6 ms·

The Northeast is becoming fire country

jmclnx 2y ago
Yes there were fires, but unless something changed, the NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change. So I doubt there will ever be fires in the NE that compare to the West. This is due to a drough that does happen once in a while. If there was no fire new NYC, I doubt this article would be published :)
- caseyohara 2y ago
  Global warming causes more precipitation and more intense drought periods. We're going to see more extreme wet events and more extreme droughts. Warmer temps increase evaporation, which leads to more precipitation. But increased evaporation decreases surface water and dries out soil/plants/vegetation (drought). This makes periods with low precipitation drier than they would be with cooler temps (more intense drought).
  - genter 2y ago
    And the precipitation causes more vegetative growth, providing more fuel during the drought periods.
  - cmcconomy 2y ago
    And - the greater earlier precipitation means more fuel mass
- bcrosby95 2y ago
  Some of our worst fires in California were the summer after winters with extreme rain events. If you have a dry season, you can have a fire season, and the wetter your wet season, the worse fire season will be.
  - hammock 2y ago
    The northeast woods does not have a wet/dry seasonality the way fire country in the West does. In the West, the wettest month (which is in winter) can have 6-10 inches of rain while the driest (which is in summer) has 0-0.5 inch. In the northeast, the wettest month (which is in SUMMER), might be 3-5 inches. The driest (which is in WINTER) might be 2-3 inches, including snowfall.
  - tomtheelder 2y ago
    The Northeast doesn't have a dry season, and I don't think anyone seriously thinks it's going to develop one. It just has occasional dry periods because precipitation is pretty chaotic, and is getting more chaotic due to climate change. When one of those happens there's some fire risk, like has just happened. "The Northeast is becoming fire country" is just unabashed scare mongering.
- coding123 2y ago
  This isn't in the news yet, but the VAST majority of fires, like 9/10 in CA in 2024 were arson. Just a warning if that trend spreads to the NE.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - kasey_junk 2y ago
    The stats I’ve seen suggest the ratio was the inverse of that, that 1/10 were arson related. Do you have a source for the 9/10 number? https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/arson-wildfires-california-los-angeles https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/arson-wildfires-c...
    - coding123 2y ago
      Not in the news, I have seen it with my own eyes.
      - wk_end 2y ago
        You've seen, with your own eyes, a large enough sample of the genesis of the thousands of forest fires that California has per year to draw that statistical conclusion?
        kasey_junk 2y ago
        The most ominous interpretation of their comment is that they started 90% of the forest fires in California.
  - sundaeofshock 2y ago
- starlust2 2y ago
  If climate change reaches the tipping point where clouds cannot form then we probably won't be seeing much rain anywhere.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Humidity can still hit 100% though, yea?
    - starlust2 2y ago
      I'm not sure about that but in that scenario polar regions would be 75-85F and life would be very harsh just about everywhere else. The one period in time where temperatures were that high, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, diversity plummeted, mammals were smaller and migrated to higher latitudes.
- crystal_revenge 2y ago
  > the NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change. One of the biggest challenges with climate change is that it continually increases variance in the system as warming increases. It's hard enough to correctly model a stable climate system, but modeling one that will be continuously changing for many human lifetimes is very hard. We're not headed to a "new normal", if we ('we' being life on this planet and human civilization) were we'd simply adapt to it, it would be costly, but survivable. But climate change will continue to cause radical and increasingly difficult to predict changes, and those changes themselves are subject to equally radical future transitions. This is why climate change is such a true crisis: it cannot be "adapted" to, because there is no stationary state we'll arrive at any time soon. Just look at Europe: the last few years it's been experience extreme heatwaves, but if the AMOC collapses (which it may, even in our life time) that will likely cause it to experience extreme cold. Even then the exact details of an event as extreme as the AMOC collapsing are hard to predict, and the AMOC collapsing is just one of countless other similarly extreme events we are going to be facing in coming decades.
  - jajko 2y ago
    More chaos. Plus overall warming (which will ie rise ocean levels), which is again chaotic so it can even mean some local drops. I think for many this is the limit of how they can/want to understand whats inevitably coming. More info causes many to zone out, move it quickly to mumbo-jumbo and seek another dopamine hit or some other cheap empty fun. Like it or not, we need for regular Joe to care at least a bit and understand at least on surface why. If we wrap it in economy like many populists do, that battle is lost (which may be intentional on their part).
    - morkalork 2y ago
      I dunno, the nihilism is creeping in. Why not buy that nice steak at the market today? The price of beef is only going to be higher next year. And so it goes.
      - defrost 2y ago
        Russia anticipates Siberia becoming cattle country and has been sending and supporting Russians to Texas to train as cowboys and take part in rodeos.
- gopalv 2y ago
  > NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change At least in CA, rain causes more grass growth for fires to connect up through. The fire material just builds up as growth pull carbon out and builds up a pile of it (because when a tree grows, most of its mass comes from the air & rain). And then the fires were started by a "Lightning complex" on top of a hill.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Even if it doesn't compare to fire risk or intensity in other regions, the occurrence of more fires that are hotter or wilder is still a big deal for regions that haven't had many in recent history. Most ecosystems in traditional "fire country" are adapted to those fires and sometimes even need some volume fires to keep working the way they have been, with the life that inhabits them. That's not the case for ecosystems in the Northeast. Large fires will take much longer to recover there, and traditional biomes and inhabitants may not recover from them at all. That's not only sad for naturalists, but can have pretty significant downstream effects on the human communities in the region.
whalesalad 2y ago
I find it all amusing. A few hundred or thousand acres burn in NY/NJ and everyone loses their shit. Watching the newscasts, governor and other admins talk about the issue they make it seem like something we have never witnessed before as a human race. Meanwhile in my home state of California (often mocked and judged by the rest of the nation), they are dealing with fires that burn hundreds of thousands of acres. NY: "Statewide, there are currently six wildfires in New York State encompassing nearly 6,031 acres, including the Jennings Creek/Sterling State Park fire. " CA: 1,040,146 acres burned this year. So next time you wanna talk shit about California and how they handle wildfires, take a look at the amateur hour response from the east coast first.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  Let nobody deny California is the best at burning to a crisp
- yCombLinks 2y ago
  This is how everything works. Systems that aren't designed to handle an event are unlikely to handle it well. Where I live, we got 4 inches of rain in 20 minutes yesterday. That was a Tuesday. From the time I've spent out west, I believe in that place it would be disaster level flooding.
  - mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
    We're likely to see more of this with climate change, right? Major snows in areas that can't handle it. Typhoons|Cyclones|Hurricanes hitting areas that can't handle it, etc. It is a big deal when an area gets a weather event that is not normal for that area because they cannot handle it and don't have the tools or people with experience in the area to deal with it. I think the freaking out is justified because it may help save lives - people in the affected area are more likely to hear about it and hopefully react accordingly.
    - yCombLinks 2y ago
      Yes, 100%, though we may build more resilient systems as it becomes the norm, or better mobile response type systems.
silexia 2y ago
Farmer and small private forest manager here. We need more logging and controlled burns to control the fuel.
1970-01-01 2y ago
You don't witness self-refuting articles very often. Editors must already be on holiday. >But the tree rings also show droughts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a severe drought in the nineteen-sixties. (1963 was a particularly tragic wildfire season in New Jersey.) The Earth’s atmosphere is complex enough that, every now and then, Seager explained, “something really strange is going to happen and there’s going to be a long sequence of dry weather.”
- defrost 2y ago
  It's not clear how evidence of past wet-dry cycles "refutes" the assertion that the region is currently experiencing drought conditions and becoming more fire prone.
dylan604 2y ago
Until they have a website called isnewenglandonfire.com that simply replies with a date stamp and the word Yes, then no. iscaliforniaonfire.com
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  But you could make such a site for Pennsylvania [1]. NY almost qualifies [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Flame_Falls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Flame_Falls
LordOmlette 2y ago
Global warming may bring us more rain overall, but the current high pressure system (expected to end tonight?) has kept rain away from us for 2 months now, which wasn't helping anything. The article doesn't mention that 700 full-time park workers were cut in Eric Adams' budget. 50 of those park workers were forestry specialists, who did things such as removing sick/dead trees, and clearing the sort of brush/debris that is easily ignitable. We see this over and over again: whatever money you "save" by delaying or skipping maintenance, you end up having to spend when something actually breaks. [1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3agxyk0ctx0e1.gif https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3... [2] https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/07/01/parks-budget-shrinks-eric-adams/ https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/07/01/parks-budget-shrinks-eric... [3] https://thechiefleader.com/stories/urban-forest-program-gutted-by-budget-cuts-vacancies,52936 https://thechiefleader.com/stories/urban-forest-program-gutt... [4] https://hellgatenyc.com/parks-budget-cuts-let-it-burn/ https://hellgatenyc.com/parks-budget-cuts-let-it-burn/
- Neonlicht 2y ago
  It probably doesn't help that people love to build houses in forests so that in every forest fire the fire department has to show up to save them.

Yes there were fires, but unless something changed, the NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change. So I doubt there will ever be fires in the NE that compare to the West. This is due to a drough that does happen once in a while. If there was no fire new NYC, I doubt this article would be published :)

caseyohara 2y ago
Global warming causes more precipitation and more intense drought periods. We're going to see more extreme wet events and more extreme droughts. Warmer temps increase evaporation, which leads to more precipitation. But increased evaporation decreases surface water and dries out soil/plants/vegetation (drought). This makes periods with low precipitation drier than they would be with cooler temps (more intense drought).
- genter 2y ago
  And the precipitation causes more vegetative growth, providing more fuel during the drought periods.
- cmcconomy 2y ago
  And - the greater earlier precipitation means more fuel mass
bcrosby95 2y ago
Some of our worst fires in California were the summer after winters with extreme rain events. If you have a dry season, you can have a fire season, and the wetter your wet season, the worse fire season will be.
- hammock 2y ago
  The northeast woods does not have a wet/dry seasonality the way fire country in the West does. In the West, the wettest month (which is in winter) can have 6-10 inches of rain while the driest (which is in summer) has 0-0.5 inch. In the northeast, the wettest month (which is in SUMMER), might be 3-5 inches. The driest (which is in WINTER) might be 2-3 inches, including snowfall.
- tomtheelder 2y ago
  The Northeast doesn't have a dry season, and I don't think anyone seriously thinks it's going to develop one. It just has occasional dry periods because precipitation is pretty chaotic, and is getting more chaotic due to climate change. When one of those happens there's some fire risk, like has just happened. "The Northeast is becoming fire country" is just unabashed scare mongering.
coding123 2y ago
This isn't in the news yet, but the VAST majority of fires, like 9/10 in CA in 2024 were arson. Just a warning if that trend spreads to the NE.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    [flagged]
- kasey_junk 2y ago
  The stats I’ve seen suggest the ratio was the inverse of that, that 1/10 were arson related. Do you have a source for the 9/10 number? https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/arson-wildfires-california-los-angeles https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/arson-wildfires-c...
  - coding123 2y ago
    Not in the news, I have seen it with my own eyes.
    - wk_end 2y ago
      You've seen, with your own eyes, a large enough sample of the genesis of the thousands of forest fires that California has per year to draw that statistical conclusion?
      - kasey_junk 2y ago
        The most ominous interpretation of their comment is that they started 90% of the forest fires in California.
- sundaeofshock 2y ago
starlust2 2y ago
If climate change reaches the tipping point where clouds cannot form then we probably won't be seeing much rain anywhere.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  Humidity can still hit 100% though, yea?
  - starlust2 2y ago
    I'm not sure about that but in that scenario polar regions would be 75-85F and life would be very harsh just about everywhere else. The one period in time where temperatures were that high, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, diversity plummeted, mammals were smaller and migrated to higher latitudes.
crystal_revenge 2y ago
> the NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change. One of the biggest challenges with climate change is that it continually increases variance in the system as warming increases. It's hard enough to correctly model a stable climate system, but modeling one that will be continuously changing for many human lifetimes is very hard. We're not headed to a "new normal", if we ('we' being life on this planet and human civilization) were we'd simply adapt to it, it would be costly, but survivable. But climate change will continue to cause radical and increasingly difficult to predict changes, and those changes themselves are subject to equally radical future transitions. This is why climate change is such a true crisis: it cannot be "adapted" to, because there is no stationary state we'll arrive at any time soon. Just look at Europe: the last few years it's been experience extreme heatwaves, but if the AMOC collapses (which it may, even in our life time) that will likely cause it to experience extreme cold. Even then the exact details of an event as extreme as the AMOC collapsing are hard to predict, and the AMOC collapsing is just one of countless other similarly extreme events we are going to be facing in coming decades.
- jajko 2y ago
  More chaos. Plus overall warming (which will ie rise ocean levels), which is again chaotic so it can even mean some local drops. I think for many this is the limit of how they can/want to understand whats inevitably coming. More info causes many to zone out, move it quickly to mumbo-jumbo and seek another dopamine hit or some other cheap empty fun. Like it or not, we need for regular Joe to care at least a bit and understand at least on surface why. If we wrap it in economy like many populists do, that battle is lost (which may be intentional on their part).
  - morkalork 2y ago
    I dunno, the nihilism is creeping in. Why not buy that nice steak at the market today? The price of beef is only going to be higher next year. And so it goes.
    - defrost 2y ago
      Russia anticipates Siberia becoming cattle country and has been sending and supporting Russians to Texas to train as cowboys and take part in rodeos.
gopalv 2y ago
> NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change At least in CA, rain causes more grass growth for fires to connect up through. The fire material just builds up as growth pull carbon out and builds up a pile of it (because when a tree grows, most of its mass comes from the air & rain). And then the fires were started by a "Lightning complex" on top of a hill.
swatcoder 2y ago
Even if it doesn't compare to fire risk or intensity in other regions, the occurrence of more fires that are hotter or wilder is still a big deal for regions that haven't had many in recent history. Most ecosystems in traditional "fire country" are adapted to those fires and sometimes even need some volume fires to keep working the way they have been, with the life that inhabits them. That's not the case for ecosystems in the Northeast. Large fires will take much longer to recover there, and traditional biomes and inhabitants may not recover from them at all. That's not only sad for naturalists, but can have pretty significant downstream effects on the human communities in the region.

whalesalad 2y ago

I find it all amusing. A few hundred or thousand acres burn in NY/NJ and everyone loses their shit. Watching the newscasts, governor and other admins talk about the issue they make it seem like something we have never witnessed before as a human race. Meanwhile in my home state of California (often mocked and judged by the rest of the nation), they are dealing with fires that burn hundreds of thousands of acres. NY: "Statewide, there are currently six wildfires in New York State encompassing nearly 6,031 acres, including the Jennings Creek/Sterling State Park fire. " CA: 1,040,146 acres burned this year. So next time you wanna talk shit about California and how they handle wildfires, take a look at the amateur hour response from the east coast first.

jncfhnb 2y ago
Let nobody deny California is the best at burning to a crisp
yCombLinks 2y ago
This is how everything works. Systems that aren't designed to handle an event are unlikely to handle it well. Where I live, we got 4 inches of rain in 20 minutes yesterday. That was a Tuesday. From the time I've spent out west, I believe in that place it would be disaster level flooding.
- mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
  We're likely to see more of this with climate change, right? Major snows in areas that can't handle it. Typhoons|Cyclones|Hurricanes hitting areas that can't handle it, etc. It is a big deal when an area gets a weather event that is not normal for that area because they cannot handle it and don't have the tools or people with experience in the area to deal with it. I think the freaking out is justified because it may help save lives - people in the affected area are more likely to hear about it and hopefully react accordingly.
  - yCombLinks 2y ago
    Yes, 100%, though we may build more resilient systems as it becomes the norm, or better mobile response type systems.

silexia 2y ago

Farmer and small private forest manager here. We need more logging and controlled burns to control the fuel.

1970-01-01 2y ago

You don't witness self-refuting articles very often. Editors must already be on holiday. >But the tree rings also show droughts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a severe drought in the nineteen-sixties. (1963 was a particularly tragic wildfire season in New Jersey.) The Earth’s atmosphere is complex enough that, every now and then, Seager explained, “something really strange is going to happen and there’s going to be a long sequence of dry weather.”

defrost 2y ago
It's not clear how evidence of past wet-dry cycles "refutes" the assertion that the region is currently experiencing drought conditions and becoming more fire prone.

dylan604 2y ago

Until they have a website called isnewenglandonfire.com that simply replies with a date stamp and the word Yes, then no. iscaliforniaonfire.com

8organicbits 2y ago
But you could make such a site for Pennsylvania [1]. NY almost qualifies [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Flame_Falls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Flame_Falls

LordOmlette 2y ago

Global warming may bring us more rain overall, but the current high pressure system (expected to end tonight?) has kept rain away from us for 2 months now, which wasn't helping anything. The article doesn't mention that 700 full-time park workers were cut in Eric Adams' budget. 50 of those park workers were forestry specialists, who did things such as removing sick/dead trees, and clearing the sort of brush/debris that is easily ignitable. We see this over and over again: whatever money you "save" by delaying or skipping maintenance, you end up having to spend when something actually breaks. [1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3agxyk0ctx0e1.gif https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3... [2] https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/07/01/parks-budget-shrinks-eric-adams/ https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/07/01/parks-budget-shrinks-eric... [3] https://thechiefleader.com/stories/urban-forest-program-gutted-by-budget-cuts-vacancies,52936 https://thechiefleader.com/stories/urban-forest-program-gutt... [4] https://hellgatenyc.com/parks-budget-cuts-let-it-burn/ https://hellgatenyc.com/parks-budget-cuts-let-it-burn/

Neonlicht 2y ago
It probably doesn't help that people love to build houses in forests so that in every forest fire the fire department has to show up to save them.