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Comment by floren | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading Dan De Quille's "The Big Bonanza", about the history of the Nevada silver mines, and I was struck by a sentence from an early chapter:

> Pointing out the blue peaks of the Marysville Buttes, seen far away in the smoky distance, [Kit Carson] said "Yonder lies the valley of the Sacramento!"

This was in 1846; was it smoky because of persistent forest fires? Since it was still before the gold rush, the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas presumably weren't particularly populous.

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The fires are nothing new;

> Before Europeans arrived (pre-1800), when the area was much more forested and the ecology much more resilient, 4.4 million acres (1.8 million hectares) of forest and shrubland burned annually.[1]

> During the 2020 wildfire season alone, over 8,100 fires have contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of land, making it the largest fire season in California's modern history.

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

Acreage isn't the only measure of a forest fire.

4.4 million acres of burn in an already historically thinned forest is going to be entirely different than the same area of burn in a mostly un-thinned forest. The damage to the forest, the CO2 produced, the smoke levels ... all could be at least an order of magnitude different.

Well California is not yet as dry as it once was a few centuries ago, so you should expect things to get even worse. You think it's bad now, but some day you'll look back on present conditions fondly. If that's not your cup of tea then I suggest getting out of the state because there are no political solutions to this. Even if by some miracle AGW were stopped dead and reversed, California would still be getting hotter and dryer. That's what the pre-industrial climate of California was typically like.

I don't live in California.

I live in a place that is likely to be even adversely affected (in terms of human living conditions) by the move out of the last several thousand years of relatively wet weather in the American southwest. Note that this change isn't expected to involve increasing temperatures of much note all by itself, just increasing dryness. AGW will likely do that, however.

I'd also note that talking about the climate of "California" doesn't make a lot of sense. If state boundaries were based on biomes/climatic zones, CA would likely be at least 3 different states. The coastal zone of Northern CA is essentially unrelated, climate-wise or ecologically, to either Central Valley, the high Sierras or the start of the great basin to the east.

This discussion about fire in California is specifically about the regions of California which are prone to fires, in case that somehow was unclear to you. If you're trying to make a point, it's not clear what that point is.

My point is this: Fires in California will get worse and this shouldn't be news to anybody who cares. Both AGW and California's history point to fires becoming increasingly common. One without the other would be bad enough, but California has both.

When I reply to people on HN (or anywhere else) I assume I am talking to that person. You noted that "you" (meaning me) should consider taking certain steps. I noted that I don't live in CA. I then pointed out that the concerns you raised about CA apply to the entire US southwest. I then noted that CA has several different climate zones and biomes and that these concerns do not apply to all of them.

What is so hard to understand about this?

> The name "Smoky" comes from the natural fog that often hangs over the range and presents as large smoke plumes from a distance.

Wikipedia, "Great Smoky Mountains".

The Great Smoky Mountains are part of the Appalachian chain, between Tennessee and North Carolina, across the country from the Sierra Nevada. I imagine that the latter might also experience haze from the same cause (terpenes emitted by living trees), but given that a large part of the current problem is the suppression of natural wildfires, it would not be surprising for there to be actual smoke despite there being few European settlers. Native Americans in the region also used fire to manage their environment, e.g. to create meadows, as in Yosemite.

I'm pretty sure the comment you're replying to didn't intend to suggest any connection between the Sierra Nevada and the Great Smoky Mountains, but to show that the usage of "smoky" as an adjective for mountains does not necessarily mean literal smoke. The Great Smoky Mountains are just one example of this usage (thus "Great".) Similarly note the usage of "blue peaks" which probably doesn't mean the peaks were actually blue but that Rayleigh scattering was being observed.

Good point, it could have just been a figure of speech to refer to natural fog or clouds.

Side note, Kit Carson, who is oftentimes celebrated as a folk hero, was responsible for many massacres of indigenous peoples and displacement of them. He was never really the schemer behind these atrocities, but he was one of the US governments best trigger man when it came to this. It was very odd considering he was married to a Mexican woman and had indigenous wives at other points in his life.

It's only odd if you think of 'indigenous peoples' as a monolithic group. No one thinks it odd that europeans fought one another, even though they're all european, right? Same deal in the Americas. Cortez would never have prevailed against the Aztec without his Tlaxcalan allies, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaxcala#Conquest

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