Monday, November 19, 2018

Finland Calls Out Trump For Rake News


In story quickly branded "Rake News," Donald Trump lectured California fire fighters on forest management, telling them that Finland's President, Sauli Niinisto, told him that country doesn't have a forest fire problem because it spends "a lot of time on raking and cleaning."

Right.

Finland's President, Sauli Niinisto, quickly branded the story a fabrication, saying he never talked with Trump about raking forests in Finland.  It's simply not done.

A Finnish biologist had no problem explaining why Finland has so few forest fires: it's a water-logged country that is frozen in snow and ice for three-quarters of the year, and it has virtually no people.  You could pour two gallons of gasoline on a Finnish tree and probably not get much of a fire going.

– Forest fires in Finland are much limited by the snowy winter (length varies acc. to year and region, but traditionally around 3 months, is shortening due to climate change). Snow and ice are solid water, forests cannot burn in wintertime.

– Even after the visible snow melts, the soil remains frozen for a couple of weeks more, postponing the soil/humus fire a bit more.

– When all the snow and frost have melted, the melting water is still absorbed by the soil/humus for various amount of weeks, giving an important boost for spring vegetation and hampering soil burns.

– Some spring weeks after melting, if dry winds prevail, are vulnerable for grass etc. burns, due to the withered grass, but these seldom develop into economically important. E.g. March-April. After this period, the green leaves make burning more difficult.

(- In whole Finland, making an open fire prohibited in given areas of drought.)

– The most vulnerable period for forest fires is late summer (e.g. July-August), in summers of long-term droughts and winds. Towards September, the rainy fall season usually makes it more unlikely.

– In Finland, the annual rainfall is relatively high (moist winds from southwest prevail), and, very importantly, the Nordic cool temperatures leads to less evaporation, so the soils keep the moisture longer, and also the relative humidity is physically higher in cool temperature. So, our air is often relatively moist (not as moist as in the Atlantic coasts of Norway, however). This seen e.g. in the nearly ubiquitous moss
cover of our forests.

And then, there is the absence of people.  Or, as a recent Finnish ad campaign put it: "New York has everything. We have nothing."


1 comment:

John said...

Having lived far enough North (in Norway) to use Finland as a route to the "South' (North Sweden), I can vouch for the beauty of the "Nothing" that Finland (rightly) boasts about (but mind the mosquitoes that are so big they (as my colleague once warned) are "dried by the locals to use as foot stools*"(!). No way that the Finns maintain the forests bu "raking".
Note *: some hyperbole here, of course.