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Do the trees get replaced? Or come back? I would think this is catastrophic from a global warming point of view.

DubiousPusher 10y ago
It's hard to say what will happen here. If the drought subsides, which statistically speaking it should as California's climate trend should "regress to the mean," the ecosystem should recover to some extent. Unless the tree population/ecosystem has been so grossly devastated that the tree it is past returning to a self sustaining point. The current drought in California isn't widely considered to be caused by global warming though there does seem to be some notion that it has been worsened by it. It's too sharp a climate swing to fall along the global warming trend line. The scary thing isn't that this is global warming but that this is just an image of what rapid climate change could do on a much vaster scale if not kept in check somehow.
nsxwolf 10y ago
In the scale of a human lifetime this is a tragedy. We see the forests when we are children and we expect to be able to return to them again and again and that the same will be true for our descendants. But go a little farther out, and every asteroid impact above a certain size incinerated every last tree on earth, instantly. Giant ice sheets scraped them off en masse like barnacles. In every case, trees came back. Maybe not the same trees, but trees suited for their new environment. It will be the same for beetles or climate change or whatever comes next.
- mathattack 10y ago
  My time horizon is "Do we have enough trees sucking carbon out of the air before we cross the point of no return?" and "Can we plant enough trees before we lose all the coastal property?"
  - nsxwolf 10y ago
    We may lose current coastal property - but it will be replaced with all new coastal property. At a terrible cost, yes.
    - mathattack 10y ago
      That's it - it's not the property, it's the mass displacement and abandonment of cities.
      - emn13 10y ago
        Also, I don't think it's obvious that whatever replaces the current habitable zones will be nearly as large or fertile as what we have now. It's by no means a necessarily long-term zero-sum game.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    We are already past the point of no return.
- emn13 10y ago
  I'm not sure any asteroid has ever incinerated every tree - I suspect not - but realize that even fairly mild extinction events such as the one that killed the dinosaurs had rather dramatic consequences: in particular; that the planet never recovered what it lost. AFAIK no (fully) land animal even close to the size of a human survived Chicxulub and its aftermath. Crocodiles were the only large (50lb+) "land" animals to survive, and they're semi-aquatic, don't need a lot of food, and the ones that survived may well have been smaller than humans anyhow. So, you're right that there is little risk of humanity wiping all life off the planet's surface, even if we all tried. There is, however, a considerable chance that humanity might wipe most large animals and lots of plants off the surface of the planet, and it's a least imaginable we'd completely wipe ourselves out (and take with us most other vertebrates). Smaller pockets of humanity certainly managed that. You'd have to be quite the misanthropist to say "meh" to the consequences of a serious ecological collapse. I'm assuming it won't come to that, but it's not at all inconceivable.
ktRolster 10y ago
The trees come back. 150 years ago, for example, Yosemite valley had many fewer trees (see this painting, as an example: http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/american/cho-looke-yosemite-fall http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/american/cho-looke-yo... ). Not just in America, I was visiting some homesteads in Scotland, and they said 70 years ago, the trees were all gone, but they'd grown back.
- Someone 10y ago
  For Scotland and many other parts of Europe, forests started coming back both because forests were (re)planted and because we started burning coal and oil instead of wood and stopped building wooden houses, ships, etc. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04/watch-how-europe-is-greener-now-than-100-years-ago/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04... has a nice gif showing forest area increase. For Yosemite, my guess would be a different cause: the area depicted had fairly recently seen a forest fire.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    The area depicted was kept down by native americans, who preferred the open fields for hunting and living in.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  The US was consuming massive amounts of wood in the 1860s, much of it for fuel. Coal didn't surpass wood until the 1880s. England switched to coal after deforesting the British Isles for glass, iron, and ship manufacture. One kilogram of iron requires 80 kg of source fuelwood, as charcoal.

It's hard to say what will happen here. If the drought subsides, which statistically speaking it should as California's climate trend should "regress to the mean," the ecosystem should recover to some extent. Unless the tree population/ecosystem has been so grossly devastated that the tree it is past returning to a self sustaining point. The current drought in California isn't widely considered to be caused by global warming though there does seem to be some notion that it has been worsened by it. It's too sharp a climate swing to fall along the global warming trend line. The scary thing isn't that this is global warming but that this is just an image of what rapid climate change could do on a much vaster scale if not kept in check somehow.

nsxwolf 10y ago

In the scale of a human lifetime this is a tragedy. We see the forests when we are children and we expect to be able to return to them again and again and that the same will be true for our descendants. But go a little farther out, and every asteroid impact above a certain size incinerated every last tree on earth, instantly. Giant ice sheets scraped them off en masse like barnacles. In every case, trees came back. Maybe not the same trees, but trees suited for their new environment. It will be the same for beetles or climate change or whatever comes next.

mathattack 10y ago
My time horizon is "Do we have enough trees sucking carbon out of the air before we cross the point of no return?" and "Can we plant enough trees before we lose all the coastal property?"
- nsxwolf 10y ago
  We may lose current coastal property - but it will be replaced with all new coastal property. At a terrible cost, yes.
  - mathattack 10y ago
    That's it - it's not the property, it's the mass displacement and abandonment of cities.
    - emn13 10y ago
      Also, I don't think it's obvious that whatever replaces the current habitable zones will be nearly as large or fertile as what we have now. It's by no means a necessarily long-term zero-sum game.
- adrianN 10y ago
  We are already past the point of no return.
emn13 10y ago
I'm not sure any asteroid has ever incinerated every tree - I suspect not - but realize that even fairly mild extinction events such as the one that killed the dinosaurs had rather dramatic consequences: in particular; that the planet never recovered what it lost. AFAIK no (fully) land animal even close to the size of a human survived Chicxulub and its aftermath. Crocodiles were the only large (50lb+) "land" animals to survive, and they're semi-aquatic, don't need a lot of food, and the ones that survived may well have been smaller than humans anyhow. So, you're right that there is little risk of humanity wiping all life off the planet's surface, even if we all tried. There is, however, a considerable chance that humanity might wipe most large animals and lots of plants off the surface of the planet, and it's a least imaginable we'd completely wipe ourselves out (and take with us most other vertebrates). Smaller pockets of humanity certainly managed that. You'd have to be quite the misanthropist to say "meh" to the consequences of a serious ecological collapse. I'm assuming it won't come to that, but it's not at all inconceivable.

ktRolster 10y ago

The trees come back. 150 years ago, for example, Yosemite valley had many fewer trees (see this painting, as an example: http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/american/cho-looke-yosemite-fall http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/american/cho-looke-yo... ). Not just in America, I was visiting some homesteads in Scotland, and they said 70 years ago, the trees were all gone, but they'd grown back.

Someone 10y ago
For Scotland and many other parts of Europe, forests started coming back both because forests were (re)planted and because we started burning coal and oil instead of wood and stopped building wooden houses, ships, etc. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04/watch-how-europe-is-greener-now-than-100-years-ago/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04... has a nice gif showing forest area increase. For Yosemite, my guess would be a different cause: the area depicted had fairly recently seen a forest fire.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  The area depicted was kept down by native americans, who preferred the open fields for hunting and living in.
dredmorbius 10y ago
The US was consuming massive amounts of wood in the 1860s, much of it for fuel. Coal didn't surpass wood until the 1880s. England switched to coal after deforesting the British Isles for glass, iron, and ship manufacture. One kilogram of iron requires 80 kg of source fuelwood, as charcoal.