What does the middle of nowhere have to do with this? We have technology that allows us to fly. You fly out, conduct controlled burns, cut out bad growth, install firebreaks. This is not an unsolved for process. For whatever reason, it’s not happening and these fires are the result. People really need to stop thinking so one dimensionally about these kinds of problems.

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gwerbin a day ago | parent [-]

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.

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remarkEon 20 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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gwerbin 7 hours ago | parent [-]

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 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.