81–90 of 147 posts
> The disease is actually related to the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1800s I was in Ireland a few months ago. Someone I met in Galway said this famine wasn't really a famine; that there were plenty of crops. The king simply withheld the potato supply, forcing the famine.
No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potatoes_Production_Great... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Is anyone aware of any pre-industrial epidemics of a similar scale?
"The American chestnut tree reigned over 200 million acres of eastern woodlands from Maine to Florida, and from the Piedmont plateau in the Carolinas west to the Ohio Valley, until succumbing to a lethal fungus infestation, known as the chestnut blight, during the first half of the 20th century. An estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, up to 1/4 of the hardwood tree population, grew within this range."
http://www.acf.org/range_close.php
They're trying to reintroduce blight resistant strains by cross breading with Chinese trees.
Five hundred years ago, Spaniards spread the seeds of european annual grasses as they traveled between missions in California. Within a century or two, a large part of the California landscape had changed. Annual grasses crowded out native perennial grasses, and we got our "golden hills." Nobody knows exactly what California looked like before the Spanish arrived or how many species may have gone extinct, but you can…
Not plant related, but equally fascinating: There used to be a lake bigger than Lake Tahoe in California between Fresno and Bakersfield. It It was the largest fresh water lake west of the Great Lakes (by surface area). It was drained for agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake
Five hundred years ago, Spaniards spread the seeds of european annual grasses as they traveled between missions in California. Within a century or two, a large part of the California landscape had changed. Annual grasses crowded out native perennial grasses, and we got our "golden hills." Nobody knows exactly what California looked like before the Spanish arrived or how many species may have gone extinct, but you can…
See also: the eucalyptus tree which was brought to CA in the 1800s and spread rapidly before everyone realized that young trees are useless for timber [0][1] Here on the Central Coast, there are eucalyptus groves everywhere (some are massive). They are messy, a fire hazard, and useless for firewood. 0. http://www.independent.com/news/2011/jan/15/how-eucalyptus-c... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus#North_Am…
The prevention to this type of problem is probably the same measure needed to fix many forestry problems. Regular fires. But now we have homes right up to the forest and no one wants to look at charred land for two decades. So I suppose it's still a no go. The thing about fire though is eventually it probably happens anyway.
For SOD, there's actually a fairly simple preventative step everyone could take that is poorly publicized. It wasn't until I happened to be out with someone who does environmental impact studies for the army corp of engineers that I learned how easily SOD can be transported from place to place through the soil that collects on clothing. Most of us wash after a trip outside, but we should be bleaching our shoes. The p…
As such we've had intensive public education campaigns here, instructing people to carefully clean down things like boots and boat hulls with either hot water or bleach solution[2]. Its spread continues, though perhaps less quickly than without such a campaign.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata#/media/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the coming ten years. ?? Why? What's special about the coming ten years? FWIW I've always seen this kind of language, it's not in the slightest new. You could go to most any point in history and find similar things. The problem is you can only tell what needs [needed] the money in hindsight. In 2002 did you know we needed the money for this? Did anyone?
Climate change is putting stress on ecosystems that causes them to change more rapidly than they have in the past. You could go back in history and find similar things, but you'd be hard pressed to go back in history and find as many things happening at the same time .
Is it? You keep reading this story and that story about how this crop failed, or changed or whatever, and they always blame climate change.
Then you check and see - oh yah, that also happened in this year and that year.
Climate change is becoming like dark energy - blame absolutely everything you don't understand on it.
Climate change is a very slow, very subtle process that is difficult to even see unless you look very closely. It's not responsible for every single thing that happens differently this year compared to last year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also: the eucalyptus tree which was brought to CA in the 1800s and spread rapidly before everyone realized that young trees are useless for timber [0][1] Here on the Central Coast, there are eucalyptus groves everywhere (some are massive). They are messy, a fire hazard, and useless for firewood. 0. http://www.independent.com/news/2011/jan/15/how-eucalyptus-c... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus#North_Am…
Slowly they are being eradicated. People in the East Bay are going apeshit over FEMA's plans to knock down ~10,000 eucalyptus in order to restore native vegetation and prevent a(nother) disastrous fire in the Oakland hills. On the other hand they seem to be very popular in Napa and along the 101 as windbreaks. Maybe we'll never get rid of them.
I'm sorry but isn't this just Darwinism in play here? You get natural selection, and various species that are selected against become extinct. But it's not like it's going to turn into some sort of desert, the area, after forest fires, will be replaced by another species that is presumably resistant to the fungus, and life moves on.
I don't think anyone is trying to blame someone for this.. Absolutely this is nature taking its course, but we happen to like oak trees so it might make sense that we would try and protect them.
Five hundred years ago, Spaniards spread the seeds of european annual grasses as they traveled between missions in California. Within a century or two, a large part of the California landscape had changed. Annual grasses crowded out native perennial grasses, and we got our "golden hills." Nobody knows exactly what California looked like before the Spanish arrived or how many species may have gone extinct, but you can…
See also: the eucalyptus tree which was brought to CA in the 1800s and spread rapidly before everyone realized that young trees are useless for timber [0][1] Here on the Central Coast, there are eucalyptus groves everywhere (some are massive). They are messy, a fire hazard, and useless for firewood. 0. http://www.independent.com/news/2011/jan/15/how-eucalyptus-c... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus#North_Am…
