From a fuel standpoint, the entire area around the redwoods used to be managed by logging companies and private industry - they even staffed the fire towers. Since that time, private and conservation owners have bought up the land around the area, but pretty much have done nothing to manage fuels, right now that is all burning for the first time in 50+ years.
The failure of those parcels to properly manage fuels on their property probably led to the threat to the redwood groves in this case. For this area in general, the NIMBY attitude has largely precluded controlled burning on the scale it used to be conducted at.
1 - https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?i...
I think the effect will mostly be that dry places will get drier and wet places will get wetter. Which is a disagreeable change, to be sure.
A better way:
The moisture is being sucked out of some places and falling to others. So one area is becoming barren, and another is being flooded. This means a few things:
- It is harder to farm. Can't farm when it is flooded, can't farm when it is barren
- It is harder to keep fixed cities because the climate changes. Imagine having to move NYC every 10 years. It is far worse when people don't have good infrastructure.
- The displacement of people will make the syrian refugee crisis look pale in comparison to what is coming.
- Entire ecologies being destroyed is gonna be an economic hit we can barely comprehend.
- Extreme weather is another effect. Example being freezing temperatures mid-bloom. Or a hot week mid winter. Crops grow and freeze causing entire crop failures.
And fires are only gonna get worse. The fact that right now this tree survived is great. But will it in 10 years?
I also don't think the consequences as easy to predict as you think. For example cross crops may transpire less because of their pores being closed more due to higher CO2 concentrations. That may be good, depending on the crop and location. There will be higher flow in most rivers, and by association most lakes (but offset by higher evaporation) which could be good both for humans and irrigation. I think the answer is complicated and difficult to predict.
Current unsustainable practices with respect to both soil and groundwater depletion will still be unsustainable.
Parts of California are not a great place to grow crops sustainably, at least not the kinds of water and soil intensive crops currently grown. That may increase or decrease on the whole over time due to climate change, it's tough to say with any certainty.
The solution to California's droughts isn't just dams. You can't build a dam large enough to hold enough water for going multiple years without rainfall and the aquifers, which bank water in the ground were deeply depleted in the last drought.
I would like to learn more about this, can someone post more information?
Longer-term I have the controversial opinion that it's a good thing (downvotes incoming!), but that could just be my tendency to look for the silver lining. Being Canadian and knowing that my entire country was buried under kilometres of ice and then scraped clean to bedrock 12,000 years ago, I feel that's a more dangerous long-term risk than global warming and rising oceans. Think of how much food we grow in northern and southern latitudes. That process would maybe have begun in about 1500 years, and one could imagine that stopping that might involve crazy things like digging up buried hydrocarbons and burning it to add CO2 to the atmosphere, or spraying dark pigment over ice and snow to reduce the albedo (rename Greenland to Greyland anyone?)
We've fucked things up pretty badly for the next thousand or more years, there will be mass extincions, mass migrations, maybe even famines and wars. But we also dodged an icy bullet for who knows how long. I take some comfort in that.
"Global Warming"/"Climate Change" is, to state something pretty obvious, about additional energy in an active system. That means, of course, more total heat across the entire system.
However, I think a far more important aspect is how much more active the system as a whole gets. I don't have time to get into it in detail here, but overall that means there will be more and more extremes. More droughts. More floods. More severe winds. More heat waves. More freezing storms. We're already seeing that in action and the rate at which the number of extremes increase will tend to increase as more energy is sent into a somewhat chaotic system.
I don't think there is much evidence to support this relationship. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
I'm all for avoiding climate change, but also want us to be real that we dont have to play an entirely passive role in adapting to what might be a new normal
Humans have built channels and storm drains as well as laid down substantial amounts of non porous ground cover like pavement and concrete.
If you really care about using freshwater resources, start restoring rivers and side channels.
I'm an environmental studies major myself, though I never completed my bachelor's degree. I also have a lot of personal reasons why my personal philosophy can be boiled down to "It's the end of the world as we know it -- and I feel fine."
I said nothing about climate change at all. Jumping to conclusions about my opinions on that topic is entirely unwarranted.
I'm guilty of being an optimist. I've been guilty of that my entire life. Previous remark by me about being an optimist in the face the shit really hitting the fan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22619932
Sorry the world is all stressed. When I was homeless and dying of CF and it was just my life that was a personal apocalypse, no one was all up in arms about needing to rescue me. You will have to excuse me for failing to wring my hands about how other people are now running around screaming "The sky is falling" now that the seeming apocalypse is larger than just my personal reality.
I didn't die on the street. I got healthier and back in housing. Life goes on.
And it will probably go on for most of the rest of the world after Mother Nature has once again proven that scientists don't know everything there is to know about this world.
In general I aim to respond to people directly if I disagree :)
[But in this particular case I was responding in frustration to a trend of comments, not one in particular.]
I’m sorry that my post added additional stress to your day — it really was not my intention.
I'm not someone saying climate change is a hoax, nor am I saying that concerns about it are mere fear mongering. But I see nothing to be gained by concluding we are clearly doomed already and should just throw in the towel now.
That's called self fulfilling prophecy. If we make zero effort to find a path forward, you can bet dollars to donuts we won't find a path forward.
Old firefighting techniques have build up vast caches if flammable material that we cannot afford to remove by any other means than forest fires.
Changes in firefighting tactics should mean that once an area has burned, the next fire should be less severe, however the burns will take much longer to recover than they should.
Any time sequoias survive a fire is good news twice over. One, the danger for them in the next fire is diminished. Two, they now have space and the opportunity to reproduce, which is something we have been systemically denying them for generations.
I see this repeated a lot. Can you talk specifically about the effect of early/mid 20th century firefighting in the Big Basin fire as compared to the Australian bushfires last year, the Siberian fires in 2019, and the Amazon fires this year and last?
I am not sure any prior firefighting occurred in Siberia. And I feel like a lot of people repeat that "firefighting has left too much fuel and that's causing these fires" as though it's conventional wisdom... but it's not quantified so I don't know if it's 100% of the cause or just contributing 10%. In fact, I don't even know how to measure the buildup of flammable material (kg/sq meter?) or how it effects fire intensity. It feels like the discussion around this can veer into being hopeful and unscientific.
We already know that timber land in the Americas requires more active stewardship than colonial thinking suggests. These are not European forests. Microbial decay doesn't reduce the calories per acre the same way. Global warming makes the balance even more precarious. But there are ways we can address both of these problems which also serves as a carbon sink. As long as we do it before the dominant forest soil biome in North America flips to bacteria-dominant due to rising ambient temperatures.
Excess fuel means ladder fires - where fire gets high enough to engulf the crowns of the trees - are far more likely.
Many conifers rely on fire to open their cones. Artificially suppressing fire stops that process of renewal.
Those are just a few examples off the top of my head - this topic is well trod and a little poking around will provide even more context.
For example, the largest fire in 2017 was larger than the total area burned in any previous year. While 2018 surpassed the record breaking total area burned from 2017.
They were accompanied by a weather pattern that we hadn't seen before: We were setting records for the BUI, an index to track moisture content in trees, by mid June. This was accompanied by record flooding. I watched on lookout as 70 km winds pushed a fire 40 km down a valley in one day. So the primary variable in my mind was always the odd weather. I'm sure that fire suppression and invasive species are variables but the weighting was perhaps 10:1 to weather in the anomalous years.
[0] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/ab...
On the evolutionary scale of the coastal redwood ecosystem, those burns are insignificant. Intellectually, the argument is romantic. Some nobler previous state of human existence. It's rooted in an anthropocentric view, not a scientific one. The physics of fire today are no different than the physics of a million years ago and the Santa Cruz mountains have been around for millions of years longer than humans.
The redwoods survived because they weren't logged. Simple but unsatisfying.
California has always been burning, so we need a better reason to believe This Time Is Different than that new migrants have no living memory of when it Wasn't Different.
That’s how ladder fires happen. Forest mismanagement. NOT climate change. Even if the climate wasn’t changing, we would be in the same situation eventually. Sooner or later the excess material WILL burn up.
https://www.opb.org/news/series/wildfires/oregon-columbia-ri...
Are you saying firestorms don’t happen naturally? I don’t know how to interpret your comment.
There is not and never has been in recorded history, a “natural” forest in California. They were anthropomorphic, but in a manner the Western eye refused to see. The indigenous peoples were not a bunch of ignorant riffraff living in a forest paradise wrought by God or Nature. They were the forest paradise, and when they were gone the forests began to change.
“Tending the Wilds” has great coverage of this topic, but if you are not into horticulture it might be a little dry. Still worth a skim.
ETA: some unspoken colonialism that is the puppetmaster in this play. I am a systems thinker. You cannot address systemic problems without at least acknowledging how they started and propagated. False histories of false histories just make the problem worse by trivializing the scope, leading people to half measures.
This is not to absolve colonialists of guilt for the horrific consequences of their actions. 'If I didn't, someone else would' is not a moral justification. But if it is the forests that we are concerned about, they would have the same fate one way or another, maybe lasting a few more millenia- not significant on the geological scales they exist in.
I will challenge your conclusion though, at least in a qualified manner. We do preserve things that we understand better before the option to exploit them arises. But. We do tend to understand things by taking them apart like children. And like children, we often lack the sophistication to put them back together again for a long time. But the clocks, radios and wind-up cars we disassembled as children were inanimate objects. Vivisecting living things/systems has a little bit different moral gravity.
But we are where we are. The best we can do is say "we fucked up, how do we fix it?" and start trying to listen, even if much of that listening now has to be through historical anthropologists.
To clarify, I don't think this is a good process, but I think it is an inevitable one. If there had been no colonialism, societies in the Americas would have reached their own equillibrium, and competition would have driven them to 'progress' as we know it. There would have been much less death, but civilisation would run its course all the same.
And additional clarification because I phrased my position on the current situation poorly: I think we can still save things. I just think there is no way for us to have skirted the initial destruction, and we would eventually have reached this point regardless.
Why? Culture is a big factor.
10,000 years ago, Europe, Asia, and Africa were hunter-gatherer populations. Such cultures succeed by taking care of their environment so that the things they depend on remain. Cultural evolution isn't necessary there; biological evolution already optimizes for hunter-gatherer humans.
When you develop agriculture, circumstances change. The most profitable move for society at large is to eradicate nature in favor of farms. The wealth and abundance that results from that makes room for selfish individuals to fight for power. Societies develop kings and slaves at this point. The wealth can be grown by further replacing nature with roads, cities, and infrastructure. With selfish people in power, this is inevitable.
In the Americas, the Mayans had reached this point and had fallen, likely due to overindulgance in those benefits.
Incas had no slaves and no currency, so theirs was a unique culture that fits the opposing viewpoint. But they also had no writing system, had only really been around for 60 years before Columbus arrived, and still had an elite class, so my view is that they would have become homogenous with other societies that were successful. As far as I know, they weren't conservationists anyway.
Cultures move to positions that are resistant to change, easy to fall into, and that provide an advantage over competing cultures. That means centralized power, military dominance, and some benefits for those in charge. Cultures that don't meet these criteria either become those that do, or are conquered by those that do.
American Indians (I am told this is the preferred nomenclature) were increasingly competing between tribes, and the agricultural tribes were growing. Either they would have soon walked the path that everyone else in history has, or they would have been wiped out by the larger southern civilisations.
The nomadic tribes mostly had an exclusive zone from the mountains to the sea, and moved back and forth seasonally, doing maintenance work to guarantee a good harvest of food and crafting materials the following year. Quite a bit of selection of fire resistant food species (eg, Cammas bulbs, which require meadows)
They also apparently gathered at flowering time, something you don't usually see in conventional agriculture. TtW suggests that this is because of Death Cammas - a hepatotoxic doppelganger with a completely different flower, that would be in the public interests to irradicate from your fields.
Cammas experts claim only an idiot would confuse the two, but harvest is a group activity. Some of those 'idiots' would be your kids or elders with failing eyesight.
I knew a guy who is trying to re-establish cammas from remnant native meadows who thinks the real reason is metabolic. That the fraction of inulin (one of the starches that make you fart) during flowering is lower, and hence they require less intensive food prep. Lewis and Clark apparently sampled underprepared cammas during their journey and spent a very unpleasant night because of it.
The idea it is either natural or the result of human caused climate change is a false choice. The question is how much climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of them as a contributing factor. They occur naturally and climate change is predicted (and has so far been accurate) to make them more frequent and worse. Like hurricanes and droughts.
> Global annual mean CO2 concentration has increased by more than 45% since the start of the Industrial Revolution, from 280 ppm during the 10,000 years up to the mid-18th century[2] to 415 ppm as of May 2019.
I know, it's Wikipedia. If you've got a better source, cite it. Until you do, "doubled" is hyperbole.
If you want to persuade people that anthropogenic climate change is real, easily-disproved overexaggeration isn't the way to do it.
Now I feel like "Captain Nitpick" for my previous comment.
Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Ladder fires — where fire leaves the forest floor, up to the crowns, creating a wall of fire that can change weather patterns — are incredibly powerful events. Despite how much fire these trees have survived over their long lives, they dodged a bullet here.
As an environmentalist, seeing that these trees won this battle is stirring. But it’s cavalier to assume they’ll win the next fight, or the one after that.
Fires are becoming more intense, more frequent, more damaging. Part of this is because the yearly burns the Native American Indians did to maintain the habitat have gone the way of history. Part of it is due to natural drought cycles. Part of it is our increasing development of the urban-wilderness interface. And part of it is climate change. The world is getting hotter, and drier. We are in the midst of a mass extinction event. These trees survived today, but will we do anything to help them survive this century?