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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."
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
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.
Will
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.
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.
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.
Will
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.
Will
Protip: when you have been thoroughly pwned, all you accomplish by whining about it is to embarrass yourself and everyone else around you.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Will