The latest climate projections are increasingly dire as the world climate clock now has only 7 years to reverse course. Increasingly large and intense wildfires are one of the major changes we are seeing as climate change accelerates. Megadroughts are also increasing which will trigger more big fires this spring and summer. Meanwhile many elected officials are emphasizing the need to thin national forests in order to prevent more catastrophic destruction from these fires.
On this episode of Locus Focus we talk again with Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with Wild Heritage in Ashland, Oregon, about how no amount of thinning will actually prevent these fires and in fact will just add more carbon emissions to the atmosphere than the fires themselves. We discuss what measures need to be taken instead to reduce some of the risk of future megafires as well as limit excessive emissions from unnecessary logging.
- KBOO