Redwoods are adapted to fire, yes, but surely there's some limit to how much they can take. Thankfully it seems this event may have been below that limit.
“Withstand” is a funny word. Forests need fire. Fire is destructive to the organs (flora and fauna) but beneficial to the organism (a forest).
I’m thinking of all of the sequoia seeds, now germinated from the fire[1], that will sprout next year into full sunlight that hasn’t touched the forest floor in hundreds of years.
It is sad though that it’s also destructive to the lives of so many people. May everyone find safety who is now in harm’s way.
Um, there aren’t any giant sequoias in the areas impacted by these fires. The range for giant sequoias is a few hundred miles to the East, on the slopes of the Sierras. They don’t grow in the coastal mountains.
Note that the trees in question are Coastal Redwoods, not Giant Sequoias, in Big Basin, maybe five miles from the coast, near sea level. They are TALL trees, with some over 300 feet tall.
The Giant Sequoias in the article you linked are in the Sierra Nevada mountains, at a few thousand feet elevation and a couple hundred miles from the coast. They are MASSIVE trees, truly awe-inspiring, a bit shorter than the Coastal Redwoods but with trunks 30 feet across.
Pedantically it ain’t so straight forward. Coastal redwoods are taxonomically in genus Sequoia while giant sequoias are in genus Sequoiadendron. And of course “pedantry“ is the answer to “What is the practical utility of learning Latin?”
I don't know about sequoias but some species' seeds need to "feel the heat" before they can germinate. For example acacias in Australia, if you just sow the seeds the germination rate is very poor. The trick is to put the seeds under boiling water before sowing them...
I know that for some species of cycads people actually burn hay in the crown to induce fruition.
Redwoods not only survive the fires, they tend to proliferate afterwards. After lesser trees have been cleared out by the fires, redwood seedlings take root.
Redwoods also thrive in low rain areas that are prone to fog because they benefit from the fog in a way that other trees do not.
I once suggested redwoods as an alternate or additional metaphor for giftedness re Stephanie Tolan's "Is it a cheetah?"
My idea didn't get any traction, but I think we need more mental models than the "cheetah" one because that not only implicitly suggests that gifted kids are always fast, it also implicitly suggests that they are dangerous predators. While it is true that intelligence can make you a danger, I would like to see myriad metaphors proliferate and redwoods are at the top of my list as a metaphor I would like to see proliferate.
I believe the heat of a wildfire is literally the trigger for the cone to open up and release the redwood's seeds! (I don't know the exact mechanism for this, though.)
I don't know. I know there is a pine that does that, but I'm in rough shape and trying to stay out of trouble, which is challenging for me under the best of circumstances.
I remember the pine cone of I think a yellow pine species opens up at 170 degrees, so it typically opens in response to fire. A quick google suggests it is called a Jack Pine.
Hurricanes are also thought to be responsible for bringing fly species to islands and new islands end up having bird poo on them with seeds the birds ingested. Plants do this intentionally to let birds spread their seeds because birds lack teeth, so the seeds don't get chewed up in the process.
Hot peppers are intended to be eaten by birds but not other species. They are hot as a form of chemical warfare against things they don't want eating them. Chocolate and maybe also coffee is bitter like it is to kill ants and if you have sufficiently dark chocolate (in, say, a tent), it doesn't attract ants. Milk chocolate attracts ants because of the sugar, but the cocoa itself is ant poison.
Anyway, little islands form from volcanos and they start sticking up out of the ocean a little and they become resting places for birds and the bird poo is the first soil and fertilizer on these barren volcanic rocks and then coconut trees are typically the first trees because the coconut will float across the ocean without being killed by the salt water and land on some newly formed little island with a bit of bird poo and a few plants and it will take root. I think no other tree does that.
If you get rid of all "disasters" entirely, you kill off a lot of stuff. Mother Nature or "mother earth" has fascinating and complex ways of letting life find a way and fire laying waste to some portion of the forest and leaving in its wake fertile soil and opening the cones of some pine species is just one of the fascinating ways she does that.
Anyway, I have big plans to shut up on HN and attempt to go behave now by being elsewhere. Ciao.
Why shut up? Your post was very informative and thanks to you I learned a lot of things!
However, I bet that the scale of the wildfires in our apocalyptic late-Anthropocene is something hardly seen before in healthy forests... all these species would be better off with less of it.
I have a medical condition and I was extremely frazzled. I can't judge if I'm making sense or not when I'm really frazzled. I've napped a bit, so I'm less frazzled now, but I'm still dealing with a lot of stress, as is often the case.
That's an interesting concept. Normally fire is a healthy part of the ecosystem, but as humans we've changed the context in which fires occur (e.g. by reducing naturally occurring fire and by making droughts more common) such that when they do occur they are more destructive than many species are able to handle. If that is the case, I wonder if there is a way we could reintroduce fires to the system (i.e. controlled burns) in such a way that it doesn't completely destroy the ecosystem.
Lol. I am just reading a novel set in the future and where our current period is referred as such, because, at the end of this climate crisis and huge extinction event, humans decide to restore the biosphere to its last post-glacial state. The notion that the Anthropocene could end is interesting though, it may be a happy (like in the novel) or a scary end.
It's the Xeelee Sequence, by Stephen Baxter. The focus on the late-Anthropocene "Bottleneck" is in the volume called "Transcendent". The end of the age of farming is located near the 27th century.
After they restored the biosphere (or did their best) though, more dire events take place in the Solar System and on Earth (but it's not only the fault of humans, so maybe not technically an Anthropocene again).
The Mountain Ash trees of south east Australia are similar in that the bushfire helps release seeds. These are also one of the tallest tree species on the planet.
At the time, I may have been Director of Community Life for The TAG Project, which I believe is the the oldest set of email lists for the gifted community on the internet and they were trying to make the transition to a formal charity and never completed the process.
So the audience would have been parents of gifted kids in need of support for how to effectively raise their kids and my opinion was somewhat respected for a fairly brief period of time in gifted circles online.
It wasn't an argument. It was an attempt to share my thoughts with people who liked my thoughts on certain subjects well enough that it got me started blogging because there was demand for my point of view on some subjects.
Not all fires are created equal. While fires are a natural part of many ecosystems, many of today’s fires are more powerful and become “ladder fires” where a build-up of fuel on the ground causes the fire to reach the crowns and cause severe damage to even fire-resistant species.
No, but the point is if the buildup goes for too long, what the controlled fires were trying to prevent becomes reality: a firestorm strong enough to burn to the tops of the trees.
What is cool about coastal redwoods is that they can survive all of their branches being burned off (i.e., a tree topping fire). The redwood trees in the Oakland fire were just logs in the sky after the fire and now the ones that were not cut down look quite nice. You can see the sprouts coming out of the redwoods left in place after the Santa Rosa fire. And those were just young redwoods (<100yr old). The ancient redwoods have much thicker insulating bark layers and even some insulating bark on some of the larger branches. It takes a lot of heat for a long time to heat up a 12ft diameter insulated redwood tree enough to kill it.
Old redwoods have high canopies and prevent smaller trees / shrubbery from growing so they’re naturally unlikely to succumb to ladder fires. Also, they can regrow the canopy if it does burn.
One of the coolest communities of people I met in the Bay Area / old school Silicon Valley (think Los Altos / Palo Alto) were the long-time residents who grew redwood sapplings in their garages / back-yards and planned regular excursions to maintain forests and to plant these saplings.
For those who don't know, redwood / sequoia saplings take years to grow in captivity and are actually quite complex to collect and sow.
To be frank, the Bay Area wasn't a great fit for me - but communities like this keep itching at me to move back from the east coast.
One of my favorite investing books (wait for it, it ties in!) is The Dao of Capital [0] which is all about contrarian investing. Great read on investing and for the philosophical perspective as well. In the book Mark Spitznagel (investment manager for Nassib Taleb's black swan inspired hedge fund, Universa Investments) has an entire chapter on how conifer trees take advantage of fire-cleared forrest floors to propagate at a higher rate. Fire clears faster growing endosperm trees which tend to dominate slower growing conifers (cone droppers) in the early stages of growth. The fire cleaning allows conifers to productively seed the forest floor and get growing with less competition in their early years. In fact some cones actually use fire as a signal to drop and open to release their seeds. Fascinating. Very eloquent writing, IMO.
The concerning issue with this fire is that humans have spent most of the last 100 years suppressing wildfires in these forests. This leads to an unprecedented amount of fuel built up on the forest floor, which leads to abnormally large and hot wildfires. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be too much for the redwoods, though time will tell.
It’s a thing, but it’s not being done on a large enough scale. It’s and incredibly difficult, decade long process to get plans approved on public lands. Private lands are much easier but still need extensive permitting through fire and air quality officials. We’re just starting to acknowledge the former extent of cultural burning in California, and the current need for fire on the landscape. It’s gotten easier to get the general public on board over the last couple years, and hopefully that trend continues!
I've heard this argument a lot and it makes sense, but on the other hand isn't there a maximum limit to the amount of fuel(carbon?) that can accumulate? Fungus and detritivores must certainly play some role, no? Doesn't the shade provided by the big trees place some limit on what can grow beneath?
Yes very much so. And you notice it the minute you enter an old growth redwood forest - suddenly the forest floor becomes largely barren of shrubbery and small trees, because the redwoods are soaking up the sunlight and nutrients.
Yeah that's been my experience but since I've only been in 6-8 different groves I didn't want to generalize.
Sure, fallen needles make a good portion of the floor beneath, and they may be rot-resistant enough to resist decay for a while, but at some point they're going to breakdown.
> This leads to an unprecedented amount of fuel built up on the forest floor
Everybody forgets the second part. Unprecedent amount of fuel AND WATER.
Forest soil is a sponge plenty of fungus, tender roots, moss, and roundworms. This means that there is a lot of water in the soil also (and that each year there is more water in the area until is fireproof). Plant tissues store water also.
Rainforests do not burn spontaneously. There is a net of streams and it rains. Maybe just once in a blue moon a lightning strikes here and there. When this happens it rains each day at 17h, therefore is a self-contained event.
Ancien forests do not burn. Gasoline soaked trees yes, they burn.
Ok, but California is the home of one of the biggest slugs in the planet, of the second tallest tree, and of newts that climb trees. We should think about it.
Definitely the place has potential to be much more humid.
We can apply measures to make buildings less fire prone
We can apply measures to make structures less fire prone also
And we definitely can release tons of water from planes after a fire. So let me propose something, why If we would do the same before a fire?.
What if instead to suck and sell all water from the environment we would fix and respect a minimum ecological level of water instead and give its part to the forest?.
If the water level descends over a minimum, just provide some water in patches or rings. We would need to pay the same bill from bomber services but we would save the money lost by fire damages. Looks like a win-win situation to me.
That may be true in rain forests. It's not true in the forests here in California, which dries out almost entirely over the course of the long, hot summer (it often doesn't rain from April to November).
A hundred miles north of this fire, at the Armstrong Redwood State Park, there is another lightning-caused wildfire that is burning through an old growth grove.
That fire is burning through the forest floor only, and is significantly less dangerous. The 1400-year-old Armstrong tree, and park buildings, have been protected, while the fire is free to burn through the surrounding undergrowth. Everyone involved seems to suggest that the fire is a net positive for the forest, and an overdue ecological renewal.
While it's definitely sad to see historic buildings destroyed, not to mention hundreds of homes, I look forward to returning to Big Basin over the next few years to witness this renewal first-hand.
The global temperature anomaly is already out-of-range for not only the lifetime of this tree, but much of its evolutionary history. We are entering an out-of-context situation for a large portion of the earth's extant lifeforms.
Again, the forest does not burn each summer. Is the job of arsonists in the majority of the times. This is a criminal problem. Is domestic terrorism
Claiming that fuel is increasing and somebody should burn the forest attract lunatics and does not help to have a future with water, or to decrease the levels of CO2 in the air.
We desperately require the CO2 stored in plants and in soil and this is not compatible with the old "time to burn" parties and traditions. Brazil and half of Africa is burning today and this is not acceptable. We must change our speech. Now.
Not sure about California in particular, but I think a pretty solid case can be made for controlled burning of environments that have evolved around regular wildfires. It's how these ecosystems work, and have worked well for a long, long time, and we risk damaging or collapsing those ecosystems if we take fire suppression too far.
Besides, while having lunatics torch forests is not desirable at all, fuel accumulation isn't fictional. Again, no idea about California in particular, but it's definitely a problem in parts of Spain, and controlled burns are already a thing there, I believe that's being done in the US, too, with good success so far.
I get that it's no fun having wildfires, even controlled ones, behind one's backyard, but it's probably not sustainable to not have any at all, forever. Even if fires can be suppressed effectively for a long time, when a fire eventually escapes suppression, and one probably will, it'll find many years of bone-dry plant matter to consume; that'll release all of the CO2 at once, and it would make for a very destructive firestorm. At least that's my layperson's understanding.
The criminal burning of the Amazon, way beyond what any wildfires would do, that absolutely must stop.
That's not an apt comparison. Painting over an artwork doesn't usually cause wide-ranging consequences apart from some human drama, destroying ecosystems frequently does.
Ecosystems influence everything from erosion and flooding, micro/macroclimate, occurrence of disease vectors and pests or lack thereof, wildfire occurrence and severity, avalanche risk, and food production on a large scale. We're putting on totally artificial pressure in a very short timeframe. Will we keep things like this for millennia? Probably not. We need stable environments to thrive, this is a recipe for severe instability. Plus, whatever comes after a collapse may be really bad for us – maybe you get a desert, maybe you get a really bad avalanche situation, maybe you get new pests and disease vectors. This isn't a question of aesthetics, it's about the functioning of the environment we are deeply dependent on to exist.
The majority of fires are not started by arsonists. This time it was lightning. Two years ago, it was strong winds and power lines. There are the occasional accidents, like the case where a hot car pulled over and ignited some dry leaves.
Also, a lot of California is a chaparral. It's an ecosystem shaped by wildfires. They are expected. Those locations must burn regularly, as they have been doing for thousands of years.
This is completely unrelated to, say, a tropical forest. Which is not expected to have more than isolated, occasional fires.
You're misunderstanding something here. The global temperature anomaly is substantially smaller than even day to day variations in temperature, and completely dwarfed by seasonal or day-night variations. The problems expected from climate change are almost entirely systemic - few individual lifeforms will end up in an out-of-context situation.
In this specific case, a 1400 year old tree will surely have seen some wildfires before.
California has been subject to century long droughts in the not too distant past (about 1000 years ago).
"BEGINNING about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur."
Further to that, the global temperature anomaly has caused rainfall patterns to change, meaning some places are trending wetter, and some drier, and crucially, volatility has increased. Having wet seasons, generating fuel load, followed by dry is more problematic than a sustained drought.
I remember driving through the Santa Monica Mountains on my way to Malibu right after Southern California was absolutely deluged by rain for weeks. It was one of the most stunning displays I've ever seen in person. Three years later Malibu burned down. So it goes.
This was actually part of my theory of why California electric companies got so lazy about tree and brush removal around their power lines. I don't think it's a coincidence that just 1 year after exiting a 6 year drought state power companies started huge fires in both Northern and Southern California.
> The bare fact that a tree is 1400 years old is pretty strong evidence that it's unlikely to be harmed by a fire.
For fires the likes of which they've experienced in their lifetimes, perhaps. Hard to know otherwise:
"What is remarkable about the CZU fire is this is a coastal fire, primarily along the the coast near the Santa Cruz mountains... in forests, a lot of redwoods, that have simply never seen forest fires... we are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating in fires the likes of which we haven't seen in modern recorded history in dense forests that are well-covered and have been historically immune from significant fires."
Depends what he means by "modern recorded history", but yes, I'm aware of basic history, thank you very much. What I was saying was that it is not at all obvious whether they have actually experienced such fires before or not; it seems possible they haven't.
> Everyone involved seems to suggest that the fire is a net positive for the forest, and an overdue ecological renewal.
Nature has adopted to occasional fire, difference here is that humans decided they can stop forest fires. And we did. But with that the undergrowth became more and more dangerous.
This slow buildup results in bigger and more aggressive fires. I am not sure how those are impacting the forests vs natural more mild fires.
A slow moving, low fuel burn is very good for the forest. A fast moving, extremely hot firestorm will burn everything to bits and destroy the ecosystem for decades.
Redwoods, and other plants and trees cannot survive a firestorm. This is the problem with our forest fires these days. They are too hot because the fuel is both dry and overgrown and condensed into non-natural areas. When we build so many homes and cities in the forests, we change their natural make-up and put everything at risk.
Always have been. It's a part of our state's ecology. Our forests require them in order to stay healthy, and native peoples were mediating the process for thousands of years before Western settlers decided fire was dangerous and had to be stopped. Now our forests and the fuel structures therein are way out of whack and we're finding our way back toward balance.
Combination of multiple reasons that are coming to a head now. Massive heat waves, long running droughts, decreasing rainfall, with more development farther out from urban core etc.
Because it's wet in the winter, and hot, dry and windy in the summer. Everywhere with this weather pattern sees frequent wildfires.
California used to have more acres burned annually a hundred years ago, but the amount of land burned has decreased since then, as a result of suppression efforts. This may be increasing the severity of fires, as there's more fuel to burn.
Coastal California sees rain from about the end of October through February, then tapers off to about nothing by May. It then does not rain again until Halloween. I used to think "doesn't rain" meant "half an inch every couple of weeks" but it does not rain in fact at all, it's totally bone dry for the hottest part of the year, until late fall. Getting three inches over the weekend is enough precipitation in the bay area to warrant flood warnings for several days. Compared to Dallas Texas where three inches in an afternoon might cause very localized flooding for an hour or two. It's quite bone dry here in the summers, the ground is literally "tinder dry" for months on end.
If you look at meso scale weather, there's a high pressure zone that develops between San Fransisco and Hawaii every summer which wards off low pressure (rain) systems. Generally develops by early June and lasts through August. Research "Pacific High" or "TransPac weather routing" or "Pac Cup weather routing" it's a major component of Pacific Ocean sailing races
I reckon that 3" of rain in a day would cause serious flooding here in southern Colorado. It'd certainly set a record! I don't think I've seen so much in my entire life, so it floors me to hear it's no big in Dallas
Most of the areas where the fires are typically get a lot of moisture in the summer from the "marine layer" i.e. fog. Not sure if that was the case this year.
There are always naturally started fires and they happen relatively often, what happens though is humans come along, build in the middle of the forest and then put out all the small fires and brush, leaves, fallen trees and branches build up over decades and when one of those small fires gets bigger and bigger and can't be contained, you get what is happening right now.
So many on HN were talking about how these fires were so much more intense than the other fires, and that probably Big Basin would be gone forever, etc.
Just another example of how people especially on HN read a
few articles and then think they are experts on the topic.
The ancient redwoods survived and will thrive, as fully expected. It’s not that forest fires are great, but it’s a natural process of life and people thinking “this time it’s different” are usually wrong.
This concept could be applied to mean that because the forest survived this event, we should expect to last much longer than previously assumed. (something like that at least...)
Another demonstration than ancien forests are fireproof whereas young forests aren't. This is the reason that makes centenary trees so valuable and so rare.
But each fire gnaw a little of this protection.
Arsonists should be more severely punished. Is the same as terrorism, just much more insidious, causing a bigger economical damage and a durable damage at long term. Not to mention that also kills people...
Why is so well accepted as unavoidable by the public opinion still amazes me
> In response to forest fires, the trees have developed various adaptations. The thick, fibrous bark of coast redwoods is extremely fire-resistant; it grows to at least a foot thick and protects mature trees from fire damage. In addition, the redwoods contain little flammable pitch or resin. If damaged by fire, a redwood readily sprouts new branches or even an entirely new crown, and if the parent tree is killed, new buds sprout from its base. Fires, moreover, appear to actually benefit redwoods by causing substantial mortality in competing species while having only minor effects on redwood. Burned areas are favorable to the successful germination of redwood seeds.
This has been the case with most News Sites, information portals etc for the last 2-3 years. They have semi-porn pictures with click bait titles after the news story that lure users into shady sites with shady intentions.
Let's take a moment and recognize the fear-mongering going on a few days ago where there were articles saying "this time is different because of climate change, this time climate change super fires have caused a national treasure to be destroyed"
I'm just saying there was a lot of mourning and saying "the redwoods are gone".
When people responded "you don't get to be a 1000+ year old tree without being able to survive fires" the response was "yeah but that was before climate change. These trees are likely gone forever now because climate change combined with fire suppression is causing super fires that burn much hotter"
I grew up in a place where people would talk about "that one storm in '62" (year made up) or even further back, either from direct experience or retelling an older generation's story. Given the bay area's high flux of people in and out, how many people have lived there long enough for generational knowledge of the weather 50 or 100 years ago to exist?
It is not uncommon for tropical moisture to reach the coast of CA in late summer/early fall. It has happened a few times since I've lived here. The lightning is more uncommon but also not unheard of.
Well it seems like the prevailing emotion in times of limited information is fear. You see dire forecasts that embody people's worst fears prefixed with probability qualifiers. The same has happened many times in the past (and is still happening now) with Covid, climate change, upcoming election, etc.
It is reasonable people will make mistakes, lots of them, so let's stop prefixing predictions with probability qualifiers "it's very likely X will happen" as if our limited information is enough to quantify a probability % of liklihood. I've seen dozens of "very likely" predictions on HN fall flat once more information came out within the past few years alone.
If COVID19 has a 15% chance of leading to a million people on long-term disability, that justifies a lot of precautions. You can phrase that as a mathematical equation, where you sum up the outcomes, average, and get an expected value, or as an emotion. In this case, the outcome is the same.
Ditto for climate change. I agree the worst-case is unlikely, and people get ahead by presenting the worst-case, but "unlikely" means 10%, not 0%. In the grand scheme of things, switching to sustainable technologies isn't too expensive.
And things with 15% odds will fall flat 5 times out of 6.
I think the bigger problem we have is an inability to move. We should have dealt with COVID19 when it first appeared. We should be doing a lot more to deal with climate change. And so on. Problem-solving is the best way to mitigate fear.
I was elated to read this, and then disappointed at the comments here. It seems to be feeding an argument of “see, fires are natural and these trees are old - Climate Change is a fear-mongering hoax!”
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?
The world is getting hotter, but only parts of it are getting drier. Parts of it are getting wetter. Overall it will get wetter. For each 1C rise in temperature, the air can hold about 7% [1] more water vapor. Warmer air above warmer oceans will pick up more water and dump it over much the same places as it does now, although the prevailing winds and ocean currents changing will also change that up.
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.
Luckily we dont have to just sit idly and watch it, we can redistribute water intelligently rather than just letting it flood rapidly back to the ocean.
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
It’s tempting to believe that climate change just means that some places will get hotter or colder, or that species will move north or south, upslope or downslope, but the reality is that we don’t really know. Much of the work coming out of ecological niche theory shows that ecosystems have many emergent properties and can’t simply be studied at the level of an individual species because those species wouldn’t survive without their symbiotic relationships [1]. What is true at the species level, however, is that each species has a unique and oftentimes non-overlapping adaptation to whatever environment it’s in relative to its peers. That means that as the climate shifts, some species will go north or south, or upslope or downslope, and others will behave differently. The consequence is that many ecosystems will literally be pulled apart, and species which lose their symbiotic relationships will have to either adapt over a short time span or go extinct. Assuming the climate stabilizes, it will take time, probably much longer than humans are comfortable with, for things to reconfigure.
Yes, I don't think that's surprising or seriously contested. Rapid change means species will have to adapt or die, and many will perish. It's not the first time that's happened on Earth, but it is the first time since the end of the last ice age. It's a terrible slow-motion train wreck that seems nearly unstoppable. Humans too will have to adapt, and some number of us could well perish also.
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.
This is a good and interesting report, thank you. As you implied, this is about averages, which is useful though incomplete.
"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.
> 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.
I don't think there is much evidence to support this relationship. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
Basically as you add energy to the system things get more extreme. Storms including hurricanes and monsoons. Dry places and times get dryer due to increased evaporation. Wet places and times get wetter (more severe floods). It's a predictable consequence of higher temperatures.
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?
Overly pessimistic. We have irrigation, dams, and drainage, we’re not totally beholden to the natural rainfall cycle anymore for farming. As far as coastal cities go, we should be investing more in sea walls, but I think technology can help solve these problems too as it has so far in Miami and Venice. If it eventually gets too expensive to maintain that will happen gradually, not like a sudden refugee crisis.
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 don't see how that makes it "a bad way to look at it" I didn't discuss the implications of likely changes in precipitation at all. Just stated what kinds of changes are likely in my opinion.
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.
“Naturally“ is a mental trap we have walked ourselves into, with John Muir leading the charge.
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.
Surely you acknowledge that forests in California predated human habitation thereof? (I could see a pedantic point in that they would not then be part of “recorded history,” if that were the point intended.)
I acknowledge that the forests of California are more than 12000 years old, yes. We have very little information on what those looked like [and some of that was systematically suppressed by the people who wrote the history books]. What we have is documentation of forests that were already under active but low-intensity cultivation for almost 10,000 years before someone with pen and paper saw them [and decided that a superior race would put them to much better use].
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.
Because races aren't genetically distinct in any substantial way, and Eurasian and African climates match North and South American ones, indigenous societies in the Americas would presumably follow the same trajectory as the indigenous societies elsewhere.
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.
> Because races aren't genetically distinct in any substantial way, and Eurasian and African climates match North and South American ones, indigenous societies in the Americas would presumably follow the same trajectory as the indigenous societies elsewhere.
Firstly, I worry that I am coming across as overconfident. I haven't researched these topics in great depth, and if someone could correct my broad model of history, I'd appreciate it- there's no better feeling than updating a mental model and letting things click into place in a clearer way.
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.
I'm not an anthropologist but the ideology mismatch was more than just race. Colonialism is, to me, a gumbo of nationalism, classism, religion, seasoned with a generous helping of some other ideologies, like our flavor of mastery over nature.
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.
It is my view that our flavor of mastery over nature is a deterministic consequence of the advantage that it gives. I think that is unlikely that European society just decided to make that a value because they liked doing it, or had less knowledge than indigenous peoples.
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.
I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious. You’re telling me that the nomadic tribes of the Native Americans, who never built a single city nor developed any appreciable technology somehow tended to the vast millions of acres of California’s forests?
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)
Specifically in the case of cammas bulbs, the harvesting method was quite precise in its imprecision. The tool for gathering bulbs was basically a polished stick, which means that digging up a cluster of bulbs misses all of the offsets and a few of the larger bulbs. But the act of levering them out pushes the remaining bulbs outward from the center of mass, giving them more room to divide.
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.
Global warming is happening, and easily measurable and observed with the naked eye. Obviously large forest fires have occurred before humans doubled atmospheric CO2 levels in the last century.
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.
Look, you're right. I base off 250 (10k yrs ago) and looking at current 415 and carelessly using an order of magnitude type phrasing. It's not up 100.0%. It's between 50-100% and on the lower end.
Yeah, well, I've never been imprecise here on HN. Never rounded my data to an order of magnitude. Nope. Never. (I, ah, may have rounded toward zero a bit in this paragraph...)
Now I feel like "Captain Nitpick" for my previous comment.
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.
"Old firefighting techniques have build up vast caches if flammable material that we cannot afford to remove by any other means than forest fires."
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.
Both can be true, and if anything I think I would agree that this means we need to be even more careful over the next 30-50 years than we ever have been (or, hopefully, will have to be again), because we have two fuckups paying dividends at the same time, and one of them is on that time scale.
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.
trees used to be used as wind breaks for farms, would it be possible to do some geo-engineering to prevent fires from spreading through passive design like gaps or roadways or something?
Firebreaks are a long-standing fire management technique. The problem is that with an intense fire, it's possible for the flame to leap across the firebreak, even very wide ones when there are windy conditions (which an intense fire can exacerbate).
A greater risk than flames crossing firebreaks is
firebrands or cinders - flaming bits of bark, small branch,
clumps of pine needles - being carried aloft by heat and
falling past the firebreak into combustible dry grass or other fuel, or onto a wooden deck next to wooden siding of a house, or in a rain gutter full of pine needles and twigs
next to a composition shingle roof edge.
I mean Santa Rosa got hit by fire after flames jumped the multi-lane I-5 freeway a few years ago, so I don’t think small gaps / roadways accomplish anything in some of these fires.
A year or two ago I read a classic Sci Fi novel set in 1940s Oakland called Earth Abides. The novel featured a global viral pandemic, and a giant pan-Californian fire. There's also this comment linking to a prior fire in 1904: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24268508
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.
In the case of Armstrong Woods historic Redwood grove here in Sonoma County, CA - currently threatended by Walbridge fire [1]:
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.
Part of this is because the yearly burns the Native American Indians did to maintain the habitat
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.
If you think I am saying "climate change is a fear-mongering hoax!", you are reading in things I never said.
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.
Sorry if this post seemed like a response to yours. It’s not. I didn’t find your post unreasonable, nor did I think you were implying that climate change is non-existent. You simply were pointing out fire’s role in nature, and I added my own response in-line with your post to call out what I see as a distinction between milder forest fires and the ones that are becoming more common today.
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.
So it bothers you that during a global pandemic, people weren't wrist-slashingly depressed for five minutes and you felt it was important they return to that state to gratify you in some way?
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.
Yes agreed. I worked as a Wildfire Fighter for BC gov. for the past 6 years. We had big fire seasons in 2017/2018 which were quite anomalous [0].
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.
basic forest mismanagement has nothing to do with climate change. We agressivly suppress the natural fire cycle which leads to excessive loads of dead material that the annual fire cycles would have cleaned out, and then we don’t let anyone go in and prune what the fires would have done naturally.
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.
The fires ravaging these forests is really sad, although I was pretty meh on living in the Bay Area, the immediate access to amazing state wildlife parks was absolutely unparalleled. IMO, who cares if it's torching scrubby LA hills or hollywood mansions?
My visit to Big Basin after huge rains in 2017 (arguably a stupid decision) was basically the first time I could say I had a "religious" experience in nature. Forests are most alive after a big rain, the entire day I spent there is absolutely seared into my mind. Every conceivable part of the forest was alive, surging out of the ground and out to take a look at what was new.
It's important to note that tragedy is an all too common step in evolutionary time for forests, this is the way that they continue to evolve and move forward. The last time I visited was after huge mud slides and rivers overrunning their banks. Many of the trails were blocked by 12' diameter trees that had fallen when the soil beneath their roots became too waterlogged or washed away. I can only hope that these forests will continue to thrive beyond my lifetime.
I will say though, visiting Big Basin really made me question how we could actually cut down forests like this just to build stupid houses. And we still are, logging trucks and signs for logging companies are all over the roads surrounding Big Basin.
Climate change is real, but climate change includes both changing temperatures and rain patterns AND change to the local climate of the forest.
When we prevent small fires from happening that burn out all of the small bushes and trees on the forest floor, we dramatically change the climate of the forest. When we build houses in the middle of the forest and then fight the fires that threaten them, we just build up more fuel that will eventually result in giant fires like the ones we are seeing now.
Of course temperature changes and changes in rain make this all worse as well.
But if we're going to be honest about climate change, then we need to be honest about climate change. We have entire government agencies whose sole purpose is to fight against the natural ecology of the forest.
Something big that we can do to both allow for houses and towns to exist in the forest, and live harmoniously with the environment: allow logging companies to come in and tend to the forest. Just regulate them.
Many commentators have blamed climate change for the fires because it is fashionable, especially on the left, to do so. The reality is that the very small change in temperatures produced by climate change isn't sufficient to produce a change in the rate of fires. We'll have to wait a long time for climate change to produce such effects, if it ever does. I would lay the blame more on our society's technological stagnation in terms of its inability to come up with better technologies than those that have existed since the 1950s to fit fires. We haven't buried our power lines, we don't have strategically positioned water storage systems, we don't have huge drones specifically for firefighting that could dump more water on the fires than an ordinary helicopter could.
I'd say this article barely meets HN's standards of something that garners intellectual interest and is more the type of thing I'd expect to see on Reddit alongside cat videos. And then of course there is the environmentalist bent that the redwoods of at most sentimental value were the important thing that burned down, rather than things of material value to people. I wonder if anyone ended up homeless as a result of the fires.
According to the theory of radical skepticism it is very tough to put a probability bound on supposedly low probability disasters like fires, and so we must be prepared for them.
Today, there's more low hanging fruit in the world of fire prevention than fire fighting. It's mostly low-tech work that just needs adequate funding and the political will: manually clearing out brush, using grazing animals like goats, controlled burns. Ultimately, the overgrowth has to go, one way or another.
Controlled burns especially have become politically unpopular in recent decades, but they're tremendously effective. With controlled burns, we can burn small amounts of brush when the wind is blowing gently away from major population centers. If we want to fund technical solutions, I'd invest in software that models the best times and places to conduct these controlled burn operations FAR before we start discussing firefighting drones.
selective harvesting (thinning), controlled burns and other tasks are hard sells to tree hugging Californians. However, it could be someone's livelihood AND a partial solution to the issues that come up.
How much do we spend on forest firefighting? How much do we spend on "no logging" lobbying? How much do we spend on smoke inhalation property damage and all the public communications?
All that could be recouped AND an industry could be revived.
It's frustrating that such an obvious solution to this problem exists. Logging will create jobs, stimulate the economies of rural towns, help the forest ecology.
Imagine this: what if we could create a biomachine that pulls CO2 out of the air and turns into carbon bricks. Now imagine that we not only have this biomachine but we have a use for all of these bricks. People want them really badly. So there is a huge incentive to speed up the process of pulling the CO2 out of the air.
We have that. The biomachines are trees, the bricks are wood, and the industry is logging. Why people who claim to care about the environment are opposed to it is baffling.
> Logging will create jobs, stimulate the economies of rural towns, help the forest ecology.
The types of plant growth that significantly increase wildfire risk significantly (by providing kindling) are not the big profitable trees, but rather the low growing brush and low diameter trees, for which there isn't much of a market (although Sierra Pacific Co. in CA is trying to turn those in to particle board).
Also, the forestry industry is very mechanized, and doesn't rely on a lot of human labor compared to the past.
One of the ways that the USFS will negotiate with the loggers is essentially to require them to do forest management in the areas that they are logging.
To be clear your article is mostly about clear cutting and I'm talking about thinning. One of the steps to those big profitable trees is thinning and selectively keeping the best tree(s) for later.
The interim products are lower value, but giving the industry a promise of the best logs allows them the finances to deal with the less valuable interims.
Loggers would love to cut down these ancient beauties. I hope they never get the chance to, but I worry with Presidents like the current one if at some point in the future they will tell the loggers to flatten these old growth forests just to make a few bucks.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadI’m thinking of all of the sequoia seeds, now germinated from the fire[1], that will sprout next year into full sunlight that hasn’t touched the forest floor in hundreds of years.
It is sad though that it’s also destructive to the lives of so many people. May everyone find safety who is now in harm’s way.
1. https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-n...
Eh, maybe it's just me but I've always felt worse for the animals than the people.
https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7048/
The Giant Sequoias in the article you linked are in the Sierra Nevada mountains, at a few thousand feet elevation and a couple hundred miles from the coast. They are MASSIVE trees, truly awe-inspiring, a bit shorter than the Coastal Redwoods but with trunks 30 feet across.
I don't think Coastal Redwoods have any trouble propagating or germinating. I have one in my back yard. Apparently they can be germinated in tap water. https://www.treeseedonline.com/blog/germination-of-coast-red...
Giant Sequoias, on the other hand, I view as truly irreplaceable. Some are over 3,000 years old. I hope we can protect them as long as possible.
The two species are cousins, but it's important to differentiate between the two.
I know that for some species of cycads people actually burn hay in the crown to induce fruition.
Redwoods also thrive in low rain areas that are prone to fog because they benefit from the fog in a way that other trees do not.
I once suggested redwoods as an alternate or additional metaphor for giftedness re Stephanie Tolan's "Is it a cheetah?"
https://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm
My idea didn't get any traction, but I think we need more mental models than the "cheetah" one because that not only implicitly suggests that gifted kids are always fast, it also implicitly suggests that they are dangerous predators. While it is true that intelligence can make you a danger, I would like to see myriad metaphors proliferate and redwoods are at the top of my list as a metaphor I would like to see proliferate.
edit: ah, Giant Sequoia is genus Sequoiadendron -- but both seem to have cones open by fire
I remember the pine cone of I think a yellow pine species opens up at 170 degrees, so it typically opens in response to fire. A quick google suggests it is called a Jack Pine.
Hurricanes are also thought to be responsible for bringing fly species to islands and new islands end up having bird poo on them with seeds the birds ingested. Plants do this intentionally to let birds spread their seeds because birds lack teeth, so the seeds don't get chewed up in the process.
Hot peppers are intended to be eaten by birds but not other species. They are hot as a form of chemical warfare against things they don't want eating them. Chocolate and maybe also coffee is bitter like it is to kill ants and if you have sufficiently dark chocolate (in, say, a tent), it doesn't attract ants. Milk chocolate attracts ants because of the sugar, but the cocoa itself is ant poison.
Anyway, little islands form from volcanos and they start sticking up out of the ocean a little and they become resting places for birds and the bird poo is the first soil and fertilizer on these barren volcanic rocks and then coconut trees are typically the first trees because the coconut will float across the ocean without being killed by the salt water and land on some newly formed little island with a bit of bird poo and a few plants and it will take root. I think no other tree does that.
If you get rid of all "disasters" entirely, you kill off a lot of stuff. Mother Nature or "mother earth" has fascinating and complex ways of letting life find a way and fire laying waste to some portion of the forest and leaving in its wake fertile soil and opening the cones of some pine species is just one of the fascinating ways she does that.
Anyway, I have big plans to shut up on HN and attempt to go behave now by being elsewhere. Ciao.
The general phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotiny
However, I bet that the scale of the wildfires in our apocalyptic late-Anthropocene is something hardly seen before in healthy forests... all these species would be better off with less of it.
I hope you are better now, I am sorry to hear that you had medical problems... Do not give up! Your contributions are helpful.
Is it always the late-Anthropocene, or do you know something?
After they restored the biosphere (or did their best) though, more dire events take place in the Solar System and on Earth (but it's not only the fault of humans, so maybe not technically an Anthropocene again).
https://vicflora.rbg.vic.gov.au/static/interplay-with-fire
Source: I have seen them!
Also metaphors make weak arguments.
So the audience would have been parents of gifted kids in need of support for how to effectively raise their kids and my opinion was somewhat respected for a fairly brief period of time in gifted circles online.
It wasn't an argument. It was an attempt to share my thoughts with people who liked my thoughts on certain subjects well enough that it got me started blogging because there was demand for my point of view on some subjects.
For they passed a noble law;
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw.
I know a little something about redwoods. I talked about redwoods. The End.
I bear zero responsibility for how other people choose to interact with anything I have said.
For those who don't know, redwood / sequoia saplings take years to grow in captivity and are actually quite complex to collect and sow.
To be frank, the Bay Area wasn't a great fit for me - but communities like this keep itching at me to move back from the east coast.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16599562-the-dao-of-capi...
I'm sure there were very dry and warm periods before this too.
Even thought we might think we're dominating nature, I'm sure it has a few tricks up it's sleeve yet.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
http://www.walkaboutpark.com.au/aboriginal-culture/cultural-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24249527
Sure, fallen needles make a good portion of the floor beneath, and they may be rot-resistant enough to resist decay for a while, but at some point they're going to breakdown.
Everybody forgets the second part. Unprecedent amount of fuel AND WATER.
Forest soil is a sponge plenty of fungus, tender roots, moss, and roundworms. This means that there is a lot of water in the soil also (and that each year there is more water in the area until is fireproof). Plant tissues store water also.
Rainforests do not burn spontaneously. There is a net of streams and it rains. Maybe just once in a blue moon a lightning strikes here and there. When this happens it rains each day at 17h, therefore is a self-contained event.
Ancien forests do not burn. Gasoline soaked trees yes, they burn.
Definitely the place has potential to be much more humid.
We can apply measures to make buildings less fire prone
We can apply measures to make structures less fire prone also
And we definitely can release tons of water from planes after a fire. So let me propose something, why If we would do the same before a fire?.
What if instead to suck and sell all water from the environment we would fix and respect a minimum ecological level of water instead and give its part to the forest?.
If the water level descends over a minimum, just provide some water in patches or rings. We would need to pay the same bill from bomber services but we would save the money lost by fire damages. Looks like a win-win situation to me.
It's hard to believe that's all gone but I am really happy the huge ancient trees survived. It's one of my favorite places in the world.
I did the skyline to the sea trail with my wife a few years ago and it was fantastic. The redwoods are really incredible.
An article about their fire resistance: https://sempervirens.org/redwoods-and-wildfires/
A donation link to the Sempervirens Fund which helps protect these incredible trees: https://secure.sempervirens.org/onlineactions/l2kebl2BfkqzEy...
That fire is burning through the forest floor only, and is significantly less dangerous. The 1400-year-old Armstrong tree, and park buildings, have been protected, while the fire is free to burn through the surrounding undergrowth. Everyone involved seems to suggest that the fire is a net positive for the forest, and an overdue ecological renewal.
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/flames-yet-to-rea...
While it's definitely sad to see historic buildings destroyed, not to mention hundreds of homes, I look forward to returning to Big Basin over the next few years to witness this renewal first-hand.
The bare fact that a tree is 1400 years old is pretty strong evidence that it's unlikely to be harmed by a fire.
Also, these trees must now survive a hundred years of aggressive fire suppression, which (ironically) allows fuel to build up to dangerous levels.
Either way, these trees are a lot safer after surviving a fire.
Claiming that fuel is increasing and somebody should burn the forest attract lunatics and does not help to have a future with water, or to decrease the levels of CO2 in the air.
We desperately require the CO2 stored in plants and in soil and this is not compatible with the old "time to burn" parties and traditions. Brazil and half of Africa is burning today and this is not acceptable. We must change our speech. Now.
Besides, while having lunatics torch forests is not desirable at all, fuel accumulation isn't fictional. Again, no idea about California in particular, but it's definitely a problem in parts of Spain, and controlled burns are already a thing there, I believe that's being done in the US, too, with good success so far.
I get that it's no fun having wildfires, even controlled ones, behind one's backyard, but it's probably not sustainable to not have any at all, forever. Even if fires can be suppressed effectively for a long time, when a fire eventually escapes suppression, and one probably will, it'll find many years of bone-dry plant matter to consume; that'll release all of the CO2 at once, and it would make for a very destructive firestorm. At least that's my layperson's understanding.
The criminal burning of the Amazon, way beyond what any wildfires would do, that absolutely must stop.
In the same way as the first week of an artistic work will disappear forever under new layers of paint.
Ecosystems influence everything from erosion and flooding, micro/macroclimate, occurrence of disease vectors and pests or lack thereof, wildfire occurrence and severity, avalanche risk, and food production on a large scale. We're putting on totally artificial pressure in a very short timeframe. Will we keep things like this for millennia? Probably not. We need stable environments to thrive, this is a recipe for severe instability. Plus, whatever comes after a collapse may be really bad for us – maybe you get a desert, maybe you get a really bad avalanche situation, maybe you get new pests and disease vectors. This isn't a question of aesthetics, it's about the functioning of the environment we are deeply dependent on to exist.
The majority of fires are not started by arsonists. This time it was lightning. Two years ago, it was strong winds and power lines. There are the occasional accidents, like the case where a hot car pulled over and ignited some dry leaves.
Also, a lot of California is a chaparral. It's an ecosystem shaped by wildfires. They are expected. Those locations must burn regularly, as they have been doing for thousands of years.
This is completely unrelated to, say, a tropical forest. Which is not expected to have more than isolated, occasional fires.
In this specific case, a 1400 year old tree will surely have seen some wildfires before.
"BEGINNING about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur."
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-dr...
What's amazing is that many of these trees survived that. And that modern humans think modern California is "normal".
When systematic deforestation and massive logging started?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
Note that animal (multicellular eukaryotes) fossils exist from that period.
> The bare fact that a tree is 1400 years old is pretty strong evidence that it's unlikely to be harmed by a fire.
For fires the likes of which they've experienced in their lifetimes, perhaps. Hard to know otherwise:
"What is remarkable about the CZU fire is this is a coastal fire, primarily along the the coast near the Santa Cruz mountains... in forests, a lot of redwoods, that have simply never seen forest fires... we are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating in fires the likes of which we haven't seen in modern recorded history in dense forests that are well-covered and have been historically immune from significant fires."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiyG9JXNspk&t=9m28s
Tree rings are also a record of history.
Nature has adopted to occasional fire, difference here is that humans decided they can stop forest fires. And we did. But with that the undergrowth became more and more dangerous.
This slow buildup results in bigger and more aggressive fires. I am not sure how those are impacting the forests vs natural more mild fires.
A slow moving, low fuel burn is very good for the forest. A fast moving, extremely hot firestorm will burn everything to bits and destroy the ecosystem for decades.
Redwoods, and other plants and trees cannot survive a firestorm. This is the problem with our forest fires these days. They are too hot because the fuel is both dry and overgrown and condensed into non-natural areas. When we build so many homes and cities in the forests, we change their natural make-up and put everything at risk.
(In other words, fires are part of nature.)
California used to have more acres burned annually a hundred years ago, but the amount of land burned has decreased since then, as a result of suppression efforts. This may be increasing the severity of fires, as there's more fuel to burn.
If you look at meso scale weather, there's a high pressure zone that develops between San Fransisco and Hawaii every summer which wards off low pressure (rain) systems. Generally develops by early June and lasts through August. Research "Pacific High" or "TransPac weather routing" or "Pac Cup weather routing" it's a major component of Pacific Ocean sailing races
The present-day human population, their works and imported flora and fauna, are not evolved the same way. This is a problem.
Just another example of how people especially on HN read a few articles and then think they are experts on the topic.
The ancient redwoods survived and will thrive, as fully expected. It’s not that forest fires are great, but it’s a natural process of life and people thinking “this time it’s different” are usually wrong.
This concept could be applied to mean that because the forest survived this event, we should expect to last much longer than previously assumed. (something like that at least...)
As well, that the tree is already 2,000 years old, we shouldn't be surprised it's survived this fire. It's survived many fires.
But each fire gnaw a little of this protection.
Arsonists should be more severely punished. Is the same as terrorism, just much more insidious, causing a bigger economical damage and a durable damage at long term. Not to mention that also kills people...
Why is so well accepted as unavoidable by the public opinion still amazes me
> In response to forest fires, the trees have developed various adaptations. The thick, fibrous bark of coast redwoods is extremely fire-resistant; it grows to at least a foot thick and protects mature trees from fire damage. In addition, the redwoods contain little flammable pitch or resin. If damaged by fire, a redwood readily sprouts new branches or even an entirely new crown, and if the parent tree is killed, new buds sprout from its base. Fires, moreover, appear to actually benefit redwoods by causing substantial mortality in competing species while having only minor effects on redwood. Burned areas are favorable to the successful germination of redwood seeds.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens
How the hell does a news organization decide this is a worthy way of pumping up revenues?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboola#Reception
ps. not on my usual computer, yes I know of adblocking :-)
The Bay area NEVER gets rain for like almost, 8 months of the year. This was a freak event.
When people responded "you don't get to be a 1000+ year old tree without being able to survive fires" the response was "yeah but that was before climate change. These trees are likely gone forever now because climate change combined with fire suppression is causing super fires that burn much hotter"
It is reasonable people will make mistakes, lots of them, so let's stop prefixing predictions with probability qualifiers "it's very likely X will happen" as if our limited information is enough to quantify a probability % of liklihood. I've seen dozens of "very likely" predictions on HN fall flat once more information came out within the past few years alone.
If COVID19 has a 15% chance of leading to a million people on long-term disability, that justifies a lot of precautions. You can phrase that as a mathematical equation, where you sum up the outcomes, average, and get an expected value, or as an emotion. In this case, the outcome is the same.
Ditto for climate change. I agree the worst-case is unlikely, and people get ahead by presenting the worst-case, but "unlikely" means 10%, not 0%. In the grand scheme of things, switching to sustainable technologies isn't too expensive.
And things with 15% odds will fall flat 5 times out of 6.
I think the bigger problem we have is an inability to move. We should have dealt with COVID19 when it first appeared. We should be doing a lot more to deal with climate change. And so on. Problem-solving is the best way to mitigate fear.
They were referring to the buildings.
Ironic?
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?
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.
[1] http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf
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.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_2/19729
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Firestorms are distinct from "large forest fires', but point taken.
> 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak
https://www.opb.org/news/series/wildfires/oregon-columbia-ri...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
My visit to Big Basin after huge rains in 2017 (arguably a stupid decision) was basically the first time I could say I had a "religious" experience in nature. Forests are most alive after a big rain, the entire day I spent there is absolutely seared into my mind. Every conceivable part of the forest was alive, surging out of the ground and out to take a look at what was new.
It's important to note that tragedy is an all too common step in evolutionary time for forests, this is the way that they continue to evolve and move forward. The last time I visited was after huge mud slides and rivers overrunning their banks. Many of the trails were blocked by 12' diameter trees that had fallen when the soil beneath their roots became too waterlogged or washed away. I can only hope that these forests will continue to thrive beyond my lifetime.
I will say though, visiting Big Basin really made me question how we could actually cut down forests like this just to build stupid houses. And we still are, logging trucks and signs for logging companies are all over the roads surrounding Big Basin.
When we prevent small fires from happening that burn out all of the small bushes and trees on the forest floor, we dramatically change the climate of the forest. When we build houses in the middle of the forest and then fight the fires that threaten them, we just build up more fuel that will eventually result in giant fires like the ones we are seeing now.
Of course temperature changes and changes in rain make this all worse as well.
But if we're going to be honest about climate change, then we need to be honest about climate change. We have entire government agencies whose sole purpose is to fight against the natural ecology of the forest.
Something big that we can do to both allow for houses and towns to exist in the forest, and live harmoniously with the environment: allow logging companies to come in and tend to the forest. Just regulate them.
I'd say this article barely meets HN's standards of something that garners intellectual interest and is more the type of thing I'd expect to see on Reddit alongside cat videos. And then of course there is the environmentalist bent that the redwoods of at most sentimental value were the important thing that burned down, rather than things of material value to people. I wonder if anyone ended up homeless as a result of the fires.
According to the theory of radical skepticism it is very tough to put a probability bound on supposedly low probability disasters like fires, and so we must be prepared for them.
Controlled burns especially have become politically unpopular in recent decades, but they're tremendously effective. With controlled burns, we can burn small amounts of brush when the wind is blowing gently away from major population centers. If we want to fund technical solutions, I'd invest in software that models the best times and places to conduct these controlled burn operations FAR before we start discussing firefighting drones.
How much do we spend on forest firefighting? How much do we spend on "no logging" lobbying? How much do we spend on smoke inhalation property damage and all the public communications?
All that could be recouped AND an industry could be revived.
Imagine this: what if we could create a biomachine that pulls CO2 out of the air and turns into carbon bricks. Now imagine that we not only have this biomachine but we have a use for all of these bricks. People want them really badly. So there is a huge incentive to speed up the process of pulling the CO2 out of the air.
We have that. The biomachines are trees, the bricks are wood, and the industry is logging. Why people who claim to care about the environment are opposed to it is baffling.
The types of plant growth that significantly increase wildfire risk significantly (by providing kindling) are not the big profitable trees, but rather the low growing brush and low diameter trees, for which there isn't much of a market (although Sierra Pacific Co. in CA is trying to turn those in to particle board).
Also, the forestry industry is very mechanized, and doesn't rely on a lot of human labor compared to the past.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/29/642955787/will-more-logging-s...
The interim products are lower value, but giving the industry a promise of the best logs allows them the finances to deal with the less valuable interims.
Obviously if they wanted to thin out the smaller trees that would be beneficial but the profitability there is questionable.
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