2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
I don't think there is much evidence to support this relationship. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
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?
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.
I would like to learn more about this, can someone post more information?
I also don't think the consequences as easy to predict as you think. For example cross crops may transpire less because of their pores being closed more due to higher CO2 concentrations. That may be good, depending on the crop and location. There will be higher flow in most rivers, and by association most lakes (but offset by higher evaporation) which could be good both for humans and irrigation. I think the answer is complicated and difficult to predict.
Current unsustainable practices with respect to both soil and groundwater depletion will still be unsustainable.
Parts of California are not a great place to grow crops sustainably, at least not the kinds of water and soil intensive crops currently grown. That may increase or decrease on the whole over time due to climate change, it's tough to say with any certainty.
Are you saying firestorms don’t happen naturally? I don’t know how to interpret your comment.
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.
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.
This is not to absolve colonialists of guilt for the horrific consequences of their actions. 'If I didn't, someone else would' is not a moral justification. But if it is the forests that we are concerned about, they would have the same fate one way or another, maybe lasting a few more millenia- not significant on the geological scales they exist in.
Why? Culture is a big factor.
10,000 years ago, Europe, Asia, and Africa were hunter-gatherer populations. Such cultures succeed by taking care of their environment so that the things they depend on remain. Cultural evolution isn't necessary there; biological evolution already optimizes for hunter-gatherer humans.
When you develop agriculture, circumstances change. The most profitable move for society at large is to eradicate nature in favor of farms. The wealth and abundance that results from that makes room for selfish individuals to fight for power. Societies develop kings and slaves at this point. The wealth can be grown by further replacing nature with roads, cities, and infrastructure. With selfish people in power, this is inevitable.
In the Americas, the Mayans had reached this point and had fallen, likely due to overindulgance in those benefits.
Incas had no slaves and no currency, so theirs was a unique culture that fits the opposing viewpoint. But they also had no writing system, had only really been around for 60 years before Columbus arrived, and still had an elite class, so my view is that they would have become homogenous with other societies that were successful. As far as I know, they weren't conservationists anyway.
Cultures move to positions that are resistant to change, easy to fall into, and that provide an advantage over competing cultures. That means centralized power, military dominance, and some benefits for those in charge. Cultures that don't meet these criteria either become those that do, or are conquered by those that do.
American Indians (I am told this is the preferred nomenclature) were increasingly competing between tribes, and the agricultural tribes were growing. Either they would have soon walked the path that everyone else in history has, or they would have been wiped out by the larger southern civilisations.
I will challenge your conclusion though, at least in a qualified manner. We do preserve things that we understand better before the option to exploit them arises. But. We do tend to understand things by taking them apart like children. And like children, we often lack the sophistication to put them back together again for a long time. But the clocks, radios and wind-up cars we disassembled as children were inanimate objects. Vivisecting living things/systems has a little bit different moral gravity.
But we are where we are. The best we can do is say "we fucked up, how do we fix it?" and start trying to listen, even if much of that listening now has to be through historical anthropologists.
To clarify, I don't think this is a good process, but I think it is an inevitable one. If there had been no colonialism, societies in the Americas would have reached their own equillibrium, and competition would have driven them to 'progress' as we know it. There would have been much less death, but civilisation would run its course all the same.
And additional clarification because I phrased my position on the current situation poorly: I think we can still save things. I just think there is no way for us to have skirted the initial destruction, and we would eventually have reached this point regardless.
The nomadic tribes mostly had an exclusive zone from the mountains to the sea, and moved back and forth seasonally, doing maintenance work to guarantee a good harvest of food and crafting materials the following year. Quite a bit of selection of fire resistant food species (eg, Cammas bulbs, which require meadows)
They also apparently gathered at flowering time, something you don't usually see in conventional agriculture. TtW suggests that this is because of Death Cammas - a hepatotoxic doppelganger with a completely different flower, that would be in the public interests to irradicate from your fields.
Cammas experts claim only an idiot would confuse the two, but harvest is a group activity. Some of those 'idiots' would be your kids or elders with failing eyesight.
I knew a guy who is trying to re-establish cammas from remnant native meadows who thinks the real reason is metabolic. That the fraction of inulin (one of the starches that make you fart) during flowering is lower, and hence they require less intensive food prep. Lewis and Clark apparently sampled underprepared cammas during their journey and spent a very unpleasant night because of it.
The idea it is either natural or the result of human caused climate change is a false choice. The question is how much climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of them as a contributing factor. They occur naturally and climate change is predicted (and has so far been accurate) to make them more frequent and worse. Like hurricanes and droughts.
Firestorms are distinct from "large forest fires', but point taken.
> Global annual mean CO2 concentration has increased by more than 45% since the start of the Industrial Revolution, from 280 ppm during the 10,000 years up to the mid-18th century[2] to 415 ppm as of May 2019.
I know, it's Wikipedia. If you've got a better source, cite it. Until you do, "doubled" is hyperbole.
If you want to persuade people that anthropogenic climate change is real, easily-disproved overexaggeration isn't the way to do it.
Now I feel like "Captain Nitpick" for my previous comment.
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.
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.
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.
Excess fuel means ladder fires - where fire gets high enough to engulf the crowns of the trees - are far more likely.
Many conifers rely on fire to open their cones. Artificially suppressing fire stops that process of renewal.
Those are just a few examples off the top of my head - this topic is well trod and a little poking around will provide even more context.
https://www.opb.org/news/series/wildfires/oregon-columbia-ri...
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.
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?i...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/ab...
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.
Redwoods also thrive in low rain areas that are prone to fog because they benefit from the fog in a way that other trees do not.
I once suggested redwoods as an alternate or additional metaphor for giftedness re Stephanie Tolan's "Is it a cheetah?"
https://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm
My idea didn't get any traction, but I think we need more mental models than the "cheetah" one because that not only implicitly suggests that gifted kids are always fast, it also implicitly suggests that they are dangerous predators. While it is true that intelligence can make you a danger, I would like to see myriad metaphors proliferate and redwoods are at the top of my list as a metaphor I would like to see proliferate.
edit: ah, Giant Sequoia is genus Sequoiadendron -- but both seem to have cones open by fire
I remember the pine cone of I think a yellow pine species opens up at 170 degrees, so it typically opens in response to fire. A quick google suggests it is called a Jack Pine.
Hurricanes are also thought to be responsible for bringing fly species to islands and new islands end up having bird poo on them with seeds the birds ingested. Plants do this intentionally to let birds spread their seeds because birds lack teeth, so the seeds don't get chewed up in the process.
Hot peppers are intended to be eaten by birds but not other species. They are hot as a form of chemical warfare against things they don't want eating them. Chocolate and maybe also coffee is bitter like it is to kill ants and if you have sufficiently dark chocolate (in, say, a tent), it doesn't attract ants. Milk chocolate attracts ants because of the sugar, but the cocoa itself is ant poison.
Anyway, little islands form from volcanos and they start sticking up out of the ocean a little and they become resting places for birds and the bird poo is the first soil and fertilizer on these barren volcanic rocks and then coconut trees are typically the first trees because the coconut will float across the ocean without being killed by the salt water and land on some newly formed little island with a bit of bird poo and a few plants and it will take root. I think no other tree does that.
If you get rid of all "disasters" entirely, you kill off a lot of stuff. Mother Nature or "mother earth" has fascinating and complex ways of letting life find a way and fire laying waste to some portion of the forest and leaving in its wake fertile soil and opening the cones of some pine species is just one of the fascinating ways she does that.
Anyway, I have big plans to shut up on HN and attempt to go behave now by being elsewhere. Ciao.
The general phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotiny
However, I bet that the scale of the wildfires in our apocalyptic late-Anthropocene is something hardly seen before in healthy forests... all these species would be better off with less of it.
I hope you are better now, I am sorry to hear that you had medical problems... Do not give up! Your contributions are helpful.
Is it always the late-Anthropocene, or do you know something?
After they restored the biosphere (or did their best) though, more dire events take place in the Solar System and on Earth (but it's not only the fault of humans, so maybe not technically an Anthropocene again).
Source: I have seen them!
Also metaphors make weak arguments.
So the audience would have been parents of gifted kids in need of support for how to effectively raise their kids and my opinion was somewhat respected for a fairly brief period of time in gifted circles online.
It wasn't an argument. It was an attempt to share my thoughts with people who liked my thoughts on certain subjects well enough that it got me started blogging because there was demand for my point of view on some subjects.
For they passed a noble law;
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw.
I know a little something about redwoods. I talked about redwoods. The End.
I bear zero responsibility for how other people choose to interact with anything I have said.
For those who don't know, redwood / sequoia saplings take years to grow in captivity and are actually quite complex to collect and sow.
To be frank, the Bay Area wasn't a great fit for me - but communities like this keep itching at me to move back from the east coast.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16599562-the-dao-of-capi...
That fire is burning through the forest floor only, and is significantly less dangerous. The 1400-year-old Armstrong tree, and park buildings, have been protected, while the fire is free to burn through the surrounding undergrowth. Everyone involved seems to suggest that the fire is a net positive for the forest, and an overdue ecological renewal.
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/flames-yet-to-rea...
While it's definitely sad to see historic buildings destroyed, not to mention hundreds of homes, I look forward to returning to Big Basin over the next few years to witness this renewal first-hand.
The bare fact that a tree is 1400 years old is pretty strong evidence that it's unlikely to be harmed by a fire.
Also, these trees must now survive a hundred years of aggressive fire suppression, which (ironically) allows fuel to build up to dangerous levels.
Either way, these trees are a lot safer after surviving a fire.
Claiming that fuel is increasing and somebody should burn the forest attract lunatics and does not help to have a future with water, or to decrease the levels of CO2 in the air.
We desperately require the CO2 stored in plants and in soil and this is not compatible with the old "time to burn" parties and traditions. Brazil and half of Africa is burning today and this is not acceptable. We must change our speech. Now.
Besides, while having lunatics torch forests is not desirable at all, fuel accumulation isn't fictional. Again, no idea about California in particular, but it's definitely a problem in parts of Spain, and controlled burns are already a thing there, I believe that's being done in the US, too, with good success so far.
I get that it's no fun having wildfires, even controlled ones, behind one's backyard, but it's probably not sustainable to not have any at all, forever. Even if fires can be suppressed effectively for a long time, when a fire eventually escapes suppression, and one probably will, it'll find many years of bone-dry plant matter to consume; that'll release all of the CO2 at once, and it would make for a very destructive firestorm. At least that's my layperson's understanding.
The criminal burning of the Amazon, way beyond what any wildfires would do, that absolutely must stop.
In the same way as the first week of an artistic work will disappear forever under new layers of paint.
Ecosystems influence everything from erosion and flooding, micro/macroclimate, occurrence of disease vectors and pests or lack thereof, wildfire occurrence and severity, avalanche risk, and food production on a large scale. We're putting on totally artificial pressure in a very short timeframe. Will we keep things like this for millennia? Probably not. We need stable environments to thrive, this is a recipe for severe instability. Plus, whatever comes after a collapse may be really bad for us – maybe you get a desert, maybe you get a really bad avalanche situation, maybe you get new pests and disease vectors. This isn't a question of aesthetics, it's about the functioning of the environment we are deeply dependent on to exist.
The majority of fires are not started by arsonists. This time it was lightning. Two years ago, it was strong winds and power lines. There are the occasional accidents, like the case where a hot car pulled over and ignited some dry leaves.
Also, a lot of California is a chaparral. It's an ecosystem shaped by wildfires. They are expected. Those locations must burn regularly, as they have been doing for thousands of years.
This is completely unrelated to, say, a tropical forest. Which is not expected to have more than isolated, occasional fires.
In this specific case, a 1400 year old tree will surely have seen some wildfires before.
"BEGINNING about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur."
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-dr...
What's amazing is that many of these trees survived that. And that modern humans think modern California is "normal".
When systematic deforestation and massive logging started?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
Note that animal (multicellular eukaryotes) fossils exist from that period.
> The bare fact that a tree is 1400 years old is pretty strong evidence that it's unlikely to be harmed by a fire.
For fires the likes of which they've experienced in their lifetimes, perhaps. Hard to know otherwise:
"What is remarkable about the CZU fire is this is a coastal fire, primarily along the the coast near the Santa Cruz mountains... in forests, a lot of redwoods, that have simply never seen forest fires... we are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating in fires the likes of which we haven't seen in modern recorded history in dense forests that are well-covered and have been historically immune from significant fires."
Tree rings are also a record of history.
Nature has adopted to occasional fire, difference here is that humans decided they can stop forest fires. And we did. But with that the undergrowth became more and more dangerous.
This slow buildup results in bigger and more aggressive fires. I am not sure how those are impacting the forests vs natural more mild fires.
A slow moving, low fuel burn is very good for the forest. A fast moving, extremely hot firestorm will burn everything to bits and destroy the ecosystem for decades.
Redwoods, and other plants and trees cannot survive a firestorm. This is the problem with our forest fires these days. They are too hot because the fuel is both dry and overgrown and condensed into non-natural areas. When we build so many homes and cities in the forests, we change their natural make-up and put everything at risk.
When we prevent small fires from happening that burn out all of the small bushes and trees on the forest floor, we dramatically change the climate of the forest. When we build houses in the middle of the forest and then fight the fires that threaten them, we just build up more fuel that will eventually result in giant fires like the ones we are seeing now.
Of course temperature changes and changes in rain make this all worse as well.
But if we're going to be honest about climate change, then we need to be honest about climate change. We have entire government agencies whose sole purpose is to fight against the natural ecology of the forest.
Something big that we can do to both allow for houses and towns to exist in the forest, and live harmoniously with the environment: allow logging companies to come in and tend to the forest. Just regulate them.
It's hard to believe that's all gone but I am really happy the huge ancient trees survived. It's one of my favorite places in the world.
I did the skyline to the sea trail with my wife a few years ago and it was fantastic. The redwoods are really incredible.
An article about their fire resistance: https://sempervirens.org/redwoods-and-wildfires/
A donation link to the Sempervirens Fund which helps protect these incredible trees: https://secure.sempervirens.org/onlineactions/l2kebl2BfkqzEy...
My visit to Big Basin after huge rains in 2017 (arguably a stupid decision) was basically the first time I could say I had a "religious" experience in nature. Forests are most alive after a big rain, the entire day I spent there is absolutely seared into my mind. Every conceivable part of the forest was alive, surging out of the ground and out to take a look at what was new.
It's important to note that tragedy is an all too common step in evolutionary time for forests, this is the way that they continue to evolve and move forward. The last time I visited was after huge mud slides and rivers overrunning their banks. Many of the trails were blocked by 12' diameter trees that had fallen when the soil beneath their roots became too waterlogged or washed away. I can only hope that these forests will continue to thrive beyond my lifetime.
I will say though, visiting Big Basin really made me question how we could actually cut down forests like this just to build stupid houses. And we still are, logging trucks and signs for logging companies are all over the roads surrounding Big Basin.
> In response to forest fires, the trees have developed various adaptations. The thick, fibrous bark of coast redwoods is extremely fire-resistant; it grows to at least a foot thick and protects mature trees from fire damage. In addition, the redwoods contain little flammable pitch or resin. If damaged by fire, a redwood readily sprouts new branches or even an entirely new crown, and if the parent tree is killed, new buds sprout from its base. Fires, moreover, appear to actually benefit redwoods by causing substantial mortality in competing species while having only minor effects on redwood. Burned areas are favorable to the successful germination of redwood seeds.
I’m thinking of all of the sequoia seeds, now germinated from the fire[1], that will sprout next year into full sunlight that hasn’t touched the forest floor in hundreds of years.
It is sad though that it’s also destructive to the lives of so many people. May everyone find safety who is now in harm’s way.
1. https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-n...
Eh, maybe it's just me but I've always felt worse for the animals than the people.
The Giant Sequoias in the article you linked are in the Sierra Nevada mountains, at a few thousand feet elevation and a couple hundred miles from the coast. They are MASSIVE trees, truly awe-inspiring, a bit shorter than the Coastal Redwoods but with trunks 30 feet across.
I don't think Coastal Redwoods have any trouble propagating or germinating. I have one in my back yard. Apparently they can be germinated in tap water. https://www.treeseedonline.com/blog/germination-of-coast-red...
Giant Sequoias, on the other hand, I view as truly irreplaceable. Some are over 3,000 years old. I hope we can protect them as long as possible.
The two species are cousins, but it's important to differentiate between the two.
I know that for some species of cycads people actually burn hay in the crown to induce fruition.
I'm sure there were very dry and warm periods before this too.
Even thought we might think we're dominating nature, I'm sure it has a few tricks up it's sleeve yet.
http://www.walkaboutpark.com.au/aboriginal-culture/cultural-...
Sure, fallen needles make a good portion of the floor beneath, and they may be rot-resistant enough to resist decay for a while, but at some point they're going to breakdown.
Everybody forgets the second part. Unprecedent amount of fuel AND WATER.
Forest soil is a sponge plenty of fungus, tender roots, moss, and roundworms. This means that there is a lot of water in the soil also (and that each year there is more water in the area until is fireproof). Plant tissues store water also.
Rainforests do not burn spontaneously. There is a net of streams and it rains. Maybe just once in a blue moon a lightning strikes here and there. When this happens it rains each day at 17h, therefore is a self-contained event.
Ancien forests do not burn. Gasoline soaked trees yes, they burn.
Definitely the place has potential to be much more humid.
We can apply measures to make buildings less fire prone
We can apply measures to make structures less fire prone also
And we definitely can release tons of water from planes after a fire. So let me propose something, why If we would do the same before a fire?.
What if instead to suck and sell all water from the environment we would fix and respect a minimum ecological level of water instead and give its part to the forest?.
If the water level descends over a minimum, just provide some water in patches or rings. We would need to pay the same bill from bomber services but we would save the money lost by fire damages. Looks like a win-win situation to me.
How much do we spend on forest firefighting? How much do we spend on "no logging" lobbying? How much do we spend on smoke inhalation property damage and all the public communications?
All that could be recouped AND an industry could be revived.
Imagine this: what if we could create a biomachine that pulls CO2 out of the air and turns into carbon bricks. Now imagine that we not only have this biomachine but we have a use for all of these bricks. People want them really badly. So there is a huge incentive to speed up the process of pulling the CO2 out of the air.
We have that. The biomachines are trees, the bricks are wood, and the industry is logging. Why people who claim to care about the environment are opposed to it is baffling.
The types of plant growth that significantly increase wildfire risk significantly (by providing kindling) are not the big profitable trees, but rather the low growing brush and low diameter trees, for which there isn't much of a market (although Sierra Pacific Co. in CA is trying to turn those in to particle board).
Also, the forestry industry is very mechanized, and doesn't rely on a lot of human labor compared to the past.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/29/642955787/will-more-logging-s...
The interim products are lower value, but giving the industry a promise of the best logs allows them the finances to deal with the less valuable interims.
Obviously if they wanted to thin out the smaller trees that would be beneficial but the profitability there is questionable.
The nbcnews.com site refuses to show content in Firefox Focus on mobile.
California used to have more acres burned annually a hundred years ago, but the amount of land burned has decreased since then, as a result of suppression efforts. This may be increasing the severity of fires, as there's more fuel to burn.
If you look at meso scale weather, there's a high pressure zone that develops between San Fransisco and Hawaii every summer which wards off low pressure (rain) systems. Generally develops by early June and lasts through August. Research "Pacific High" or "TransPac weather routing" or "Pac Cup weather routing" it's a major component of Pacific Ocean sailing races
The present-day human population, their works and imported flora and fauna, are not evolved the same way. This is a problem.
The Bay area NEVER gets rain for like almost, 8 months of the year. This was a freak event.
When people responded "you don't get to be a 1000+ year old tree without being able to survive fires" the response was "yeah but that was before climate change. These trees are likely gone forever now because climate change combined with fire suppression is causing super fires that burn much hotter"
It is reasonable people will make mistakes, lots of them, so let's stop prefixing predictions with probability qualifiers "it's very likely X will happen" as if our limited information is enough to quantify a probability % of liklihood. I've seen dozens of "very likely" predictions on HN fall flat once more information came out within the past few years alone.
If COVID19 has a 15% chance of leading to a million people on long-term disability, that justifies a lot of precautions. You can phrase that as a mathematical equation, where you sum up the outcomes, average, and get an expected value, or as an emotion. In this case, the outcome is the same.
Ditto for climate change. I agree the worst-case is unlikely, and people get ahead by presenting the worst-case, but "unlikely" means 10%, not 0%. In the grand scheme of things, switching to sustainable technologies isn't too expensive.
And things with 15% odds will fall flat 5 times out of 6.
I think the bigger problem we have is an inability to move. We should have dealt with COVID19 when it first appeared. We should be doing a lot more to deal with climate change. And so on. Problem-solving is the best way to mitigate fear.
They were referring to the buildings.
Ironic?
This concept could be applied to mean that because the forest survived this event, we should expect to last much longer than previously assumed. (something like that at least...)
As well, that the tree is already 2,000 years old, we shouldn't be surprised it's survived this fire. It's survived many fires.
(In other words, fires are part of nature.)
How the hell does a news organization decide this is a worthy way of pumping up revenues?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboola#Reception
ps. not on my usual computer, yes I know of adblocking :-)
But each fire gnaw a little of this protection.
Arsonists should be more severely punished. Is the same as terrorism, just much more insidious, causing a bigger economical damage and a durable damage at long term. Not to mention that also kills people...
Why is so well accepted as unavoidable by the public opinion still amazes me
Just another example of how people especially on HN read a few articles and then think they are experts on the topic.
The ancient redwoods survived and will thrive, as fully expected. It’s not that forest fires are great, but it’s a natural process of life and people thinking “this time it’s different” are usually wrong.
I'd say this article barely meets HN's standards of something that garners intellectual interest and is more the type of thing I'd expect to see on Reddit alongside cat videos. And then of course there is the environmentalist bent that the redwoods of at most sentimental value were the important thing that burned down, rather than things of material value to people. I wonder if anyone ended up homeless as a result of the fires.
According to the theory of radical skepticism it is very tough to put a probability bound on supposedly low probability disasters like fires, and so we must be prepared for them.
Controlled burns especially have become politically unpopular in recent decades, but they're tremendously effective. With controlled burns, we can burn small amounts of brush when the wind is blowing gently away from major population centers. If we want to fund technical solutions, I'd invest in software that models the best times and places to conduct these controlled burn operations FAR before we start discussing firefighting drones.