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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 - C

by gdubs 6y ago

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?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eloff 6y ago
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. [1] http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  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
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    Water does not just flood rapidly back to the ocean on its own. It forms rivers, streams, creeks, flood plains, ponds, and lakes. 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.
- jarnagin 6y ago
  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. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_2/19729 https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_2/19729
  - eloff 6y ago
    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.
- Diederich 6y ago
  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.
  - ouroboros1 6y ago
    > 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.
    - eloff 6y ago
      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.
    - Diederich 6y ago
      https://sites.nationalacademies.org/BasedOnScience/climate-change-global-warming-is-contributing-to-extreme-weather-events/index.htm https://sites.nationalacademies.org/BasedOnScience/climate-c...
      - ouroboros1 6y ago
        Ah! Thank you
- Justsignedup 6y ago
  Thats a bad way to look at it. 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?
  - throwaway1777 6y ago
    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.
    - stingrae 6y ago
      we're not too protected either. What percentage of the US's food gets grown in CA? https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-produce-a-lot-of-food-but-what-and-how-much-might-surprise-you/#:~:text=While%20California%20produces%2013%20percent,more)%20for%20the%20following%20crops https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-prod.... 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.
  - Isamu 6y ago
    > The moisture is being sucked out of some places and falling to others. I would like to learn more about this, can someone post more information?
- gnopgnip 6y ago
  Both can be true. It can be wetter on average, but drier during fire season
refurb 6y ago
Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Are you saying firestorms don’t happen naturally? I don’t know how to interpret your comment.
- hinkley 6y ago
  “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.
  - kaonwarb 6y ago
    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.)
    - hinkley 6y ago
      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.
      - 6y ago
hinkley 6y ago
I hope so. 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.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  "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.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    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.
calvinmorrison 6y ago
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?
- dhosek 6y ago
  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). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak
  - dmckeon 6y ago
    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.
    - dhosek 6y ago
      Yeah, sloppy language on my part. I should have said "fire" rather than "flame", the former encompassing firebrands/cinders/etc.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  During the socal fires a few years back, the Santa Ana winds caused it to jump an 8 lane freeway. You're going to need one hell of a firebreak.
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    A fire jumped the Columbia River (a large river) a couple of years ago https://www.opb.org/news/series/wildfires/oregon-columbia-river-gorge-wildfires-interstate-84/ https://www.opb.org/news/series/wildfires/oregon-columbia-ri...
leafboi 6y ago
In all likelihood the answer is no. They won't survive.
nitrogen 6y ago
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 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.
dfsegoat 6y ago
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. 1 - https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=6dc469279760492d802c7ba6db45ff0e&extent=-13816097.4846%2C4550240.7459%2C-13577613.9563%2C4705713.6614%2C102100 https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?i...
brudgers 6y ago
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.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
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 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.
- gdubs 6y ago
  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.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    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.
joconne 6y ago
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. [0] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/about-bcws/wildfire-history/wildfire-season-summary https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/ab...
EricE 6y ago
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.

by gdubs 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eloff 6y ago

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. [1] http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf

maerF0x0 6y ago
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
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  Water does not just flood rapidly back to the ocean on its own. It forms rivers, streams, creeks, flood plains, ponds, and lakes. 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.
jarnagin 6y ago
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. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_2/19729 https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_2/19729
- eloff 6y ago
  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.
Diederich 6y ago
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.
- ouroboros1 6y ago
  > 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.
  - eloff 6y ago
    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.
  - Diederich 6y ago
    https://sites.nationalacademies.org/BasedOnScience/climate-change-global-warming-is-contributing-to-extreme-weather-events/index.htm https://sites.nationalacademies.org/BasedOnScience/climate-c...
    - ouroboros1 6y ago
      Ah! Thank you
Justsignedup 6y ago
Thats a bad way to look at it. 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?
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  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.
  - stingrae 6y ago
    we're not too protected either. What percentage of the US's food gets grown in CA? https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-produce-a-lot-of-food-but-what-and-how-much-might-surprise-you/#:~:text=While%20California%20produces%2013%20percent,more)%20for%20the%20following%20crops https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-prod.... 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.
- Isamu 6y ago
  > The moisture is being sucked out of some places and falling to others. I would like to learn more about this, can someone post more information?
gnopgnip 6y ago
Both can be true. It can be wetter on average, but drier during fire season

refurb 6y ago

Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Are you saying firestorms don’t happen naturally? I don’t know how to interpret your comment.

hinkley 6y ago
“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.
- kaonwarb 6y ago
  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.)
  - hinkley 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago

hinkley 6y ago

I hope so. 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.

throwaway5752 6y ago
"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.
- hinkley 6y ago
  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.

calvinmorrison 6y ago

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?

dhosek 6y ago
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). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak
- dmckeon 6y ago
  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.
  - dhosek 6y ago
    Yeah, sloppy language on my part. I should have said "fire" rather than "flame", the former encompassing firebrands/cinders/etc.
bcrosby95 6y ago
During the socal fires a few years back, the Santa Ana winds caused it to jump an 8 lane freeway. You're going to need one hell of a firebreak.
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  A fire jumped the Columbia River (a large river) a couple of years ago https://www.opb.org/news/series/wildfires/oregon-columbia-river-gorge-wildfires-interstate-84/ https://www.opb.org/news/series/wildfires/oregon-columbia-ri...

leafboi 6y ago

In all likelihood the answer is no. They won't survive.

nitrogen 6y ago

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 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.

dfsegoat 6y ago

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. 1 - https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=6dc469279760492d802c7ba6db45ff0e&extent=-13816097.4846%2C4550240.7459%2C-13577613.9563%2C4705713.6614%2C102100 https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?i...

brudgers 6y ago

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.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

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 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.

gdubs 6y ago
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.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  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.

joconne 6y ago

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. [0] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/about-bcws/wildfire-history/wildfire-season-summary https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/ab...

EricE 6y ago

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.