Forest fires in history

I lived in New Mexico when that state had several terrible fires, including the one that almost burnt the city of Los Alamos.

Luckily it spared us that time (a fire a few years earlier burnt a canyon nearby) but I was bemused to see signs: No smoking outdoors (they allowed smoking inside only).

So my sympathy is with those in the California fires.  Expect lots of finger pointing for blame, but short of stopping people from living in forested areas, there is not much you can do.

Burning off the underbrush helps (unlike eastern forests, the dead wood seems to sit there and doesn't rot for years, probably because it is dry). However, the Los Alamos fire was caused by a fire started to burn off the underbrush to stop a future fire: they miscalculated.

Our local Apache tribe had trained firefighters that would go out every year to fight fires. They would start training early in the year, and often would be called up for months. We didn't lose any firefighters when I was there; but they often came back with the worse case of fungus toes due to sweating feet inside their boots.

And some of our fighters were young women: but if you know Apache history, you don't mess with Apache women.

If you leave the forest burn, locals will complain, but this is how forests renew themselves: new trees and plants will come up. IF you stop the fires, then that means a hotter larger fire next time.

However, the largest fire in the west was in 1910: the Devil's Broom fire that included northern Idaho and surrounding states and killed 87 people.

the National Park Service site has a list of major recorded fires, mostly in the USA.

the worst fire on their list was the Peshtigo Wisconsin fire in 1871, which killed almost 1200 people. Few people heard about it, because it happened the same time as the great Chicago fire.

Wikipedia has a list of fires worldwide.

In many places, old dry grass is burnt off so that the new tender grass will sprout, or so farmers can plant crops more easily.  The farmers in Africa did this when they moved to a new field (after the older fields became exhausted) and the Native Americans also set fire to clear the grass. Ditto for Asia. But usually these fires are started when rain will limit the damage (at the start of the rainy season, when planting is done) and are more grass than forest fires.

Global warming will be blamed for all of this, and fingers pointed to Trumpieboy.

Yet the increase in global temperature has been going on for 100 years and Trumpie boy has only been in charge for 2.

And although the US refuses to bow and obey the NWO bosses who want to order people around, one tiny fact is that, unlike in Europe, the US carbon footprint has gone down in recent years, due to the use of natural gas from fracking.

yes, I support sustainable living. But the religion of global warming is to manipulate people into accepting a UN dictatorship that will tell you how to live for your own good (and maybe order you to die for the good of the world, although they usually hide that beneath fancy language).