The Yosemite Inferno In the Context of Forest Policy, Ecology and Climate Change

Lasrick writes "Andrew Revkin at DotEarthblog posts an assessment of the drivers of wildfire trends in the American West. He shows a graph of fire activity for the past 400 years in the Yosemite-Mariposa area, and a rather surreal time-lapse video of the current Rim Fire now burning in and around Yosemite."

Comments

so its not global warming?

[alen]

no way

no one is going to believe it though since you need something simple for people to blame everything on

Re:so its not global warming?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It's a combination of factors, of which warming is one. Probably the best summation from TFA:

"When you look at the long record, you see fire and climate moving together over decades, over centuries, over thousands of years," said pyrogeographer Jennifer Marlon of Yale University, who earlier this year co-authored a study of long-term fire patterns in the American West.

"Then, when you look at the last century, you see the climate getting warmer and drier, but until the last couple decades the amount of fire was really low. We've pushed fire in the opposite direction you'd expect from climate," Marlon said.

The fire debt is finally coming due.

This is pretty much what you'd expect. Leaving aside the question of the human contribution to warming and what we can do about it, the fact of global warming is established to all but the shrieking denialists; it's also a fact that under normal circumstances, ecosystems adapt to any change in climate--sometimes better than others, but they do adapt. Our fire suppression policies for the last century or so have prevented what would have been the normal adaptation from taking place. So now we're getting it all at once.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Trees, over their life span, may sequester carbon. But forests do not. They are carbon neutral.

This is true over the very long term--in the extreme case of Carboniferous forests, 300 million years or so; we're only now getting around to releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere by burning coal. Obviously in most cases dead trees rot and release their carbon faster than that, but "fast" is relative, and it's still a very slow process by human standards. And most of the carbon from a dead tree doesn't go straight back into the atmosphere; it's taken up by other organisms, and ultimately goes back into the soil as part of the organic waste that makes forest floors into fertile ground for the next generation of trees. Rotted wood, bits of smaller plants, bug poop ... it all looks like a buffet to a sapling.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Outside of suggesting increased dryness, they take a great deal of pain to point out how fire suppression is leading to vast increases in fuel, i.e. smaller trees, pines, brush, and other buildup, that used to get cleared out every few years by lesser fires.

Although in the 1970s, they started doing small controlled burns, they're still burning less per decade than used to be burned per year naturally. This is all from tree ring and other data.

Re:so its not global warming?

[taiwanjohn]

Yes, it's ironic (and frustrating) that apparently "green" policies can often lead to undesirable results. Thus, it's nice when somebody comes up with an idea that solves the problem without them.

For example, Allan Savory has a proven idea that, if adopted by even 50% of the industry, could sequester all the CO2 emitted since the industrial revolution in less than a decade. And, by the way, it has potential to mitigate the problem of brush fires too.

Another example: Amory Lovins, who has a plan to wean us off oil within the next 40 years, led by business, driven by profit.

There are lots of hopeful things happening. It would be nice if we would get past the left/right rhetoric and focus on the things we can all agree on. Unfortunately, "agreement" doesn't have enough "drama" to attract eyeballs to TV screens. Thus we end up with a spoon-feeding of "breaking news" every day with only a tenuous relationship to reality.

[sigh!] Have another soma...

Re:so its not global warming?

[Will.Woodhull]

Parent post is using some very incorrect assumptions.

Rotting vegetation does not release all the carbon that was sequestered during growth into the atmosphere. Much of it is transformed into other living things: termites and other insects, nematodes, fungus, etc. A log in contact with dirt becomes more soil; it does not evaporate into gases. The carbon is sequestered for as long as the ecosystem remains healthy and growing.

In a forest fire, a large amount of CO2 is released, but also a large amount remains in unburned wood (especially in the root systems) and in charcoal. The roots rot, as described above: that carbon is sequestered. The unburned wood above ground eventually rots as well; more sequestering. The char weathers into small bits over time and eventually enters the soil as biochar. That carbon is not only sequestered, but has become an important substrate to an enriched ecosystem. [One gram of biochar has an active surface area the size of a tennis court, which captures micro nutrients for slow release as the ecosystem can absorb them, and filters out heavy metals and other pollutants.]

In a forest fire, the ratio of carbon that remains sequestered to carbon that goes atmospheric as CO2 is somewhere between 1:4 and 1:2. Not all of the carbon in a forest is burned in a fire; somewhere between 25% and 33% is retained, basically forever, in the ecosystem as it recovers.

Re:so its not global warming?

[PPH]

A log in contact with dirt becomes more soil;

Then I should be able to measure the thickness of that soil, its carbon content and deduce its age. But I can't. I can take a shovel into an old growth forest that has been here since the last ice age and dig through a few feet of organics until I hit rock. And it looks pretty much like newer forests. Some that have repopulated human habitats a hundred years ago or less. Forget the shovel. I can do that with the toe of my hiking boot in many places.

Trees and other organisms consume the organic matter lying on the ground, incorporate it into their living structure. And then they die, burn, or rot. And something else eats them. There are a few notable places where organics accumulate. Peat bogs are an example. But forests in general? No.

The only carbon credits that forests should receive is for every pound of carbon removed permanently on the back of a logging truck, used in permanent structures and then buried in a deep land fill.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Will.Woodhull]

Then I should be able to measure the thickness of that soil, its carbon content and deduce its age. But I can't.

Of course you can't. You are not a pedologist or edaphologist or other soil scientist; you are not an ecologist, or biologist; you are probably not any kind of scientist. You are not even well-read about the subject you write about. So no one with any sense would expect you to be able to do any kind useful soil measurements.

You are entitled to your opinion, which you have expressed in a manner which makes it very clear how broadly it is based in fact. Which is not very broadly at all; it is so narrow that it topples under its own instabilities. Nevertheless, it is a valid opinion that you are most certainly entitled to express. And which can be used by anyone to assess the value of your contributions to these discussions.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Elbows]

Fire burns up undergrowth and dead branches on the forest floor, but the larger trees mostly survive. Logging removes the large trees and allows brush to grow up in its place.

So logging has a totally different ecological impact, and probably increases the risk of fire.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Will.Woodhull]

Yes, a good bit of the carbon in rotting vegetation ends up as CO2 eventually. But not all of it; much of it moves from part of one living thing to a part of another. Trees are predominantly made of cellulose, which is polymer of a simple sugar. Much of a rotting log is literally being eaten by bacteria and animals that can consume cellulose: this feeds the ecosystem at its base level.

Temperature, humidity, and other factors affect the speed with which rot occurs, but do not affect the process or its eventual results. Some fraction of what was once a log becomes free CO2, but a much greater portion moves into the region's ecology.

The conifer forests are sometimes described as "primary soil builders". Partly because their roots begin to break up the bedrock of mountains, but also because when they die, their products of decomposition feed the nascent soils.

Re:so its not global warming?

[bosef1]

While I'm as much [citations needed] as the next guy; you could, you know, go through the trouble of explaining what this world-fixing solution that "industry / the green lobby / the government doesn't want me to see" instead of forcing me to wade through the YouTube videos. When you do it this way it looks like the worst kind of shyster "at home infinite electricity" solutions.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Protip: when you have been thoroughly pwned, all you accomplish by whining about it is to embarrass yourself and everyone else around you.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Will.Woodhull]

Why does a 10K year old old growth forest not contain 10x the carbon of a 1K year old one?

Well, shoot. That's easy. The owls and the wolves and the raccoons and all the other critters carry the carbon away, to neighboring ecosystems.

None of this stuff is compartmentalized. The only compartments in ecology are in your head.

Re:so its not global warming?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I'd take AGW arguments more seriously if they weren't so dependent on rhetorical fallacies.

You've already amply demonstrated that no amount of evidence will ever make you take a scientific analysis of climate change seriously.

Ad hominem attacks such as the above ("shrieking denialists") and appeals to authority ("97% of scientists") are ridiculously common.

"Ridiculously common" is an apt description of the denalist tendency to shriek "ad hominem!" every time somewhat accurately identifies them, and their constant pretense that appeal to authority is at the basis of scientifically based climatological arguments.

Re:so its not global warming?

[RespekMyAthorati]

So you prefer appeals to non-authorities ("3% of scientists").

Re:so its not global warming?

[sjames]

You forgot that soil can erode and even end up at the bottom of the ocean. You apparently also didn't know that a significant portion of wood ash is calcium CARBONate. When calcium carbonate crystallizes (such as by the action of rain water), it becomes limeSTONE. The word stone there is not a coincidence.

The ability to operate a backhoe and a tape measure are useful skills, but it seems you also needed a bit more knowledge of chemistry and mineralogy to put all the pieces together.

Decrapified URL

[Daniel Dvorkin]

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/the-yosemite-rim-fire-in-the-context-of-forest-policy-ecology-and-climate-change/

Just in case anyone wants to actually, you know, read the article rather than being taken to a login screen.

Re:Decrapified URL

[Solandri]

Alas the NY Times seems intent on making sure nobody reads the story and has put your link behind a login page too.

Here's the video at least. Not the down-ressed YouTube version included in the NYT article, but the original HD version posted by the National Park Service.
http://vimeo.com/73310936

Re:the biggest driver is arson

[phantomfive]

Most wildfires in California are started by lightning. Watch the weather sometime, after there's a lightning storm in August, there will be fires everywhere in its wake.

Tree killers

[jklovanc]

This is exactly what I said in the last article about this fire.

If you let fuel build up you create bigger hotter fires that kill trees and cause massive damage. It is evidenced by living trees with burn scars that trees can live through fires. When the fire get hot enough and enough bark is burned the tree dies. Another issue is that most tree trunks are bare a fair way up. This allows low burning fires to move through the forest and burn the brush. If these low burning fire get hot and high enough ther start burning the tree branches which also kills the trees. It also creates a crown fire which can spread rapidly and devastate large areas.

It is well known that proscribed burns are good for forests. We just are not doing them enough. We don't want to see blackened areas in our parks even though it is necessary to protect them from bigger fires.

Human Arrogance

[billybob_jcv]

The arrogance of our species is astounding. Our perceptual timelines are far too short and our reactions are far too erratic. Nature grinds forward - with or without intervention by humans - and with or without the survival of life on this planet. It's not clear to me whether we have the power to remove all life on this planet and make it just another dead, lifeless space rock - I suspect we do not - not as long as the oceans contain micro organisms that can evolve very quickly such that even we can't easily eradicate them. Either way - the universe doesn't give d@mn - and thinking we have the ability to "control" our environment is the height of folly. Our mindset should be to try to survive and live within the current state of the planet - whatever that current state looks like. If the mean temperature of the planet is increasing, fine - then instead of trying to stop the environment's current direction - figure out how to live with the new status quo. Adapt or die - it's as easy as that. Hopefully, the squid will do a better job after we are gone and the squid rise-up to take our niche in the hierarchy.

Re:Human Arrogance

[phantomfive]

Our mindset should be to try to survive and live within the current state of the planet

No thanks, I like having a house with four walls. My house changes the environment (especially when combined with billions of other houses), but I'm not giving it up to prove I'm not 'arrogant.'

Re:Human Arrogance

[CyprusBlue113]

Of course we can control our environment. It is trivial. At the small scale just start smoking in bed until your home (environment) catches fire. Big change, man-made. One person can overturn a truck carrying pesticide so that it flows into a river which poisons downstream land and farms.

Now I know you're talking about very large scale environment. One human doesn't have a lot of power to affect the very large scale environment, but 4 billion humans do. Humans absolutely have destroyed many environments already. We've drained marshes and created deserts. Arrival of Europeans to America has caused massive change. Most of Europe used to be one large forest. We created the dustbowl in America in recent history. Humans have cause huge changes in the past and the evidence is very clear that humans are greatly exacerbating the current climate change.

Yes, we need to adapt. But we need to stop doing the stupid stuff that is encouraging the climate change. You can't just keep using your 10mpg SUV and importing your food from the other side of the globe while shouting out the window "not my fault!"

Every time I see one of these humans can't change weather cranks, I just hear "Black Blizzard" in my head. Congress actually debated this very issue till one side said "look out the window, and you can see my home state of Kansas blowing by". Some people just refuse to listen to facts and cling to their beliefs until they personally experience just how wrong they are.

Even with AGW aside

[estitabarnak]

In this discussion, we can completely ignore global climate change and end up with the same general calculus. If you let fuels accumulate (as they always have and always will) by putting out every fire, you will keep kicking the can down the road until there's a fire so big that you can't put it out. Add in budget problems and the situation is ripe in California.

This isn't a matter of wacky tree-hugging liberals preventing logging from saving our forests either. Use of prescribed burning and selective logging are taught extensively at the UC Berkeley Forestry program. Selective logging is used for various management goals in the Santa Cruz mountains (including revenue maximization). Neither of those places have a history of being particularly conservative.

This isn't a problem that you can micromanage your way out of. You can't take out a few juicy trees and declare your forest safe from fire. Regular, prescribed burns allow for the kind of patchy diversity and general fuels reduction that prevent these big fires from happening.

Re:Potheads Suspected

[MightyMartian]

I'm going to blame Good Ol' Boys listening to Rush Limbaugh and lighting their farts on fire every time he says "Obama!"