A controlled blaze in Utah could improve models of how wildfire smoke spreads | Hacker News Reader

A controlled blaze in Utah could improve models of how wildfire smoke spreads

nature.com

74 pointsAnon8423 comments

Forests that have been clear cut have a different structure from old forests and burn very differently. Most California fires were of the former kind.

In “Young” forests grown in the place of clear cut “old forests”, the shrubbery grows before the trees and is very thick. The trees are not that high and the branches are close to the ground. These forests get completely annihilated by fire.

Old forests have tall trees, with branches away from the ground and almost no shrubbery. So when a fire happens, the shrubbery tends to burn out before any trees catch on fire. Such forests are benefitted by fires.

Cleaning the shrubbery in some parts of idlewild, ca prevented the forest from burning during the recent fires. It’s a strategy that is proven to work.

Not clear cutting forests also helps of course.

Not fighting forest fires also helps.

Truth is forest fires are necessary. The bugs in forest fires, like destroyed homes and lives are because we are doing it wrong: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2...

Have you been through the Redding burn scar? What happened there isn't a "cleansing fire" that's going to leave the forest healthier. The forest is gone. It's not going to come back without a lot of human effort, and even then not before we're all much older.

What's going to grow back in those areas is mostly scrub, and that in turn is going to further affect the microclimate around the Redding area, making one of the hottest microclimates in the state even hotter and drier.

Yes, there are biomes that benefit from a regular low-intensity fire. Those are the biomes that scientists are talking about when they say "let it burn". Scrub and grasslands can burn and be back to scrub within a year. Old growth forest can survive a low-intensity fire and be a lot healthier afterward.

But the young forests that have grown in all of the clear-cut areas from the state's mining days, those don't bounce right back from a high-intensity fire.

I imagine it might be possible to put effort into growing healthy forests even after clear cutting / devastating fire. But this may be more expensive than the profit from clear cutting.

It is interesting how strong an example clear cutting forests is for externalizing the costs... and pushing them more than a century down the timeline. Should this be something that we regulate? Or, should we include the cost for the future forest fires in the price of the timber?

Similarly, shouldn't the gas producing countries pay for the cost of the CO2 their product disposes into the atmosphere?

and the corollary to this is that logging can absolutley be done sustainably, providing direct benefit to the environment. But this is a politically offensive fact, so people often find elaborate ways to navigate around it to support their faith.

It sounds to me like there's a very simple solution to this problem: just don't clear-cut forests.

Of course, as usual with stupid humans, when there's a very simple solution to a problem, they absolutely refuse to do it, usually because some selfish person is benefiting from the action that's causing the problem, and countless other people are perfectly happy to enable that person.

Were we in 1819, then I would agree.

Unfortunately, we're in 2019, and it's already happened. You're stuck with homogenous forests.

This is incorrect. There are still old-growth forests, such as the Amazon, but they're still being clear-cut.

It's very, very simple: stop doing that.

No, we can't easily get back the old-growth forests in the US, as that ship has sailed, but there's more to the planet than the US, and we can stop causing even more damage. But we don't want to.

There are also old-growth forests in the United States. Many in the Upper Midwest, are in areas not on maps in 1800s due to cartographic errors. Another, Cathedral Pines in Wisconsin was not logged at the request of the timber company manager's wife, so she could continue her prayer group in the forest. List of old-growth forests in the US that need continued protection not only from timber harvests but from disease, fire, and pests:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests

Brazil isn't going to stop so do we invade a sovereign nation to get them to stop in order to benefit the world?

If you ranked all wars humanity has fought from most justified to least, I expect your proposed war would be rather near the top.

Oh, I definitely agree. I just don't think anyone else is on board with me. There should be UN forces that help steward our earth from dipshit despots.

There is also the consideration that this whole process is being studied and modeled on a moving platform.

The environments that we assumed to be in place when we look back and describe these 'ancestral' states are rapidly changing. The timing and duration of rain events, winter snow levels (elevation, depth, duration), high heat events, Santa Ana winds; all of these things are quite rapidly changing their patterns of predictability.

Forests are dynamical systems with non-linearity in many of the ways they interact with and respond to the environment. How forests have responded to climate change, to anthropogenic interactions, hunting and extinction of large herbivores (and predators), create feedbacks that further impact how forests (or really, vegetation at large), respond to the environment.

I think my point here is that there is questionable utility in trying to run the clock in reverse. Its more important to understand where we're at and how things respond now than it is to contrast them with some ancestral state that is impossible to return to.

There's no un-baking the cake. The 'climate' (read: entire earth biosphere), has changed/ is changing.

I agree.

The 'climate', and the species that can live in it, also change and continue to change- the wooly mammoth couldn't survive many places right now, to be honest.

I feel like a lot of people miss the idea that the planet itself shifts over time- Hawaii hasn't been there forever, and most of the land on the earth has shifted a lot from where it first was in Pangaea.

Humans stopping climate change feels a lot like getting in front of a moving train- it is absolutely futile- it also makes sense to try to shift the rails themselves around, but I don't even know how feasible that is, either.

It's true that in a lot of cases, the simplest solution is the best solution. For example, if you want to lose weight, eating and drinking less is the right solution, not to exercise more.

But in situations with complex dynamics of nature, such as the one in the comment you replied to, there are often unforeseen laws of nature or physics or government that make things more complicated, that only the experts really know about, so that our solutions often aren't grounded in the facts that would make them very useful or practical.

Clear-cuts can be used to mimic natural disturbance. Specifically, patch cuts (a small clear cut), can increase biological diversity, reduce fire risk, and increase forest resiliency. Certain species, such as Douglas Fir, do best if the intention is to regrow Douglas Fir with clear-cuts (common western commercial forestry practice). Also, a selection harvest in a Douglas Fir stand would favor shade tolerant species such as fir, hemlock, and spruce. Accordingly, certain choices need to be made addressing a variety of economic and ecological considerations.

In healthy forests the lower branches may be cleared by animals like deer.

"Limbing up" trees not only changes the fire ladder dynamic but also helps control some pest vectors, such as fungal spores that have to find their way from the forest floor to the lower leaves of the trees. I think it's safe to assume that periodic fires also reduce a bunch of pests.

Http://firesmoke.ca is a website I am unfortunately visiting already this year.

on top of destroying people's homes and lives, what used to be the best couple months of summer are pretty much ruined for any type of outdoor activity from Mexico to Alaska and la push to Regina.

It is already hazy around vancouver due to the big fires in Alberta. We also had a fire get out of control in early April when the ground is supposed to be super wet still.

they do occasional controlled burns in Eastern Alabama and the acrid smoke smell can saturate North West Atlanta and further North.

Nice little PDF from forestry service about Southern Burns https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr292/1989_wade.pdf

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