dry
weather can EXACERBATE the fire situation, Alistair, but it does not
CAUSE the fire in the first place. Fire load and dry weather are
contributing factors to the extent and severity of the fire, but they
are not, EVER, the cause.

You have a pretty narrow version of causality there, David. If forest
fires are caused by lighting or carelessness, why don't we have forest
fires in the winter?

Would it help if the discussion was framed in the context of 'risk'
and 'hazard', where 'risk' is the probability of ignition (e.g.
lightning or 'the match') and 'hazard' is the fuel condition or state
that MAY lead to a fire?

How might global warming affect risk and/or hazard?

Definitely!! GW will increase the risk...possibly. GW will
alter weather conditions on most scalesy, so it is very difficult to
speak in anything other than broad terms.


Which combination of hazard and risk is likely to be most prevalent
given the effects of global warming?

1)high risk, low hazard
2)high risk, high hazard
3)low risk, low hazard
4)low risk, high hazard

What are the effects of low intensity (low hazard) fires that occur
frequently (high risk)?

What are the effects of high intensity (high hazard) fires that occur
frequently?

What are the effects of low intensity fires that occur sporadically
(low risk)?

What are the effects of high intensity fires that occur sporadically?

Finally, what would a landscape with such a fire regime look like
(ecologically as well as aesthetically), and how would such a fire
regime affect human activities (e.g. where houses get built, forest
management practices)?

As I said above, speaking with any kind of certainty is
impossible at this time. We can make broad statements about what might
happen, but they have to remain broad. My pet-peeve is with people
attempting to blame GW for everything from the snow in the eastern US
the past few days to the forest fires last summer in the American
west. While we can make statements about possible or even probable
impacts of GW, we simply can't blame each and every event on it.

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:45:14 -0500, "Ian St. John"
wrote:


"David Ball" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:11:09 -0500, "Ian St. John"
snip
I have a pretty accurate version of causality. Kindly show me,
Larry, how to start a fire just by putting wood into a pile?

uh, oh.... David. Not to burst your bubble but you *can* do that. In
my
hometown the used to be a large 'pit' that contained rather extensive
piles of 'sawdust'. It would catch fire at regular intervals from
'spontaneous combustion'. Just wood in a pile... ;-)

I didn't ask you about spontaneous combustion, Larry. I asked
you to start a forest fire by piling up wood, the implication being
along the lines of the fuel loading you describe in your original
post. It would be like saying that a person dies because they fall off
a building. As the adage goes, it isn't the fall that kills, but the
sudden stop at the bottom. If falling killed, the mortality rate for
sky-divers would be rather high...like 100%. As I said in my original
reply, fuel loading will certainly exacerbate a fire, but then so will
exceptionally dry conditions. It's just that neither causes the fire.


David. Lighten up a little and check the header.. You must be
overworking a bit... ;-)

I did. Once again, people can't seem to understand cause and
effect.

Larry Caldwell wrote in message t...
(caerbannog) writes:

It should be pointed out that fire-suppression policies did not
play a major role in the Yellowstone fires. Most of the forest
that burned there was high-elevation lodgepole pine or mixed
lodgepole-pine/subalpine-fire forest. Infrequent, high-intensity
crown fires are the norm there.

You are mistaken. Yellowstone is the result of decades of fire
suppression. The big Yellowstone fire was an exception. The park
management was concerned about fuel loads, so decided to let it burn. It
got away from them, and the result made national headlines.


With regard to the type of forest that dominates Yellowstone National
Park, *you* are mistaken. Although fire-suppression policies have
caused drastic changes in many of the forests in the West, such
policies have had little impact on most of the Yellowstone forests.

On the Yellowstone National Park web-site, you will find
an interesting article at:
http://www.nps.gov/yell/publications...references.htm
(beware of possible URL wrap).

Here are some excerpts:

################################################## #

"By the 1980s, about a third of Yellowstone's forests were more than
250 years old and reaching their most flammable stage. While it was
only a question of time before they would burn, it could have been a
matter of weeks or years. It was a question of when a summer with the
right conditions would arrive."

"The legacy of fire suppression.

In the heat of the moment, park managers on the defensive were apt to
attribute the magnitude of the 1988 fires at least in part to the
suppression policies of their predecessors. But in the more careful
post-fire assessment, it was recognized that effective suppression had
been possible for only about 30 years. In forests where trees live to
be hundreds of years old, this had not been long enough to add
significantly to the fuel accumulation, and during extreme burning
conditions such as those of 1988, crown fires burned irrespective of
fuel loads. "
......

"Although fire suppression may have had some influence on the spread
and severity of fires in 1988, Romme and Despain concluded that the
large scale of the fires was primarily due to the coincidence of an
extremely dry and windy summer with fuel that had accumulated for
hundreds of years through natural plant succession. Although
Yellowstone had become highly vulnerable to large fires because of the
age of its forests, that vulnerability was part of the area's ecology,
not a result of human intervention."

......

"In Yellowstone and the Biology of Time (1998), Mary Meagher and Doug
Houston compared photographs taken since the 19th century to document
changes in the landscape. The vast tracks of lodgepole pine-dominated
forests that characterize the central and southern parts of the park,
most of which lie between 2,300 m and 2,600 m, had changed little in
appearance or extent during the century before the 1988 fires."

###########################################

The high-elevation lodgepole forests in Yellowstone N.P. have mean
fire-return intervals measured in *centuries*. These forests have a
very different fire regime than do the lower elevation ponderosa pine
and douglas fir forests.

Effective fire-suppression was in effect in Yellowstone for only a few
decades prior to the "let it burn" policy initiated in 1972. These
few decades of fire-suppression had virtually no effect on the vast
majority of Yellowstone's forests.





Lodgepole pines have evolved a "burn hotter than hell and
incinerate the competition, then grow back real fast"
wildfire strategy.

Just about the whole West enjoys a fire climax ecology of some sort.

In Yellowstone, the lodgepoles are growing back like crazy
in the burned-over areas, and are doing so without the assistance
of timber-industry "stewardship".

Time to burn them again, before they build up another huge fuel load.
Lodgepole will sprout thick as the hair on a dog. Most of them need to
be killed off.

Under normal climactic circumstances, it takes 200-300 years for a
high-elevation lodgepole pine forest in Yellowstone to become
vulnerable to fire. Attempting to conduct prescribed-burn/mechanical
thinning projects in such forests would do nothing except waste
taxpayers' money.

"David Ball" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:45:14 -0500, "Ian St. John"
wrote:


"David Ball" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:11:09 -0500, "Ian St. John"
snip
I have a pretty accurate version of causality. Kindly show me,
Larry, how to start a fire just by putting wood into a pile?

uh, oh.... David. Not to burst your bubble but you *can* do that.
In
my
hometown the used to be a large 'pit' that contained rather
extensive
piles of 'sawdust'. It would catch fire at regular intervals from
'spontaneous combustion'. Just wood in a pile... ;-)

I didn't ask you about spontaneous combustion, Larry. I asked
you to start a forest fire by piling up wood, the implication being
along the lines of the fuel loading you describe in your original
post. It would be like saying that a person dies because they fall
off
a building. As the adage goes, it isn't the fall that kills, but
the
sudden stop at the bottom. If falling killed, the mortality rate
for
sky-divers would be rather high...like 100%. As I said in my
original
reply, fuel loading will certainly exacerbate a fire, but then so
will
exceptionally dry conditions. It's just that neither causes the
fire.


David. Lighten up a little and check the header.. You must be
overworking a bit... ;-)

I did. Once again, people can't seem to understand cause and
effect.

You replied to my message calling me Larry. Clear now?

And the 'cause' of the spontaneous combustion is 'putting wood into a
pile' as specified..

I understand cause and effect just fine.

The cause seems to be overwork. The effect is your previous post..

I seemed to have mucked up that post. Please try this one.

"Alastair McDonald" wrote in
message ...
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...183125,00.html
"Larry Caldwell" wrote in message
...
(Alastair McDonald) writes:
"Larry Caldwell" wrote in message

Where did the global warming crap come in? The recent catastrophic fires
in the West were not caused by global warming, they were caused by
overcrowded and dying forests. The entire West, except a thin band along
the coast, gets dry enough to burn every year, and always has. The
problem is becoming extreme because the American public despises the land
and refuses to care for it. The vast public holdings in the west are
treated by political spoils by whichever party wins the most recent
election.

So it is the politicians who are burning the forests. Perhaps you should
read what was written again.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...183125,00.html

Worst ahead for fires in West
Experts: Complex factors at work
By Theo Stein
Denver Post Environment Writer

Sunday, February 16, 2003 - The worst is yet to come for fire-prone
areas of the Rocky Mountain West, the nation's top fire historian
says.
But forest thinning and restoration programs are helping Westerners
rethink their uneasy relationship with one of nature's most
spectacular and important ecologic processes.

"I think it's probably working its way out," said Arizona State
University professor Stephen Pyne at a symposium on the role of
science in ecosystem management in the American West.

"Lots of communities are already taking steps to reduce fire danger in
their neighborhoods. We're watching the crest of this wave, and the
next five or six years will see the worst of it. Then I think we'll
increasingly see people start to view fire as a routine problem
instead of a crisis."

But like the other speakers on the panel at the American Association
for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, Pyne agreed that
Westerners have a rough road in front of them.

"We don't have one fire problem in the West; we have many fire
problems in the West," said Pyne, a Fulbright scholar whose books have
made him among the most respected experts on the relationship between
people and wildfire.

Climate change will bring warmer weather and frequent droughts to the
already dry West, amplifying fire cycles and overwhelming federal and
state programs designed to limit the danger to rural residents, said
University of Idaho professor Penelope Morgan.

While the cause of climate change is still debated in political
circles, Morgan is among the majority of scientists who believe the
fossil fuel economy is making it worse.

"Human-induced climate change is very real and will have a major
impact on fires," said Morgan, who pointed to one study that showed
Canada has already experienced a dramatic surge in acreage burned
during the past few decades, which have been the warmest in the past
1,000 years.

The underlying reason the West burns so furiously is simple: Forests
become choked with flammable debris because it's too cold or too dry
for the dead wood and downed trees to rot.

But fires themselves are the product of complex interaction among
precipitation, forest growth, wind and human activities.

National firefighting policies have largely eliminated the small- and
medium-sized fires that used to clean out dead and downed wood during
presettlement times, Morgan said. Those policies set the stage for the
spectacular conflagrations that have hit the West roughly every two
years since Yellowstone burned in 1988.

"One of the most interesting paradoxes is once we suppress a fire, the
next one often burns more intensely," Morgan added.

Wildfires are only one contact point in the slow-motion collision
between society's demands and ecological reality in the arid West,
said Gary Machlis, a senior scientist with the National Park Service.
But the intensity and frequency of big fires has made them a major
political issue.

Adapting to the environmental limits is a process that will bring
disruption and dislocation, Machlis said.

"We may be in one of those exceedingly brief periods in history which
will influence future natural resource policies for a very long time,"
he added.

University of Colorado historian Patricia Limerick said scientists can
help society change gears by providing policymakers with a range of
options that show the true costs and benefits of their actions.

"When shifting paradigms, it's important to use the clutch," Limerick
observed.

One of the dangers confronting policymakers is the temptation to look
for simplistic solutions to complicated problems, said University of
Washington professor Jerry Franklin, who conducted pioneering ecologic
studies following the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980 and the
Yellowstone fires of 1988.

For example, thinning to reduce fire danger may be smart policy for
ponderosa pine systems, but not high-elevation forests.

And he criticized a Bush administration plan to let loggers cut big
trees in payment for thinning forests.

"That's like saying you have to destroy the village in order to save
it," Franklin said. "It's absolutely inappropriate."


Whomever this ASU prof is, he was either misquoted or he is an ignorant
idiot. Whichever the case, the statement is false.

He is a Fulbright scholar, and he is backed up by Professor Penelope
Morgan, Professor Jerry Franklin, and Gary Machlis, a senior scientist with
the National Park Service. I don't think it is Stein who is the ignorant
idiot! I can think of one or TWO others!

HTH,

Cheers, Alastair.

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 00:57:07 -0500, "Ian St. John"
wrote:


"David Ball" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:45:14 -0500, "Ian St. John"
wrote:


"David Ball" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:11:09 -0500, "Ian St. John"
snip
I have a pretty accurate version of causality. Kindly show me,
Larry, how to start a fire just by putting wood into a pile?

uh, oh.... David. Not to burst your bubble but you *can* do that.
In
my
hometown the used to be a large 'pit' that contained rather
extensive
piles of 'sawdust'. It would catch fire at regular intervals from
'spontaneous combustion'. Just wood in a pile... ;-)

I didn't ask you about spontaneous combustion, Larry. I asked
you to start a forest fire by piling up wood, the implication being
along the lines of the fuel loading you describe in your original
post. It would be like saying that a person dies because they fall
off
a building. As the adage goes, it isn't the fall that kills, but
the
sudden stop at the bottom. If falling killed, the mortality rate
for
sky-divers would be rather high...like 100%. As I said in my
original
reply, fuel loading will certainly exacerbate a fire, but then so
will
exceptionally dry conditions. It's just that neither causes the
fire.


David. Lighten up a little and check the header.. You must be
overworking a bit... ;-)

I did. Once again, people can't seem to understand cause and
effect.

You replied to my message calling me Larry. Clear now?

Ah, yes. Sorry about that, Larry. ;-)

The love fest continues. . . . .

Must be Canadians . . . . .


"David Ball" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 00:57:07 -0500, "Ian St. John"
wrote:


"David Ball" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:45:14 -0500, "Ian St. John"
wrote:


"David Ball" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 21:11:09 -0500, "Ian St. John"
snip
I have a pretty accurate version of causality. Kindly show me,
Larry, how to start a fire just by putting wood into a pile?

uh, oh.... David. Not to burst your bubble but you *can* do that.
In
my
hometown the used to be a large 'pit' that contained rather
extensive
piles of 'sawdust'. It would catch fire at regular intervals from
'spontaneous combustion'. Just wood in a pile... ;-)

I didn't ask you about spontaneous combustion, Larry. I asked
you to start a forest fire by piling up wood, the implication being
along the lines of the fuel loading you describe in your original
post. It would be like saying that a person dies because they fall
off
a building. As the adage goes, it isn't the fall that kills, but
the
sudden stop at the bottom. If falling killed, the mortality rate
for
sky-divers would be rather high...like 100%. As I said in my
original
reply, fuel loading will certainly exacerbate a fire, but then so
will
exceptionally dry conditions. It's just that neither causes the
fire.


David. Lighten up a little and check the header.. You must be
overworking a bit... ;-)

I did. Once again, people can't seem to understand cause and
effect.

You replied to my message calling me Larry. Clear now?

Ah, yes. Sorry about that, Larry. ;-)

(David Ball) writes:

You have a pretty narrow version of causality there, David. If forest
fires are caused by lighting or carelessness, why don't we have forest
fires in the winter?

I have a pretty accurate version of causality. Kindly show me,
Larry, how to start a fire just by putting wood into a pile?

Feel free to join the conversation any time, David. We aren't talking
about building a fire, we are talking about the "recent catastrophic
fires in the West." Or at least I was. I don't think you have any idea
what you are talking about.

--
http://home.teleport.com/~larryc

David Ball wrote in message . ..
On 18 Feb 2003 18:00:46 -0800, (Scott Murphy) wrote:

Larry Caldwell wrote in message t...
(David Ball) writes:

Jesus Murphy! Would you two kindly do a little thinking,
especially about the meaning of cause of effect. The fires were CAUSED
by lightning or a careless camper or god-forbid...a MATCH! Think about
it! Global warming is an effect. It cannot CAUSE anything. In the case
you speak about Larry, the fire load in the forest EXACERBATED the
fires, but it sure as hell did not cause them. Long periods of dry
weather can EXACERBATE the fire situation, Alistair, but it does not
CAUSE the fire in the first place. Fire load and dry weather are
contributing factors to the extent and severity of the fire, but they
are not, EVER, the cause.

You have a pretty narrow version of causality there, David. If forest
fires are caused by lighting or carelessness, why don't we have forest
fires in the winter?

Would it help if the discussion was framed in the context of 'risk'
and 'hazard', where 'risk' is the probability of ignition (e.g.
lightning or 'the match') and 'hazard' is the fuel condition or state
that MAY lead to a fire?

How might global warming affect risk and/or hazard?

Definitely!! GW will increase the risk...possibly. GW will
alter weather conditions on most scalesy, so it is very difficult to
speak in anything other than broad terms.


Which combination of hazard and risk is likely to be most prevalent
given the effects of global warming?

1)high risk, low hazard
2)high risk, high hazard
3)low risk, low hazard
4)low risk, high hazard

What are the effects of low intensity (low hazard) fires that occur
frequently (high risk)?

What are the effects of high intensity (high hazard) fires that occur
frequently?

What are the effects of low intensity fires that occur sporadically
(low risk)?

What are the effects of high intensity fires that occur sporadically?

Finally, what would a landscape with such a fire regime look like
(ecologically as well as aesthetically), and how would such a fire
regime affect human activities (e.g. where houses get built, forest
management practices)?

As I said above, speaking with any kind of certainty is
impossible at this time. We can make broad statements about what might
happen, but they have to remain broad. My pet-peeve is with people
attempting to blame GW for everything from the snow in the eastern US
the past few days to the forest fires last summer in the American
west. While we can make statements about possible or even probable
impacts of GW, we simply can't blame each and every event on it.
While you are probably right about _every_ instance, the above
probably _are_ indications of global warming.

GW should cause more extremes of weather, which will tend to pop up
all over the world. Chris Maser has suggested the similar of a water
bed: drop a bowling ball in one spot, and spikes and dips will appear
shortly thereafter all over the surface.

Expect more hurricanes, more major storms through all parts of the
globe, colder weather than would be expected in some areas, and warmer
weather in others.

These also seem to match the computerized weather predictions
suggested by Warren Washington (although, as he notes, clouds are hard
to factor into the prediction software).

Daniel B. Wheeler
www.oregonwhitetruffles.com

"TellTheTruth" wrote in message
...

The love fest continues. . . . .

Must be Canadians . . . . .

Insulted by other peoples use of common courtesy and civilised behavior.

Must be an American.