Decades of prescribed burning saved Shaver Lake forestlands from California’s high-intensity … [+] megafire. Southern California Edison Over the last few days, California Governor Gavin Newsom, other politicians, and the news media have pointed to climate change as the single most important cause of historic, high-intensity “megafires” ripping through California and Oregon. “This isn’t about ideology,” tweeted Governor Newsom, adding “What we are experiencing is an existential climate crisis.” But California’s leading forest scientists say that fire suppression and the accumulation of wood fuel, not climate change, are what’s made California’s fires more intense. “Climate dries the [wood] fuels out and extends the fire season from 4-6 months to nearly year-round but it’s not the cause of the intensity of the fires,” said US Forest Service scientist Malcolm North. “The cause of that is fire suppression and the existing debt of wood fuel.” North estimates that there is five times more woodfuel in California’s forests, on average, than before Europeans arrived. And now a large, well-managed forest appears to have turned a high-intensity fire into a low-intensity one, proving that how forests are managed outweighs the higher temperatures… Click below to read the full story from Forbes
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