New England's Dark Day
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...
> Approximately 1.8 million ha burned annually in California prehistorically (pre 1800). Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is 88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a decade (1994–2004) characterized as ‘‘extreme’’ regarding wildfires. The idea that US wildfire area of approximately two million ha annually is extreme is certainly a 20th or 21st century perspective. Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period.
And: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
> Many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem [...] however, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.
For that matter California can go into drought for hundreds of years at a time which lead to the downfall and forced migration, understandably, of peoples in the area.
That's not to minimize man-made impacts, which certainly change the game! But I worry the focus on man-made change leads people to fail to appreciate just how much living on earth, on the geological scale, is riding a wild horse. If we can barely stomach a single weather anomaly without thinking it must be the result of man-made climate change (and would not be there otherwise), rather than a part of a planet with a big history of anomalies, it will lead us to thinking less clearly. (Of course all kinds of denialists aren't helping there, either.)
Our job is to steward the earth so we can stave off things like mass death, famines, etc. California should be thinking about the engineering needed to live in a biome that genuinely wants to be on fire, sometimes, and we should be routing around this possibility. It's somewhat frustrating to see the governor jump to climate change if only for its convenient exculpatory power, as if when we are not sequestering carbon, we humans are otherwise helpless.
The summer 2020 fires in the western US are largely a man-made disaster [1]:
1. Suppression of fire over the last century has led to an excessive build-up of biomass fuel.
2. The woodland urban interface has become more crowded in recent decades leading to difficulties in forest management (e.g., controlled burns) and safety.
3. Anthropogenic climate change leading to warmer and drier conditions in forests around the world.
Yes, large fires burned in the past and are a natural part of the forest ecosystem, but their severity has vastly increased (e.g., sterilization of soils, re-burning of forest that had burned just a few years ago). Yes, the climate changes but at no time in recent or medium-term geologic history has it changed so quickly.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/inside-the-megafire/
And this last bit is a bit of nitpikcing but depending on how you'd like to define "medium-term" geologic history yes, the climate has changed very quickly and drastically in even moderately recent history. It's a conciet to think we really affect the earth so much that it has rarely dealt with equal problems. Quite the contrary, it has many times dealt with far worse catastrophes than man-made climate change.
Edit: I'm sorry this goes against the zeitgeist, but we still need evidence for backing up our claims
[1] - https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/climate-change-and-wildfire....
Eeeeeh.
Sure, fair I suppose. Except that the US political arena is currently composed of people that want to address climate change and environmental stewardship responsibly and those that deny it's existence while toting snow balls onto the senate floor.
It's fine to reasonably say that California & the feds are underfunding efforts to maintain fire breaks and forest management in the state. It's not fine to say that carbon sequestration will solve everything magically one day - we need to be doing both, addressing excessive carbon generation and looking into carbon sequestration.
Also, as far as I've seen, carbon sequestration isn't really a renewable process - the idea is to lock that carbon outside of the natural cycles, that's a great way to reset things, but it doesn't effect the velocity with which we continue to make the problem worse.
Lastly, we're a pretty rich society - if we can do something about this why don't we. I think most people would be happy to go without the next generation of iPhone if it means solving climate change - maybe we can just slightly slow down the economic engine and produce a more sustainable existence.
The good news is a much smaller carbon tax is enough to change some behavior and get much of the benefit. You can start small and go from there.
But thinking about if California can continue to be habitable for 40 million people is scary.
Don't you also have to go vegan, stop flying, switch to an EV car, stop using disposable plastic, switch to green electricity, avoid businesses that aren't carbon neutral, consider the environment before you print that email, and so on ... ?
The scale of change required is seriously overwhelming and I fear without a solution to that, we aren't going to fix this problem anytime soon :(
If there was a natural climate event that would decrease temperatures by 20 degrees and we could only prevent it by clear-cutting forests and polluting our environment then that's of course what we would do.
This is definitely the approach ("avert") that is assumed in almost all discussion of this topic but there is also the choice to mitigate the effects (infrastructure, relocation, technology).
I don't think it is at all clear that we can "avert it" without a tremendous cost and I think it is entirely reasonable to discuss ways of mitigating effects and that approach may be much less costly.
The costs associated with averting global warming ultimately focus on reducing greenhouse gases, which means reducing fossil fuel use. But accomplishing that means expensive energy (i.e. carbon tax approaches, expensive power grids based on intermittent renewables) or extraordinary economic slowdowns (think COVID-19 global reduction in economic activity permanently, for example). More importantly instituting those changes to an extent that would actually reduce greenhouse gases would require extraordinary global enforcement mechanisms. How are the more industrialized economies going to force less industrialized economies to use less energy? to build fewer fossil fuel plants, etc? The reductions that are required can't be accomplished by a subset of world's economies.
All of this assumes that our knowledge of how the global climate systems work is substantially accurate. What if it isn't?
Discussion on boards like this is pointless. No one here knows what they're talking about because they are arriving at these conclusions from first principles and so they are far too slow to reach the better parts¹. But if you go up to the proposed plans for the future talked about by the policy eggheads you know that spending money to move people, to build and renovate sea walls, and build flood control is all absolutely on the cards².
If you are curious, then these are usually referred to as climate change adaptation strategies (Google for that exact phrase to get lots of results) in contrast to climate change mitigation strategies (reducing carbon emissions etc.).
¹ The SOTA policy thoughts around this are at Shakespeare and the discussion here is like a child reciting the alphabet. Do yourself a favour and skip this part.
² The geopolitical details about who gets more arable land, etc. are all other factors.
And you don’t think global warming will eventually cause an economic slowdown at Covid19 or worse levels, permanently? I’m not so optimistic.
I'm not exactly sure what part of my comment you are referring to. If it is the last part regarding our understanding of global climate, then perhaps I can expand my comment a bit.
Catastrophic global warming predictions are predicated on two linked concepts: 1) Greenhouse gases block infrared radiation 2) the global climate system has a particular sensitivity to 1) that results in the predicted net change in average global temperature.
1) is basic physics and can be measured directly in the lab. 2) is the "climate sensitivity" to atmospheric CO2 concentrations and its particular value is not directly measurable. It is a component of the complex climate simulation models and is just an estimate of the real climate's sensitivity.
My comment was about our confidence in the climate models and the sensitivity that they model.
> And you don’t think global warming will eventually cause an economic slowdown at Covid19 or worse levels, permanently? I’m not so optimistic.
I don't think there is any particular reason to think that humans won't adapt.
Your last paragraph points out that this isn't the case.
Most climate economists estimate that, without substantial behavioral changes, the effect of global warming will reduce our GDP by a single-digit percentage from what it otherwise would have been on the order of 100 years.
You’ve been swept up in a very hyperbolic and apocalyptic narrative which lacks any factual basis.
It’s not clear that, from a humanitarian standpoint, we should actually change anything about our behavior right now. The humanitarian cost of losing various sources of cheap energy very likely exceeds the humanitarian benefit of slightly reducing expected global temperature.
I'm totally cool giving a pass to areas with severe humanitarian problems that don't have the means to fight them. I care about America and other big consumers getting their act together.
And GDP is an interesting measure of stuff, but it is a really poor reflection of standard of living which I value a lot more than GDP measures or the stock market. In fact, losing or gaining a few points of global GDP isn't going to have any meaningful impact on folks living through humanitarian crises.
https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2830/six-trends-to-know-about-...
While yes, the earth is unpredictable and humans should aim to be adaptable, if we have identified trends that look dangerous then ideally we want a political and value system that rewards steering away from them.
http://blog.rongarret.info/2020/09/this-is-what-apocalypse-l...
That was a "This can't be good" sort of feeling.
I haven't watched it in years, but nowadays it'd be better described as "The Conspiracy Channel", with generous sides of American Pickers and Pawn Stars.
It reminded me of how I feel after programming for 12 hours straight -- nothing makes sense any more and everything is connected... I can't believe they've made 7 seasons out of this.
An example synopsis:
> With only two weeks left in the season Rick, Marty and Craig debate what they will do while the crane operators are on strike. They decide to conduct seismic testing in the swamp. At Smith's Cove, another wooden structure is found and excavation of that begins. A rust coloured patch of packed rocks with water flowing out is found. In the war room, members of the team meet with researcher Chris Donah who contacted them about the swamp and its relationship with the constellation Virgo. Eagle Canada returns to the island to conduct seismic testing in the swamp using 2,025 charges and 4,000 geophones. On Lot 27, Gary and Marty metal detect the spoils from a previous excavation of the swamp. They find a button, a coin or token with a square hole in it. In the war room, the dendrochronology results are revealed. The samples date to around 1770 with a 99.99% confidence.
This episode had 3.16 million viewers. What.