Wasn't this an excuse by a recent Aussie administration?

The CO2 from their forest fires were so much higher than all their industrial emissions that there was no need for any reductions in their man made sources

That is not the conclusion that I would draw. It is indeed an excuse.

"Although wildfires are to some extent natural occurrences, human activity contributes to making wildfires 'unnatural disasters' through man-made climate change and development … in fire prone areas," Jerrett said.

There's very little that's unnatural about wildfires, and probably very little due to development, other than increasing the impact of eventual fires. So build stuff in the woods, don't be too suprised when it burns in a wildfire. That's the unnatural situation that Australia has, ie not allowing landowners to reduce fire risks.

California's problem seems to be in not managing it's land, so fuel loads increase, especially when there are millions of dead trees due to pine borers. So fires become more intense to the point where even it's fire tolerant species burn and the state gets fined $80/t for the CO2 emissions. Or they just try to pass those costs on to ConEd, who pass them on to Cali customer's bills. If Cali were serious about reducing the risk of wildfires, it should take a more active responsibility for managing their land properly.

This is not really true. Natural wildfires historically happened during the rainy season, because they were started by lightning. Because the rainy season is generally colder and wetter, the fires would burn though the undergrown but leave the larger mature trees mostly intact. By contrast, the recent fires have mostly been caused by human ignition sources, during the driest, hottest times of year. Worse, many were caused by electrical sources on days with high wind. Those fires spread much faster and burn much hotter than the natural fires, and are thus far not damaging. Some of the most damaging fires in recent years started or spread through regions which had had fires or were clear cut just a few years previously, still you really can go blaming historical for suppression efforts for them. The mismanagement love is popular with a certain crowd that wants to authorize more clear-cutting, though.

Some of the most damaging fires in recent years started or spread through regions which had had fires or were clear cut just a few years previously, still you really can go blaming historical for suppression efforts for them. The mismanagement love is popular with a certain crowd that wants to authorize more clear-cutting, though.

The perfect management is a theory popular with a certain crowd that thinks forests should be left to grow wild. But who said anything about clear cutting? Wildfires were more common in the past, ie acres burned. Fires are simple things, run by the triad. Fuel, oxygen, heat. Allow fuel to grow unchecked, oxygen's a given, add heat and away they go.

We can mostly only influence one of those, so we could take some active measures to reduce the fuel load. Cali doesn't want to do that, Australia makes it illegal. Clear cutting is one option, but also a misnomer. Cali could clear cut parcels of it's forests to create fire breaks and reduce fuel loads.. If that cutting removes all the fuel. It could just cut fire breaks. It could thin out forests and do some brush clearing. It could remove the millions of dead trees from it's pine borer infestation.

But it doesn't. Much simpler to do nothing, and blame 'climate change' when it inevitably burns.

Increased heat and droughts caused by climate change are a marginal contributing factor to the fires, but absolutely the #1 culprit is overdevelopment and lack of land management. The main reason for droughts is most of the water is being sucked up by excessive agriculture including heavy cultivation of species that require lots of water eg almond trees. Suburban planning also means massive sprawl, and because suburbs and the requisite infrastructure are expensive to maintain and under-taxed, municipalities have to keep growing to stay solvent (like a physical ponzi scheme)

The combination leaves lots of homeowners / landowners who are both in close proximity to woodland, and unable to sufficiently water their lawns / other vegetation which cerate a buffer zone between the forests and human sources of potential ignition.

> The study didn't account for the growth of new vegetation in fire-swept areas

That's a pretty important caveat. In a steady state, forests fix some carbon, but dead leaves and wood also release carbon (and methane, which is worse) into the atmosphere as they rot. On the other hand, charcoal, once buried under new growth, is actually a really good way to sequester carbon. And recently burned areas are going to see very rapid vegetation growth, which will fix carbon. So yeah, over time scales of a few years, forest fires release lots of carbon, but over multi-decade timescales I suspect that a forest that gets periodic alternating cycles of fires and regrowth is going to sequester more carbon than one which doesn't. Especially if those are relatively cool fires which burn the undergrowth (which grows back very quickly) but leaves the big, mature fire-adapted trees behind.

That said, while many of these ecosystems are adapted for fire, they're adapted for the less intense fires you get when they're caused by lightning that is usually accompanied by rain (last year's Big Basin fire being a freak exception). In recent years, most of the wildfires in California were caused by human ignition sources, on hot, dry, windy days, when the fires spread faster and burn hotter. So instead of mostly just burning undergrowth and leaving the older trees behind, it burns everything. That's harder to recover from.

Maybe, just maybe, they should start removing all the old, dry wood again that the tree harvesters left behind, like they used to do, before eco warriors stopped them. Same problem as in Australia. And, no, you won't find this on the BBC or in the Guardian.

So long as there's rain, redwood trees grow like weeds and they're nearly indestructible. They'll blanket steep unstable granite mountains in the Sierra mountain range. Pine trees are less fire resistant but make up for it with faster growth.

The California fires were those massive trees turning into giant torches because they were dying/dead of dehydration.

If they're not being logged now it's because you can't reach them. You can't put all the blame on environmentalists.

But all the carbon in the CO2 produced by wildfires, like the CO2 and CH4 emitted by domesticated livestock, must have been originally captured from the atmosphere by photosynthesising plants (part of the carbon cycle, which some of us learnt about in school geography, unless we were taking part in a klimastreik that day). It's not directly comparable to emissions from fossil fuels, which are what ultimately increases CO2 in the atmosphere.