The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the loss in dead trees | Hacker News Reader

The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the loss in dead trees

latimes.com

139 pointsMz104 comments

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.

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.

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

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-...

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-idUSKCN1...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-cl...

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.

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.

But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.

I know that you are aware that I am homeless in California and have been for about 4.5 years. Every place I camp with my two sons, we urinate on the local bushes and trees to intentionally try to grow better cover for our campsite.

Where we currently are, we are camped behind what we thought was a dead tree. Large parts of it are covered in lichen. With being peed on for months, it grew a whole new section and developed berries. Birds began nesting in it. Nearby, what was previously essentially a dead zone is alive with insects and smaller animals.

The large bird that routinely perches above us has stopped screeching constantly -- a territorial behavior intended to drive off competitors for its food -- and we recently witnessed multiple birds of the same species gather nearby in a copse of trees. We think these are all golden eagles and we think they may have paired off to mate, though we aren't sure. It was somewhere between 8 and 11 birds that we could count and it may have been more.

I am homeless and live without a car (and gave up my car a few years before I walked away from my corporate job) and everywhere I pee, the flora and fauna flourish.

My "boots" are probably on the ground a lot more than yours, and to me it looks like it isn't that hard at all to make a positive difference in this situation. Though I have no idea how to start a "please walk more and please pee on a tree" campaign. Nonetheless, everywhere I go, people begin walking more and the local environment visibly improves -- a thing I have written about some: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...

I also have a deadly medical condition that is incurable and I am getting well when doctors claim that cannot be done. So I spent over a year at death's door and have spent a lot of years coming back from that. Thus, what we are doing to our environment looks solvable to me. I have done harder things.

But I am a homeless woman that everyone dismisses as insane because, obviously, only men in white lab coats can figure out how to help deathly ill people (for scads of money, of course) not former homemakers who are dirt poor because of a) being a woman that no one will listen to and b) having an expensive debilitating medical condition.

So, to my eyes, the big challenge is figuring out how to get an audience and how to present the information in a manner that will be palatable. If I can get off the street in the near future, I imagine I will work on that -- because we all need a hobby, I guess.

Well, there are some important differences between berry-bearing trees and the larger conifers, as well as all the various different microbiomes we have around the sierra. There's chaparral, scrub, high desert, foothill, subalpine and alpine environments, and they all have different needs and react differently to environmental changes. The high desert stuff, for instance, is really good at coming back from extended dry hot periods. Chaparral, scrub, and foothill aren't likely to change drastically, I don't think (in my totally uneducated opinion).

I'm more worried about the subalpine forest, the kind of stuff you see in the western Sierra from about 3,000 to 8,000 foot elevation. That's where we're seeing the worst of the tree die-off and wildfire disasters, and it's an ecology that takes much longer to return to what we think of as "healthy". The watersheds in these areas is also a major, very important part of the state's water supply, so impacts on these ecosystems have the potential to affect communities all over the state.

Best wishes to you. Good to hear from you again.

there are some important differences between berry-bearing trees and the larger conifers

Yes, one of which is that some pines only reproduce in the aftermath of fire.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BOREASFire/

http://creationrevolution.com/plants-that-need-fire-to-survi...

"So other than that Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

I'll make an assumption here that is, the oil fires if extinguished would leave something of immense value behind for resources companies to extract? That might be why effort and money was spent on extinguishing them. Why else would the Iraqis set them on fire, so people couldn't have them?

I'm not saying the engineers did a bad job, at all. It sounds like they worked miracles, but the issue with climate change is that the global money distributers and politicians want engineers to stop people from solving this problem. they just don't seem to care. There is no consent given for the right people to fix it.

Solving the problem in this case using common sense and reasoning, just means you're stepping on self-interested, highly deluded people's toes.

The real problem that needs solving first is the baking and political systems. People problems.

Common folk seem to want the issue resolved but have taken the failed stance of being a single entity who can't make a difference, without realising they're everything, the way they vote, travel, eat and consume all are part of the solution. We're all feeding the machine.

The consumption levels in the world are just out of control, I wonder how we have gotten this far. Even today in Rome I was looking at the millions of cigarette butts on he ground, a storm was forecast and I just felt sorry for Mother Earth, she needs rain to provide for us but when it happens, she is rewarded with toxic rubbish ending up in the oceans. She has provided us with everything and that's what we give back.

By the way I think you're right, if the problem was one of pure engineering, science and reasoning, we wouldn't have a problem. In that sense there is a positive side.

What is wrong with us?

Yeah, they lit oil wells -- petroleum. And after the fires were extingushed, sometimes with large amounts of water, the water- and ash-covered desert bloomed like no one could remember in at least twenty years. This did not make the news. It was a footnote in stories with more drama and human interest.

The rich people failing to do something effective about this are fools. They are like the hyenas in "The Lion King" destroying the landscape -- the very source of their wealth. Without abundance, wealth dies.

I blog about varying topics -- homelessness, managing health issues without drugs, etc -- topics to empower ordinary people to solve their problems with minimal resources. There isn't much money it and a lot of people are openly dismissive of me. But not doing it scares me more. No one seems to be effectively addressing these problems.

I would be thrilled if you would check out some of my writing and Tweet it or otherwise share it.

> 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.

The problem here is that the parallel to the burning oil wells are already on fire, have been on fire for years, and the collective response hasn't been one determined to address this, it's been a fight between people who are saying there's a problem and people who are saying the idea of burning oil wells is a conspiracy (and even if it's not, we didn't light the oil wells on fire).

The two examples you gave have a significant mitigating factor -

They are not massively cross disciplinary.

Oil wells were a specific problem solved by finding a solution possible with current tech.

Same for y2k. The fear got us on the other side, and the damage was far less than expected.

But.

We have been harping on climate change forever, there are vested interests who have found it useful to cloud civic thought with FUD, there is a political movement which has evolved (implying that even the base debate was fraught), to openly mock science and research.

Working on climate change is further hampered by it being vague and imprecise, dependent on our improvements in science and tech.

It also severely curtails the options of growing economies who see it as the west robbing them blind, living like kinds and then denying them the same quality of life.

Global warming requires people around the world to feel and believe they are in the same boat, which is worth saving, with other people they share a lot in common with.

Since that is a pipe dream no one is working on, broad political solutions are out, leaving weird targets and alliances to move forward. Targets which most people don't want to meet because it means engines cost more, products become expensive, and margins thin.

This is not a problem solved the same way.

I have not found it necessary to convince anyone global warming is real to inspire them to walk more:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...

So, in my mind, your objections are irrelevant. There are plenty of Americans -- the so-called 99% that rich assholes would like to treat like sheeple and give Basic Income -- whose lives are in the toilet. I in no way need to convince them they are saving the world. I just need to get solutions into their hands that make their lives work better. The solutions that work are lightweight and low cost. If you can arrange your life so that you do not need a car, your quality of life can go up dramatically even if you are some "loser" failing at having a spiffy well-paid career. And then you are doing less harm to the environment even though saving the environment was not on your agenda.

I am a big believer in enlightened self interest. Our current system does not work for most people. We have a shrinking/shrunken middle class and most people's lives are just not working, even if they are doing everything the system tells them is the right thing to do.

The gig economy is growing and Millenials are insisting more on walkable neighborhoods and many of them live without a car. To the best of my ability, I try to encourage people who are failing to get a job to stop looking for a job and embrace the gig economy.

This is not a movement I need to start. It is already happening because no car and flexible work just works better for some people. But I can toss in my two cents worth and hopefully make the transition process a little easier for some folks, basically.

But it's not a black/white thing where once we've gone too far, the bad things happen and it's too late to act.

Things can get _way, way_ worse than this, and we still need to do everything we can asap.

>> The easy fixes might have worked if we could get worldwide buy-in 20 years ago

This is completely true - it's just sad that even now, we can't seem to make the right decisions. Both democrats and republicans have had the opportunity to head this off and have done little to nothing to stop it.

Every time one of these threads come up, I still see Carter's speech in 1977 about the energy crisis: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-...

That was 35+ years ago, what have we done since then? Not much. Reduce emissions by a fraction here and there while other countries ramp up their industrial revolutions and outweigh any gains we make in this country.

>> Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions.

Not sure how this would even be accomplished. Even if you took off all the gas powered cars on the road and replaced them with electric vehicles it wouldn't be enough - and then you have to contend with the pollution on the Li-Ion battery production and recycling issues.

I'm not being sarcastic, but would like to know what you'd propose that would work. In smaller countries mass transit works well, but since our country is so large geographically and our mass transit differs from state to state, I'm not sure even if you outlawed cars all together and just ran with public transportation that would help either.

>> Not sure how this would even be accomplished.

Essentially an end to fossil-fuel combustion as far as is technologically feasible. A large-scale rollout of nuclear power, replacing literally everything, with enough capacity to cover the peaks. Large-scale electric vehicle rollout where feasible, large-scale synthetic-liquid fuel (derived from nuclear energy and atmospheric sources) rolled out where direct electric is infeasible (colder climates and aircraft).

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jrse/4/3/10.106...

There is no technical impediment to a large-scale nuclear rollout. We literally have unlimited power at our fingertips and we cannot find the will to use it. The only thing we need is the political will to solve the waste disposal problem - which is another of those problems that humanity refuses to solve until their house is burning down. Between reprocessing and our geologically-sound repositories we can easily solve the problem until we have cheap and reliable launch capability in 50-100 years (eg launch loop) and launch it into the sun. Arguably we have that now - the Atlas-V has done 106 consecutive successful launches now.

This is actually why I say that we need to solve energy consumption on a long-term basis as well. Nuclear is so good that we will literally poison our planet with waste heat unless we preemptively solve that problem. Depending on your figures the impact of waste heat is between 1% and 50% as significant as the greenhouse impact of fossil fuels. The number varies based on how much of the atmosphere you are considering venting the heat towards - a vast majority of our energy is dissipated within say 100 meters of the surface and a vast majority occurs in cities that make up say 1% of the total surface area.

We can certainly bring everyone up to a first-world standard of living but we can't continue indefinite population growth and indefinite per-capita increases in energy consumption. A 25-100x increase in total energy consumption can easily happen within a few decades if we continue to allow population to boom while also increasing per-capita consumption, both at exponential rates. Exponential growth happens fast.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/waste-heat-global-warming.h...

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/01/waste-heat-as-a-contribu...

> 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.

> 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.

That actually would be a good argument for splitting CA in two. Culturally it's shocking it's one state anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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

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-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.

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.

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.

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.

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/suppres... [1] http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/static/documents/2012/06/13/St...

I worked at the Forestry department at a major university for a while (in IT), but I heard that same thing from all of the professors and staff there. It's less a theory and more of a fact. It is more often better to let the forest fire burn than to try and contain it.

The people at that department are doing some incredible research like mapping forest floors from drones/airplanes with radar.

I live in the southeast, and the forest service does controlled burns all the time instead of fire suppression and, granted there's a huge climate difference, but it works well.

It depends.

There are some scientists talking about some newly discovered effects on soil by fireforests. There are two types of ashes after a fireforest: White and Black. White cinders are completely burned. Can be permeated by rain and contain minerals and nutrients easily taken by plants. Black ashes are incompletedly burned and have instead an hydrophobic efect. They make the soil reject the new water. Soil turns into a brick and water can now only move trough crevices, (unavailable to the other "90%" of the soil for months or years).

So, fireforests can be good, but there are some undesired collateral effects also. A better way would be that some people stop deliberately creating fireforests for profit, and I'm not talking about environmental managers here.

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.

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...

[1] http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range...

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.

Old Farmer's Almanac! Come on man, they just make that stuff up. There are even studies about how useless they are.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

+1 to yucky manzanita. pollen stinks so bad.

only worthwhile thing they produce are the burls, but those are worthless for turning since they have a high likelihood of containing rocks.

They talked about that at Yosemite as well. Before they were driven out, the Ahwahnechee would periodically start fires that cleared out the undergrowth and made the valley much more open.

Here's a drawing from 1855 of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point by Thomas A. Ayres: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hampton/images/...

And here's one from Inspation Point in 2013 : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Yosemite...

The forest has become very dense which makes fires larger, more intense, and incredibly difficult to control. It also makes the forest more susceptible to pine beetle outbreaks (they spread faster when the trees are close), and that makes fires even more likely.

It's now the accepted understanding that past aggressive fire prevention contributed to giant burns. There's a lot of substance to that, and letting smaller burns happen and even introducing some controlled burns are considered part of good management practices now.

This is not all that's going on, though, in the Sierras and elsewhere. Other contributing factors:

1) Drought. Severe drought. Trees need water. There's less of it.

2) The heat. Higher average temperatures (climate change!) affect how living trees use/need moisture and how dead trees turn to tinder.

3) Where these don't kill, they stress, and things like the current bark beetle infestation epidemic happen: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-milne/pine-tree-deaths-p...

Fortunately, in the United States, we have several robust federal agencies dedicated to... wait. We massively cut funding to all of them years ago (http://wilderness.org/blog/sequestration-continues-threaten-... ). Largely under pressure of wild fantasies from the growing unhinged wing of the Republican party (which, let's hope, has reached its apotheosis in Trump) whose economics and governing philosophy are on par with their ability to recognize and admit science into a discussion of how we handle our environment.

So, yeah. Overprotection has been a problem. But prescribed burns have found their way into Forest Service philosophy (http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/management/rx.html ). And it's not going to solve the problem.

If only we were as able to let observant study and good stewardship guide us in other areas.

> 1) Drought. Severe drought. Trees need water. There's less of it.

Due to alfalfa, almond/pistachios, pastures, rice, corn, other field crops, vineyards, other truck crops, cotton, grain, and tomato, primarily, according to: http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds-...

I was surprised about alfalfa and pasture.

And "The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades, has been responsible for about 80% of all deforestation in the region, or about 14% of the world's total annual deforestation, making it the world's largest single driver of deforestation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...

Convince your friends not to eat as much meat, especially beef. It's bad for the environment.

Unless you believe rivers flow uphill into the mountains, farming has nothing to do with trees dying in the mountains. Salmon downstream in rivers have a complaint, trees upstream do not.

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

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.

In Canada, pine beetles have been spreading further and further North in recent years. Warm winters help beetles spread, but keeping old forests untouched by fire many decades past what is typical in the area has also played a big part. Forest fires control pine beetles.

In this area, forests do not live for thousands of years. Fire is a natural part of the life cycle, but we've kept unprecedented amounts of forest "safe" from fire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pine beetles are forcing their way into very touristy areas, and pretty soon people will have to accept having their view spoiled, either by pine beetles or by fire.

Nature is often ugly. We need to perform more controlled burns, both to restrict the spread of pine beetles and reduce the risk of mega-fires. People need to accept forest fires as a natural part of forest ecology rather than seeing them solely as natural disasters. By clinging to our pretty, green views of what we think forests should be, we are actually harming our forests.

The planet has suffered climate changes before and there is a common trend in this cases. The forest will move.

Entire forests migrated to the north or south to return again after some thousands of years. After the ice covering Europe melted, hazelnuts and poplars regain quickly its territory and arrive first. Oaks came later slowly migrating toward the north from its mediterranean refuges. Finally we have the beechs still trying to extend its distribution towards the south and living in the cold north side of the mountains whereas oaks live in the sunny side.

If pines finally give up, a new forest based in different trees (more adapted to dry places) will slowly take over. Maybe oaks. It is worth to mention, that if this species need shadow in its first years, could need the dead pines in place for a while.

The new forest will be shorter also. Trees are living creatures that spend a lot of energy to assure that thousands of Kg of matherials will climb up inside the trunk each day. When water gets scarce, there is a point when the roots have problems to win against the electrostatic and gravitational forces that keep the water in the soil. By the laws of physics, greater the distance, bigger the work that you need to do against the gravity to move a given weight. Therefore, taller species of trees are less efficient using water and will be gradually excluded from the drying area.

>The planet has suffered climate changes before and there is a common trend in this cases. The forest will move.

I think what you miss when making this argument is not that there will be a forest somewhere else in the future, but that there will be consequences from it not being where it currently is.

The timescale of change is important to remember. Yes, forests have migrated in the past--but this current trend of climate change is happening so much faster than anything we see in the geological record. They don't have generational timescales to adapt and move this time.

This is a problem that can be solved. We know by the "Chernobyl experience" that nature can return really fast as long as the soil is not reclaimed by man for other uses. We can accelerate that process easily, creating new "highways" for our forests. Most birds don't need it, but big mammals, forest birds and smaller plants and arthropods would benefit a lot of the life-line of having ecological corridors.

I'll drop one of my stupid ideas; what if we start thinking about implement the next level of environmental parks?. The first "nomad national parks" in the planet with gradually movable boundaries designed to minimize the consequences of climate change. Some coastal forests could need a safe exit to move towards the inner land for example. We could change a strip of protected soil with dying trees by some agricultural land in the border of the forest, protect strictly this area and plant there a new extension of the forest. We could include the died wood in the contract to buy a bigger extension in other place and use a mix of native trees (designed to be more resilient against plagues than natural monocultures). The right time to start planning how to do this is forty years ago, but today would be also fine.

This is sad. I could see this causing a lot more problem than all the fires we're getting in CA.

This is a slight tangent, but are there jobs for people in tech to help fight this (or drought, logging, etc)? Wouldn't mind spending a few years trying to protect the environment, but want to put the engineering skills to use.

Environmental engineering is a field that would be utilized for this sort of issue as one facet of a multidisciplinary remedy or study. I do a lot of environmental work but haven't heard much about the tech industry but there is a lot of technology involved with remote sensing, UAS, instrumentation and data analysis. I would love to hear about modern environmental tech firms working on solutions to these types of problems.

Unfortunately a lot of private sector "Environmental engineering" jobs are about getting projects through/around the regulations.

I see that the USDA has some software related to conservation up for download [1]. Anything from water budgeting on farms to Animal Waste Management. I did not download or test any of this software, just found it after a quick search.

Then there's this organization that ran out of funding, but contacting one of the former team members may help you. [2]

There is development of software that doesn't directly affect the environment but rather helps dictate what work should be done to improve/conserve conditions. This book seems to address this topic. [3]

Here are some other random related things. [4] [5]

Unfortunately, it seems like software engineers are mostly used to develop management software. Modeling software is closer to the type of action I suspect you are interested in. It is needed, though I doubt the software engineers are helping analyze data and building solutions based on that research. I could be very wrong.

EDIT: I should clarify. A SE COULD analyze the data, but in the context of a paid full-time position I doubt your employer would want you to spend your time doing that.

If you find any information regarding "environmental [activism/conservation] with software", or something like that, please let us know.

DISCLAIMER: I don't know what I'm doing ;)

[1] http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/ndc...

[2] http://se4s.ics.uci.edu/

[3] http://www.journals.elsevier.com/environmental-modelling-and...

[4] http://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/sof...

[5] http://www.capterra.com/environmental-software/

Thanks a bunch for the resources :). Gonna play around with some of these.

Modeling software is definitely something that's interesting, but also just helping these organizations not seem so unappealing. Their websites are old unusable, their career tracks are pretty bad, pay is low -- they sell these jobs terribly.

I wouldn't even mind working a degree away from environmental endeavors just to get smart people motivated to solve these problems and learn more. Think data journalism on environmental educational pieces. Or helping local governments preserve the nearby environments. Kinda just shooting around in the dark hoping to hit something, but thanks for the start :)

I believe there is quite a market for environmental protection research technology.

I worked IT in a forestry and enviro science department at a university, and the amount of technology they required was incredible. Lots of servers, storage, laptops, radar equipment, drones, gps, lab tech, cameras, everything you can imagine. I'm sure they could use some tailored tech.

Not exactly what you were asking and it has probably been posted 1000 times but it can't get enough visibility: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

The only way to stop this, really, is to flood the world with an abundance of cheap, clean energy.

For example, prices of solar power have been dropping steadily and the cost of installation is now the biggest factor. Reducing this cost might have a huge impact on the world today and on the life of our children.

I mean, I get that this is a serious problem, but before we get too hasty about doing anything about it, imagine all the shareholder value that could be lost by hasty actions, or all the economic liberty that could be destroyed by environmental regulation. They're the real victims here.

I think people has missed the sarcasm, because it is sarcasm, isn't?

The brilliance of that comment is that around here I wouldnt be surprised if it wasn't!

When people speak about it's too late and ad the words "we" i always get nautious. Don't project your generalisations onto others, do something about it - and if you do what you can do help someone else to turn around. There are millions of people working to do so. And yes, there will be a high peak if nothing is done but there is still time to avoid extinguishing (or close to) the human race in it's current technological advancement.
There is still time to realingn the military to fight an actual war that matters, for continued human progress. There is still time for powerful regulation of the commons to avoid the tragedy therefor in so many areas. There is still time to buy those solar panels and spread information about those that exist ready to increase the efficiency a handful of times. There is still time for city planners to stop allowing new buildings in areas that will not be sustainable. There is still enough time to do alot of things...

Excluding conservatives worldwide, who are finally coming along as looking beyond their noses they've started smelling blood in the water - possibilities to prosper in the new climate.

California should consider itself lucky if the pine beetle has just hit in 2015 and not really that bad from the pictures. Probably 50% of the trees in Colorado are dead, 90% in some places.

There's no mention of the pine beetle in the article. He heavily implicates drought and climate change.

Drought makes the trees easier for the beetles to attack, and climate change keeps the beetles alive through the winter.

I would think, although possibly wrongly, that if this was drought induced the die off would be more uniform. The pictures look similar to what I saw in Wyoming a decade ago due to pine beetles.

Both are likely related, reduced water makes the trees more susceptible to the ravages of the pests?

Reduced water does indeed make pine trees more susceptible to beetles. Pines defend themselves by producing pitch to trap and expel the beetles, and that works better when the trees have enough water.

I spent half my childhood in South Lake Tahoe and have lived in the region most of my life. During the 80's and 90's, much of which was a period of drought for the region, beetles were a problem and being actively mitigated by the forestry service. You can go through the national forest all through the sierras and see trees that have been tagged for removal due to beetles. The problem is very severe right now and certainly the worst I can remember. I've got a couple of friends that work for the us forestry service and they say it's so bad they can't keep up with it. Other sources point out that beetle infestation is part of the problem.

Local news site for Tahoe specifically: http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/california-tahoe-area-...

SF Chronicle on the beetle problem and commenting on the excess wood: http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-has-66...

But climate change and its horsemen — rising temperatures, drought and bark beetle — are accelerating this pace.

Maybe it is a different kind of beetle, but the article does mention beetles.

>But climate change and its horsemen — rising temperatures, drought and bark beetle — are accelerating this pace.

The pine beetle is native to Colorado. Its population is normally tempered by cold winters. With increasingly warmer winters brought on by global climate change, the pine beetle is left unchecked.

It seems like a similar process is playing out in California due to the native bark beetle.

Colorado seems to be doing better these days. I think the pine beetle mitigation efforts are showing some progress and I would assume that the trees left standing are maybe naturally more resistant.

> California should consider itself lucky

I don't think any place experiencing the destruction of its landscape, the erosion of its environment, and the tragic loss of so many unique, beautiful and valuable places, should count itself lucky simply because it's not as bad as somewhere else.

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

It's hard to say what will happen here. If the drought subsides, which statistically speaking it should as California's climate trend should "regress to the mean," the ecosystem should recover to some extent. Unless the tree population/ecosystem has been so grossly devastated that the tree it is past returning to a self sustaining point.

The current drought in California isn't widely considered to be caused by global warming though there does seem to be some notion that it has been worsened by it. It's too sharp a climate swing to fall along the global warming trend line.

The scary thing isn't that this is global warming but that this is just an image of what rapid climate change could do on a much vaster scale if not kept in check somehow.

In the scale of a human lifetime this is a tragedy. We see the forests when we are children and we expect to be able to return to them again and again and that the same will be true for our descendants.

But go a little farther out, and every asteroid impact above a certain size incinerated every last tree on earth, instantly. Giant ice sheets scraped them off en masse like barnacles.

In every case, trees came back. Maybe not the same trees, but trees suited for their new environment. It will be the same for beetles or climate change or whatever comes next.

My time horizon is "Do we have enough trees sucking carbon out of the air before we cross the point of no return?" and "Can we plant enough trees before we lose all the coastal property?"

We may lose current coastal property - but it will be replaced with all new coastal property. At a terrible cost, yes.

That's it - it's not the property, it's the mass displacement and abandonment of cities.

Also, I don't think it's obvious that whatever replaces the current habitable zones will be nearly as large or fertile as what we have now. It's by no means a necessarily long-term zero-sum game.

We are already past the point of no return.

I'm not sure any asteroid has ever incinerated every tree - I suspect not - but realize that even fairly mild extinction events such as the one that killed the dinosaurs had rather dramatic consequences: in particular; that the planet never recovered what it lost. AFAIK no (fully) land animal even close to the size of a human survived Chicxulub and its aftermath. Crocodiles were the only large (50lb+) "land" animals to survive, and they're semi-aquatic, don't need a lot of food, and the ones that survived may well have been smaller than humans anyhow.

So, you're right that there is little risk of humanity wiping all life off the planet's surface, even if we all tried. There is, however, a considerable chance that humanity might wipe most large animals and lots of plants off the surface of the planet, and it's a least imaginable we'd completely wipe ourselves out (and take with us most other vertebrates). Smaller pockets of humanity certainly managed that.

You'd have to be quite the misanthropist to say "meh" to the consequences of a serious ecological collapse. I'm assuming it won't come to that, but it's not at all inconceivable.

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

For Scotland and many other parts of Europe, forests started coming back both because forests were (re)planted and because we started burning coal and oil instead of wood and stopped building wooden houses, ships, etc.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04... has a nice gif showing forest area increase.

For Yosemite, my guess would be a different cause: the area depicted had fairly recently seen a forest fire.

The area depicted was kept down by native americans, who preferred the open fields for hunting and living in.

The US was consuming massive amounts of wood in the 1860s, much of it for fuel. Coal didn't surpass wood until the 1880s.

England switched to coal after deforesting the British Isles for glass, iron, and ship manufacture.

One kilogram of iron requires 80 kg of source fuelwood, as charcoal.

I visited Rocky Mountain National Park in early September, and it was awful what fraction of the trees appeared to have died off. There were some absolutely gorgeous scenes that must have been truly stunning when they were green. I'm sad I missed seeing them before the pine beetle.

My home town of Cincinnati has been suffering from the emerald ash borer. Forests that I played in as a kid are now just empty fields.

California, even less than Colorado, cannot afford the destruction of what non-desert habitat it has.

Indeed the pine beetle did quite a bit of damage. Some time ago I was working up in the mountains regularly, and from the US-40/I-70 junction and on up the US-40 corridor, the damage was apparent and got progressively worse the deeper one went into the mountains along US-40. Once past Berthoud Pass, the forest was the opposite of how a healthy one should look: dead brown as far as the eye could see with the occasional patch of living green. I've not been up there in a while, so I don't know how things have progressed -- if they've gotten worse, better, or just shifted about.

Sadly, what needs to happen in these areas of pine beetle infestation is what will never be permitted to happen: the forest needs to burn. A large forest fire would kill the beetles and their eggs/larvae, clear out the dead trees to make space for new growth, and fertilize the soil, making it possible for the forest to recover. But with how much beetle-kill there is up there, I don't think a controlled burn would be permitted. It would likely escape containment; there'd be too much risk to persons and property. But the longer such a burn is deferred, IMO, the harder it will be to prevent one, and the more severe it will be. I don't know of a good solution here. Cutting down all the dead trees for lumber might help, but I don't think it can defer a need for a burn forever, nor do I think it will help the forest recover as well as a burn would.

I would be happy to be wrong in this regard.

You are wrong in some respects. Where the fire does not affect structures it is allowed to burn. See the Beaver Creek Fire.

Southern New Jersey has the same beetle problem: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/science/earth/in-new-jerse... Alas for the cold nights that would kill 'em all in winter.

The high sierras have cold nights in the winter.

You can see Yosemite Valley this summer: http://i.imgur.com/FSmwv6g.jpg

It looks quite beautiful, with the fall foliage, leaves changing color.....then you realize those are evergreens and are changing color because they are dead.

...You've completely overstated the beetle problem. It seemed as though it would have massive impact a few years ago, but it didn't. Very specific locations saw a lot of damage, but the overall impact is negligible.

http://csfs.colostate.edu/forest-management/common-forest-in...

There was a nice article in The Economist [1] a few months ago on just about this issue - how it relates to global warming, forest densification, mismanagement, etc.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21701751-stricken-tre...

If only people got the message a few decades ago, we'd have a modicum of hope. It's too late now.

The big environmental movement started in the 70's. I remember as a very young kind in the 90's that it was drilled into our innocent minds at school. People have been worrying about resources and the environment for a very long time before that, as well.

It's been a building problem with a clear trajectory for a long time, but typically people are only getting the message long after there's something meaningful they could have done.

worrying about != building political will for the significant changes needed

I remember in the late 80s/early 90s it seemed like all the environmental stuff was about the ozone hole and acid rain. By the late 90s it seemed to be all about preserving the rainforest to the exclusion of almost anything else—incidentally, did we... win that one? Or hopelessly lose it so everyone gave up? It seems like the chatter there has dropped to almost nothing, though for a while it was the environmental issue.

Global warming per se didn't get center stage until later. I don't remember hearing much about it back in the days of soda-by-the-pitcher and Made in America signs on racks at Wal-Mart (gave up on that one pretty fast, haha).

The ozone hole is closing, so that's a win, but also a bit of shuffling deck chairs.

I think Asimov might have disagreed. In 1989 he said:

> I thought the most interesting scientific event of 1988 was the way everyone started speaking about the greenhouse effect just because there was a hot summer and a drought, when I had been talking about the greenhouse effect for twenty years, at least. - http://www.ubcome.com/AsimovSaveCivilization.html

He also talks about the rainforest in '89:

> I said therefore, when Brazil begins to cut down the rainforest of the Amazon, not only is it destroying a habitat for vast numbers of plant and animal life which could be of great use to us, there are perhaps pharmacological products we know nothing about that are produced by these forms of life that if we knew about could advance the art of pharmacology and the practice of medicine, enormously. And we'll never find out, we're going to drive them to extinction. We're going to destroy the ground, because the soil of a rainforest isn't very good, and when you chop it down it doesn't make for good farming, what it makes is for good deserts. And finally, we're going to cut down on absorbing the carbon dioxide and on producing oxygen, so that we are actually tampering with the climate of the Earth and with the very atmosphere that we breathe, so that under those circumstances it is useless for Brazil to say that she can do what she wants with her own, that the rainforest belongs to her and if she wants to cut them down, she can. The rainforest doesn't belong to her, it belongs to humanity, she is merely the custodian of the rainforests.

The campaigns to save the rainforest did a lot of good. Deforestation slowed dramatically, although it is still a problem.

29000 km^2 lost in 1995 -> 6000 km^2 lost in 2015

http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/deforestation_calcula...

The big environmental movement followed Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring (1962).

There was some earlier resource awareness, mostly growing over the 1950's, but it really only chrystalised in the late 1960s / early 1970's.

Earlier concerns were much more diffuse. Aldo Leopold, Thoreau, a few others, but little mass awareness.

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