9 ms·

I live in the foothills of the sierra, and I've been a search and rescue volunteer for a while now, so I'm in some part of the Tahoe national forest about once

I live in the foothills of the sierra, and I've been a search and rescue volunteer for a while now, so I'm in some part of the Tahoe national forest about once a week on average. The damage, when you see it up close, is stunning. You'll be driving along a highway and see miles, and miles, and miles of dead trees standing there, waiting to burn. It's catastrophic, and that's not a word I use lightly. The prediction for this year is a mostly dry and cold Winter. If that happens, I expect next Summer to be one of the worst fire seasons in state history. There's so much dry material out there now in areas that require tremendous resources to combat. If/when superfire season happens, there's a good chance it'll overwhelm state resources and there's going to be a lot of damage that will take decades to recover. I was in Kings Canyon for a state SAR conference not too long ago and the fire scars from a few years ago still look fresh. Most of the stretch of highway 20 through Clear Lake is just black and brown. That's gonna be a look that's hard to get away from pretty soon, and I doubt we fully grasp the impact of that yet.

npsimons 10y ago
I too spend a lot of time in the Sierras, though more of the Southern end. I would concur with your conclusions. While I'm not the most cognizant of foliage, I can say that the watershed has dropped noticeably over the years. People might say "who cares? you only need water for overnight trips.", but that's not only wrong, but missing the big picture. The Sierras have been getting less snow, and LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct, refusing to even consider solutions such as desal plants. Public transportation to reduce AGW is also a no-brainer that no one seems to want. Damage has already been done, but there are actions that could be taken to improve the situation. No one seems to care, though.
- paulmd 10y ago
  The reality is that it's too late at this point. The easy fixes might have worked if we could get worldwide buy-in 20 years ago but short of a planetary-scale engineering project or outright banning fossil fuel usage we're in for some bad times even before we factor in economic growth from India, China, and Africa. Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions. And beyond that we need to start thinking about levelling out energy consumption entirely, even independent of CO2 emissions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U Classic Newsroom clip but fact-checked as accurate, minus the hyperbole at the end about permanent darkness. We're already seeing majorly shifting weather patterns, movement of the jet stream, droughts, unprecedented wildfires, etc. We're already starting to see the first major cities lost due to rising sea levels - Miami is already sinking beneath the seas and it's only a matter of time before it exceeds the limits of engineering to fix it. It's built on porous limestone and borders directly on hundreds of square miles of swamp, so it's something of a worst-case scenario. You can't pump out water when it just comes right back in through the limestone, and even if you could we would be talking about hundreds of times as much wall as the Netherlands uses. Every single building in Miami will need to be elevated Chicago/Seattle style or abandoned within the next decade or two. Otherwise people are going to start leaving rather quickly once the sewers start backflowing on a regular basis. All of modern society is built on the shoulders of sanitation infrastructure and it's going to get nasty once it stops working. http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/climate-desk-fact-checks-aaron-sorkins-climate-science-newsroom http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/climate-desk-... https://newrepublic.com/article/123216/miami-sinking-beneath-sea-not-without-fight https://newrepublic.com/article/123216/miami-sinking-beneath... I wish I had something positive to say like "maybe this will finally get us to proactively solve our problems instead of assuming they can always be fixed at some future date" but I don't actually believe that will happen. We are unwilling to systematically factor in future risks into present costs. Heck, even we as a community don't do it properly - how many times are we going to get hacked before we learn to lock things down from day 1? Sorry to be pessimistic but that's the reality at this point. Objections to this are political slant and wishful thinking. The US military's job is to be apolitical and make realistic assessments about future threats to our nation, and they're planning for increased levels of conflict due to climate change in the 21st century. It's happening and it's going to suck pretty bad. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-idUSKCN11K0BC http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-idUSKCN1... http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-climate-change-aids-terrorists-destabilizes-entire-world-stresses-military/ http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-cl...
  - Mz 10y ago
    I wish I had something positive to say When the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire as the Iraqis left, the prediction was that it would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got. In the 1990's, they were predicting a global financial meltdown due to y2k and people were prepping for it -- putting away food stocks, etc. That got quietly solved and no one wakes up every day going "THANK GOD THEY SOLVED THAT AND WE AREN"T LIVING IN THE POST Y2K APOCALYPSE!!!!" I think we can solve this. I also think if we do solve it, people will act like the fears we are expressing now about it were overblown. People are terrible about being unable to count the disasters that did not happen. When things go well, we seem to think that is "normal" even though it really is not. I am aware we may not solve it and the world may, in fact, go to hell the way everyone is predicting. But may not and cannot are different things. But, you know, we are all dust in the wind anyway. In another million years, none of this really matters. My experience is that if you have something positive to say, people pretty much ignore you. I am still trying to figure out how to get traction for being able to talk about things that actually work in various problem spaces. People mostly do not want to hear it. They are far more interested in being all emo about the state of the world while carrying on with their lifestyle as usual for the most part.
    - thaumaturgy 10y ago
      I fixed my fair share of Y2K bugs in COBOL in 1998-1999. I agree with you. I know from the work I did then that there would have been some pretty serious, life-disrupting issues had there not been the colossal effort to fix it all (payroll jobs in fact did fail to run, as did financial reports, report cards, etc.). I'm generally an optimist. I think there will be fairly widespread support for environmental engineering in our state to protect and repair our natural areas. (There already is a lot of that.) But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.
      - Mz 10y ago
- jefurii 10y ago
  > LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct Those alfalfa farms where the entire crop is shipped off to China are a huge chunk of the state's water usage. The Central Valley could also move from almonds and other water-intensive crops. If it was just vegetables and tree fruit it wouldn't be so bad.
  - losteric 10y ago
    > The Central Valley could also move from almonds and other water-intensive crops. Subsidies are a big problem. Washington actually has pretty good climate for growing almonds and there's plenty of resources for thirsty almonds... yet most almonds are grown in California because growers can assume water is essentially free. Good luck running on a platform to end subsidies though. Media will immediately spin that into "shipping jobs overseas, hurting our poor local farmers". The conservative Central Valley will love that.
    - CalRobert 10y ago
      That actually would be a good argument for splitting CA in two. Culturally it's shocking it's one state anyway.
      - techdragon 10y ago
        Culturally it's much more diverse than 2 states.. rural, LA, SF, modern suburban intermediate. California is a strangely successful state considering that if it was a country it would probably have gone the way of Czechoslovakia ages ago.
- dubyah 10y ago
  refusing to even consider solutions such as desal plants. That's not really true; improved stormwater capture, potable reuse, and fixing leaking infrastructure are far more economical & environmentally friendly options being planned or undertaken. MWD put out a proposal last year for a billion dollar potable reuse plant and the SWRCB put out a draft report for regulation of direct potable reuse out last month. Desalination plants are really an option of last resort given their cost, environmental impact, and capacity. The Carlsbad desalination plant cost $1 billion, runs their RO membranes at 800 PSI, produces 50 MGD, and is ~ $2,000 per acre-foot of water. Whereas OC's GWRS(indirect potable reuse) cost ~$623 million after an initial expansion last year, runs their RO membranes at 150 PSI, produces 100 MGD, and is ~ $476(~$850 before subsidies) per acre-foot.
- shams93 10y ago
  Although the trick here in LA is we actually have these super rich mega water users, they have a lot of clout, they should be required to use desal to water their lawns but they won't do it, only the best for their mansions. If we made the super rich pay their fair share for taxes we would actually see some relief for northern california from the massive suckage from the south. If you look at the stats the water consumed by ordinary working people in LA is dwarfed by the amount consumed by just a handful of mega consumers who got a free pass from Governor Brown to keep sucking out that water for their massive gardens and trees and lawns.
  - georgeecollins 10y ago
    This is completely irrational. Urban use (all urban use including "super rich mega water users" ?) is 8% of California's water use. http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108 http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108 Residential users ("super rich") pay 40 times what agricultural users do and they get their water from the same sources. http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/10/23/california-drought-statistics-infographic http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/10/23/california-drough... The truth is that it would be completely cost effective to get urban water from desalination plants, but very expensive to replace farming water that way, which is now being taken from groundwater. But lets not let the facts get in the way of blaming people in mansions.
- WillPostForFood 10y ago
  LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct That's not really how aqueducts work, They don't suck water from mountains, they collect and divert it. Rivers and lakes downstream mountains lose access water. The mountains don't lose any water that they wouldn't have anyway. You can blame gravity, not aqueducts or Los Angeles. The tree die off is an effect of the long California drought.
korethr 10y ago
I find it odd that the fire scars from a few years back are still black. Many years ago I was doing some volunteer work with my father here in Colorado, running donated supplies up to the base camps of the firefighters working an active fire. On the drive up, we passed through areas previously burned by the fire, I want to say a couple weeks earlier, and you could see new plants sprouting up everywhere. It seems to me that fire fertilized the soil and made room for new plants to start growing. I was of the understanding that fires are a healthy thing for a forest, though I must admit that it's been decades since I've lived in California, and that the local climates and ecologies are quite different.
- npsimons 10y ago
  At least at higher altitudes, things decay and grow a lot slower. This is why you will see signs forbidding campfires above certain elevations and also why you have to pack out excrement in many places.
- greeneggs 10y ago
  There's a theory that decades of wildfire suppression have led to a buildup of material, so that when fires occur now they are much more severe than they would otherwise have been. These hotter fires kill a lot more, and are harder to recover from. [0, 1] > "Historically, fires operated in a way that tended to be less severe in valley bottoms and lower slopes," Taylor added. "Now, because of fire suppression, they tend to burn at a higher severity and you lose that habitat." The practice of not allowing any fires means that more leaf litter and branches—the components of forest fuel—can accumulate on the floor, while small trees that would have burned in the past can grow large enough to carry fires into the crowns of the taller trees that had escaped the impact of less severe fires in the past, putting the landscape in jeopardy. [0] [0] http://news.psu.edu/story/270206/2013/03/26/research/suppression-naturally-occurring-blazes-may-increase-wildfire-risk http://news.psu.edu/story/270206/2013/03/26/research/suppres... [1] http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/static/documents/2012/06/13/Stephens_Surrogates_BioSci_2012.pdf http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/static/documents/2012/06/13/St...
  - blakes 10y ago
knowtheory 10y ago
My wife & I traveled up to Big Trees State Forest (north & west of Yosemite) for the first time two months ago. I was astonished at the number of dead trees. Talking with the park rangers, i found out that the state of the park is _after_ a half million dollar project to thin the underbrush and dead wood in order to protect the park in the event of a fire.
steven777400 10y ago
I'm not disagreeing at all, I'm just curious your source for "dry and cold winter". NOAA's Jan-Feb-Mar 2017 predictions for California show normal to warmer than normal temperature [0] and generally normal precipitation [1]. [0] http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range/poe_index.php?lead=4&var=t http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range... [1] http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range/poe_index.php?lead=4&var=p http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range...
- thaumaturgy 10y ago
  Huh, that's interesting. I should've checked NOAA, I know better. Source was an interview with the woman running the Old Farmer's Almanac, aired on NPR a couple of weeks ago. I'll take some time later today to see what the overall consensus looks like from more sources.
  - sammydavis 10y ago
    Old Farmer's Almanac! Come on man, they just make that stuff up. There are even studies about how useless they are.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> The damage, when you see it up close, is stunning. You'll be driving along a highway and see miles, and miles, and miles of dead trees standing there, waiting to burn. Is this a cyclical kind of thing, or does it seem to be unprecedented? I'm asking because I know nothing about this topic.
- thaumaturgy 10y ago
  It seems to be unprecedented, at least on the time scale of "middle-aged human". On geological time scales, you'd have to ask someone much older. :-) edit: for a less flippant reply, a lot of folks don't realize that vast swathes of what we now consider dense forest were all logged to the ground from about 1800 to about 1930. That's what makes places like Sequoia National Park and Big Basin State Park and parts of Humboldt and Mendocino counties so unique -- they're the remnants of old growth forest, and it's a very different kind of forest. So perhaps it's not right to talk about this in terms of the "health of the forest". Much of the current forest could die and be replaced by entirely new forest over the next hundred years. A better question is, what kind of environment do we want to be able to enjoy during our lifetime? That environment is currently struggling. I don't much care for hiking in burn scars and dealing with muddy places in the Winter, so I'm pretty interested in what's happening to the forests right now.
  - seanalltogether 10y ago
    > I don't much care for hiking in burn scars and dealing with muddy places in the Winter, so I'm pretty interested in what's happening to the forests right now. So I'm from Colorado and spend a decent amount of time in the mountains. I've read an argument that our over protection of the forest is potentially to blame for some of the problems right now. We do everything we can to protect it from forest fires, and now its being chocked out by dead trees and overgrowth. If this argument is wrong however I would like to understand it better.
    - thaumaturgy 10y ago
      Yeah, fwiw that argument has become pretty convincing to me too. I used to be staunchly opposed to any kind of forest management, and now I'm much less bothered by seeing a carefully-thinned forest area. Manzanita is one of the bigger reasons (for me). I hate that damn plant with a fiery passion, and it's one of the first things in the sierra to come back and take over an area after it burns. Well-managed forest areas tend to have much much less manzanita.
nerdponx 10y ago
Isn't this when they start doing controlled burns? Or is that not a thing.
ldehaan 10y ago
Also in colorado up around breckenridge, the trees look like matches, covering whole mountain ranges. The lack of enough rain weakened the trees enough to let the beetles do their destructive work. Also, buy air filters now, because they get expensive during fire season.

npsimons 10y ago

I too spend a lot of time in the Sierras, though more of the Southern end. I would concur with your conclusions. While I'm not the most cognizant of foliage, I can say that the watershed has dropped noticeably over the years. People might say "who cares? you only need water for overnight trips.", but that's not only wrong, but missing the big picture. The Sierras have been getting less snow, and LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct, refusing to even consider solutions such as desal plants. Public transportation to reduce AGW is also a no-brainer that no one seems to want. Damage has already been done, but there are actions that could be taken to improve the situation. No one seems to care, though.

paulmd 10y ago
The reality is that it's too late at this point. The easy fixes might have worked if we could get worldwide buy-in 20 years ago but short of a planetary-scale engineering project or outright banning fossil fuel usage we're in for some bad times even before we factor in economic growth from India, China, and Africa. Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions. And beyond that we need to start thinking about levelling out energy consumption entirely, even independent of CO2 emissions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U Classic Newsroom clip but fact-checked as accurate, minus the hyperbole at the end about permanent darkness. We're already seeing majorly shifting weather patterns, movement of the jet stream, droughts, unprecedented wildfires, etc. We're already starting to see the first major cities lost due to rising sea levels - Miami is already sinking beneath the seas and it's only a matter of time before it exceeds the limits of engineering to fix it. It's built on porous limestone and borders directly on hundreds of square miles of swamp, so it's something of a worst-case scenario. You can't pump out water when it just comes right back in through the limestone, and even if you could we would be talking about hundreds of times as much wall as the Netherlands uses. Every single building in Miami will need to be elevated Chicago/Seattle style or abandoned within the next decade or two. Otherwise people are going to start leaving rather quickly once the sewers start backflowing on a regular basis. All of modern society is built on the shoulders of sanitation infrastructure and it's going to get nasty once it stops working. http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/climate-desk-fact-checks-aaron-sorkins-climate-science-newsroom http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/climate-desk-... https://newrepublic.com/article/123216/miami-sinking-beneath-sea-not-without-fight https://newrepublic.com/article/123216/miami-sinking-beneath... I wish I had something positive to say like "maybe this will finally get us to proactively solve our problems instead of assuming they can always be fixed at some future date" but I don't actually believe that will happen. We are unwilling to systematically factor in future risks into present costs. Heck, even we as a community don't do it properly - how many times are we going to get hacked before we learn to lock things down from day 1? Sorry to be pessimistic but that's the reality at this point. Objections to this are political slant and wishful thinking. The US military's job is to be apolitical and make realistic assessments about future threats to our nation, and they're planning for increased levels of conflict due to climate change in the 21st century. It's happening and it's going to suck pretty bad. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-idUSKCN11K0BC http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-idUSKCN1... http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-climate-change-aids-terrorists-destabilizes-entire-world-stresses-military/ http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-cl...
- Mz 10y ago
  I wish I had something positive to say When the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire as the Iraqis left, the prediction was that it would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got. In the 1990's, they were predicting a global financial meltdown due to y2k and people were prepping for it -- putting away food stocks, etc. That got quietly solved and no one wakes up every day going "THANK GOD THEY SOLVED THAT AND WE AREN"T LIVING IN THE POST Y2K APOCALYPSE!!!!" I think we can solve this. I also think if we do solve it, people will act like the fears we are expressing now about it were overblown. People are terrible about being unable to count the disasters that did not happen. When things go well, we seem to think that is "normal" even though it really is not. I am aware we may not solve it and the world may, in fact, go to hell the way everyone is predicting. But may not and cannot are different things. But, you know, we are all dust in the wind anyway. In another million years, none of this really matters. My experience is that if you have something positive to say, people pretty much ignore you. I am still trying to figure out how to get traction for being able to talk about things that actually work in various problem spaces. People mostly do not want to hear it. They are far more interested in being all emo about the state of the world while carrying on with their lifestyle as usual for the most part.
  - thaumaturgy 10y ago
    I fixed my fair share of Y2K bugs in COBOL in 1998-1999. I agree with you. I know from the work I did then that there would have been some pretty serious, life-disrupting issues had there not been the colossal effort to fix it all (payroll jobs in fact did fail to run, as did financial reports, report cards, etc.). I'm generally an optimist. I think there will be fairly widespread support for environmental engineering in our state to protect and repair our natural areas. (There already is a lot of that.) But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.
    - Mz 10y ago
jefurii 10y ago
> LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct Those alfalfa farms where the entire crop is shipped off to China are a huge chunk of the state's water usage. The Central Valley could also move from almonds and other water-intensive crops. If it was just vegetables and tree fruit it wouldn't be so bad.
- losteric 10y ago
  > The Central Valley could also move from almonds and other water-intensive crops. Subsidies are a big problem. Washington actually has pretty good climate for growing almonds and there's plenty of resources for thirsty almonds... yet most almonds are grown in California because growers can assume water is essentially free. Good luck running on a platform to end subsidies though. Media will immediately spin that into "shipping jobs overseas, hurting our poor local farmers". The conservative Central Valley will love that.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    That actually would be a good argument for splitting CA in two. Culturally it's shocking it's one state anyway.
    - techdragon 10y ago
      Culturally it's much more diverse than 2 states.. rural, LA, SF, modern suburban intermediate. California is a strangely successful state considering that if it was a country it would probably have gone the way of Czechoslovakia ages ago.
dubyah 10y ago
refusing to even consider solutions such as desal plants. That's not really true; improved stormwater capture, potable reuse, and fixing leaking infrastructure are far more economical & environmentally friendly options being planned or undertaken. MWD put out a proposal last year for a billion dollar potable reuse plant and the SWRCB put out a draft report for regulation of direct potable reuse out last month. Desalination plants are really an option of last resort given their cost, environmental impact, and capacity. The Carlsbad desalination plant cost $1 billion, runs their RO membranes at 800 PSI, produces 50 MGD, and is ~ $2,000 per acre-foot of water. Whereas OC's GWRS(indirect potable reuse) cost ~$623 million after an initial expansion last year, runs their RO membranes at 150 PSI, produces 100 MGD, and is ~ $476(~$850 before subsidies) per acre-foot.
shams93 10y ago
Although the trick here in LA is we actually have these super rich mega water users, they have a lot of clout, they should be required to use desal to water their lawns but they won't do it, only the best for their mansions. If we made the super rich pay their fair share for taxes we would actually see some relief for northern california from the massive suckage from the south. If you look at the stats the water consumed by ordinary working people in LA is dwarfed by the amount consumed by just a handful of mega consumers who got a free pass from Governor Brown to keep sucking out that water for their massive gardens and trees and lawns.
- georgeecollins 10y ago
  This is completely irrational. Urban use (all urban use including "super rich mega water users" ?) is 8% of California's water use. http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108 http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108 Residential users ("super rich") pay 40 times what agricultural users do and they get their water from the same sources. http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/10/23/california-drought-statistics-infographic http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/10/23/california-drough... The truth is that it would be completely cost effective to get urban water from desalination plants, but very expensive to replace farming water that way, which is now being taken from groundwater. But lets not let the facts get in the way of blaming people in mansions.
WillPostForFood 10y ago
LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct That's not really how aqueducts work, They don't suck water from mountains, they collect and divert it. Rivers and lakes downstream mountains lose access water. The mountains don't lose any water that they wouldn't have anyway. You can blame gravity, not aqueducts or Los Angeles. The tree die off is an effect of the long California drought.

korethr 10y ago

I find it odd that the fire scars from a few years back are still black. Many years ago I was doing some volunteer work with my father here in Colorado, running donated supplies up to the base camps of the firefighters working an active fire. On the drive up, we passed through areas previously burned by the fire, I want to say a couple weeks earlier, and you could see new plants sprouting up everywhere. It seems to me that fire fertilized the soil and made room for new plants to start growing. I was of the understanding that fires are a healthy thing for a forest, though I must admit that it's been decades since I've lived in California, and that the local climates and ecologies are quite different.

npsimons 10y ago
At least at higher altitudes, things decay and grow a lot slower. This is why you will see signs forbidding campfires above certain elevations and also why you have to pack out excrement in many places.
greeneggs 10y ago
There's a theory that decades of wildfire suppression have led to a buildup of material, so that when fires occur now they are much more severe than they would otherwise have been. These hotter fires kill a lot more, and are harder to recover from. [0, 1] > "Historically, fires operated in a way that tended to be less severe in valley bottoms and lower slopes," Taylor added. "Now, because of fire suppression, they tend to burn at a higher severity and you lose that habitat." The practice of not allowing any fires means that more leaf litter and branches—the components of forest fuel—can accumulate on the floor, while small trees that would have burned in the past can grow large enough to carry fires into the crowns of the taller trees that had escaped the impact of less severe fires in the past, putting the landscape in jeopardy. [0] [0] http://news.psu.edu/story/270206/2013/03/26/research/suppression-naturally-occurring-blazes-may-increase-wildfire-risk http://news.psu.edu/story/270206/2013/03/26/research/suppres... [1] http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/static/documents/2012/06/13/Stephens_Surrogates_BioSci_2012.pdf http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/static/documents/2012/06/13/St...
- blakes 10y ago

knowtheory 10y ago

My wife & I traveled up to Big Trees State Forest (north & west of Yosemite) for the first time two months ago. I was astonished at the number of dead trees. Talking with the park rangers, i found out that the state of the park is _after_ a half million dollar project to thin the underbrush and dead wood in order to protect the park in the event of a fire.

steven777400 10y ago

I'm not disagreeing at all, I'm just curious your source for "dry and cold winter". NOAA's Jan-Feb-Mar 2017 predictions for California show normal to warmer than normal temperature [0] and generally normal precipitation [1]. [0] http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range/poe_index.php?lead=4&var=t http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range... [1] http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range/poe_index.php?lead=4&var=p http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range...

thaumaturgy 10y ago
Huh, that's interesting. I should've checked NOAA, I know better. Source was an interview with the woman running the Old Farmer's Almanac, aired on NPR a couple of weeks ago. I'll take some time later today to see what the overall consensus looks like from more sources.
- sammydavis 10y ago
  Old Farmer's Almanac! Come on man, they just make that stuff up. There are even studies about how useless they are.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> The damage, when you see it up close, is stunning. You'll be driving along a highway and see miles, and miles, and miles of dead trees standing there, waiting to burn. Is this a cyclical kind of thing, or does it seem to be unprecedented? I'm asking because I know nothing about this topic.

thaumaturgy 10y ago
It seems to be unprecedented, at least on the time scale of "middle-aged human". On geological time scales, you'd have to ask someone much older. :-) edit: for a less flippant reply, a lot of folks don't realize that vast swathes of what we now consider dense forest were all logged to the ground from about 1800 to about 1930. That's what makes places like Sequoia National Park and Big Basin State Park and parts of Humboldt and Mendocino counties so unique -- they're the remnants of old growth forest, and it's a very different kind of forest. So perhaps it's not right to talk about this in terms of the "health of the forest". Much of the current forest could die and be replaced by entirely new forest over the next hundred years. A better question is, what kind of environment do we want to be able to enjoy during our lifetime? That environment is currently struggling. I don't much care for hiking in burn scars and dealing with muddy places in the Winter, so I'm pretty interested in what's happening to the forests right now.
- seanalltogether 10y ago
  > I don't much care for hiking in burn scars and dealing with muddy places in the Winter, so I'm pretty interested in what's happening to the forests right now. So I'm from Colorado and spend a decent amount of time in the mountains. I've read an argument that our over protection of the forest is potentially to blame for some of the problems right now. We do everything we can to protect it from forest fires, and now its being chocked out by dead trees and overgrowth. If this argument is wrong however I would like to understand it better.
  - thaumaturgy 10y ago
    Yeah, fwiw that argument has become pretty convincing to me too. I used to be staunchly opposed to any kind of forest management, and now I'm much less bothered by seeing a carefully-thinned forest area. Manzanita is one of the bigger reasons (for me). I hate that damn plant with a fiery passion, and it's one of the first things in the sierra to come back and take over an area after it burns. Well-managed forest areas tend to have much much less manzanita.

nerdponx 10y ago

Isn't this when they start doing controlled burns? Or is that not a thing.

ldehaan 10y ago

Also in colorado up around breckenridge, the trees look like matches, covering whole mountain ranges. The lack of enough rain weakened the trees enough to let the beetles do their destructive work. Also, buy air filters now, because they get expensive during fire season.