The Northeast is becoming fire country
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The article doesn't mention that 700 full-time park workers were cut in Eric Adams' budget. 50 of those park workers were forestry specialists, who did things such as removing sick/dead trees, and clearing the sort of brush/debris that is easily ignitable.
We see this over and over again: whatever money you "save" by delaying or skipping maintenance, you end up having to spend when something actually breaks.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3...
[2] https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/07/01/parks-budget-shrinks-eric...
[3] https://thechiefleader.com/stories/urban-forest-program-gutt...
>But the tree rings also show droughts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a severe drought in the nineteen-sixties. (1963 was a particularly tragic wildfire season in New Jersey.) The Earth’s atmosphere is complex enough that, every now and then, Seager explained, “something really strange is going to happen and there’s going to be a long sequence of dry weather.”
So I doubt there will ever be fires in the NE that compare to the West. This is due to a drough that does happen once in a while.
If there was no fire new NYC, I doubt this article would be published :)
Warmer temps increase evaporation, which leads to more precipitation. But increased evaporation decreases surface water and dries out soil/plants/vegetation (drought). This makes periods with low precipitation drier than they would be with cooler temps (more intense drought).
One of the biggest challenges with climate change is that it continually increases variance in the system as warming increases. It's hard enough to correctly model a stable climate system, but modeling one that will be continuously changing for many human lifetimes is very hard.
We're not headed to a "new normal", if we ('we' being life on this planet and human civilization) were we'd simply adapt to it, it would be costly, but survivable.
But climate change will continue to cause radical and increasingly difficult to predict changes, and those changes themselves are subject to equally radical future transitions. This is why climate change is such a true crisis: it cannot be "adapted" to, because there is no stationary state we'll arrive at any time soon.
Just look at Europe: the last few years it's been experience extreme heatwaves, but if the AMOC collapses (which it may, even in our life time) that will likely cause it to experience extreme cold. Even then the exact details of an event as extreme as the AMOC collapsing are hard to predict, and the AMOC collapsing is just one of countless other similarly extreme events we are going to be facing in coming decades.
I think for many this is the limit of how they can/want to understand whats inevitably coming. More info causes many to zone out, move it quickly to mumbo-jumbo and seek another dopamine hit or some other cheap empty fun.
Like it or not, we need for regular Joe to care at least a bit and understand at least on surface why. If we wrap it in economy like many populists do, that battle is lost (which may be intentional on their part).
I kind of expect this to happen when the south part of China becomes uninhabitable due to warming.
IIRC, China has 10x the number of people than Russia.
Is it your opinion that climate change is universally bad? Language like "more chaos" make it sound that way: whatever changes happen are bad. I can't imagine that's the case. Some things will certainly be bad, and some not so much.
An unceasing labyrinthine supply chain operates day and night with tendrils in a million other complex systems in order to make sure that you have food, water, medicine, law and order, HVAC, etc.
We are an inch from chaos, moreso than any time in history.
Substantial disruption to these systems will be poorly tolerated and could easily lead to the kind of lifestyle we haven't seen since we found out that sharpened sticks make for excellent negotiation devices.
Surely, you wouldn't mind your freezer warming to above freezing every other Tuesday? That change may be bad, but some of the other changes I'll make might be good...
Our societies optimize around climate bands, be it in agriculture, housing, transportation, etc. The benefit of having temperatures and weather swinging in a 'good' direction half the time will be more than offset by them swinging in a 'bad' direction even a fraction of the time.
The PNW might not mind a 60 degree winter (it's better than a 50 degree one, except for the pine beetle eating all of its lumber because the winters aren't cold enough to kill it, but that ship has sailed years ago), but it sure as hell will mind 100 degree highs in the summer (which are much worse than 90 degree ones). The last time one happened in 2021, over a thousand people died.
And on the agricultural front: It takes three months to grow our food crops, but it only takes one bad weekend to ruin a harvest.
Luckily, I'll probably be dead before the worst of this will existentially affect me. Your kids will be the ones who will have to sort out the mess that people currently upset over $4 eggs are making. Bon appetit!
Stay Healthy!
Do you find the tundra too cold and dry? Then sure, you will benefit.
Do you like your current climate? Do you find it too predictable? Would higher energy air make it better?
We need to reduce the population by 99.9% and stop all oil pumping full stop, stop all nuclear power, it will be painful but it's better than the alternative, we are the custodians of the environment and we need to treat it as more sacred than human life, this is what I feel and I'm an authority so you should listen to me.
This is strictly false. A consistent warming trend reduces the occurrence of extreme cold events. This will narrow the range of temperature fluctuations, which directly reduces the time derivative of temperature variance.
Also, oceans redistribute heat more efficiently due to climate change. This causes the temperature gradients between regions to weaken. Once again the time derivative of temperature variance is reduced. Empirically, one can observe this decrease in temperature variance in the tropics.
If you have a dry season, you can have a fire season, and the wetter your wet season, the worse fire season will be.
In the West, the wettest month (which is in winter) can have 6-10 inches of rain while the driest (which is in summer) has 0-0.5 inch.
In the northeast, the wettest month (which is in SUMMER), might be 3-5 inches. The driest (which is in WINTER) might be 2-3 inches, including snowfall.
Just a warning if that trend spreads to the NE.
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/arson-wildfires-c...
Here is one of many news articles on the actual numbers, btw: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna171393
At least in CA, rain causes more grass growth for fires to connect up through.
The fire material just builds up as growth pull carbon out and builds up a pile of it (because when a tree grows, most of its mass comes from the air & rain).
And then the fires were started by a "Lightning complex" on top of a hill.
Most ecosystems in traditional "fire country" are adapted to those fires and sometimes even need some volume fires to keep working the way they have been, with the life that inhabits them.
That's not the case for ecosystems in the Northeast. Large fires will take much longer to recover there, and traditional biomes and inhabitants may not recover from them at all. That's not only sad for naturalists, but can have pretty significant downstream effects on the human communities in the region.
NY: "Statewide, there are currently six wildfires in New York State encompassing nearly 6,031 acres, including the Jennings Creek/Sterling State Park fire. "
CA: 1,040,146 acres burned this year.
So next time you wanna talk shit about California and how they handle wildfires, take a look at the amateur hour response from the east coast first.
It is a big deal when an area gets a weather event that is not normal for that area because they cannot handle it and don't have the tools or people with experience in the area to deal with it. I think the freaking out is justified because it may help save lives - people in the affected area are more likely to hear about it and hopefully react accordingly.
> California (often mocked and judged by the rest of the nation)
Being this defensive about your state is ridiculous. And don't pretend people in California never mock people from the "flyover" states.
There's no doubt that climate change will shift the centers of disasters from one place to another (there's speculation about California getting tropical storms [1]). But I'd say you should only able to laugh or throw snark about this if you're also doing something about it.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/extreme-weather-events/study-...