Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

nbcnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 210 posts

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#131

Post by henearkr »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #124
henearkr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. I am just reading a novel set in the future and where our current period is referred as such, because, at the end of this climate crisis and huge extinction event, humans decide to restore the biosphere to its last post-glacial state. The notion that the Anthropocene could end is interesting though, it may be a happy (like in the novel) or a scary end.

I'm intrigued. What's the book called?

It's the Xeelee Sequence, by Stephen Baxter. The focus on the late-Anthropocene "Bottleneck" is in the volume called "Transcendent". The end of the age of farming is located near the 27th century.

After they restored the biosphere (or did their best) though, more dire events take place in the Solar System and on Earth (but it's not only the fault of humans, so maybe not technically an Anthropocene again).

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#132

Post by jarnagin »

eloff wrote: post #108
gdubs wrote: post #99

I was elated to read this, and then disappointed at the comments here. It seems to be feeding an argument of “see, fires are natural and these trees are old - Climate Change is a fear-mongering hoax!” Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Ladder fires — where fire leaves the forest floor, up to the crowns, creating a wall of fire that can change weather patterns — a…

The world is getting hotter, but only parts of it are getting drier. Parts of it are getting wetter. Overall it will get wetter. For each 1C rise in temperature, the air can hold about 7% [1] more water vapor. Warmer air above warmer oceans will pick up more water and dump it over much the same places as it does now, although the prevailing winds and ocean currents changing will also change that up. I think the effec…

It’s tempting to believe that climate change just means that some places will get hotter or colder, or that species will move north or south, upslope or downslope, but the reality is that we don’t really know. Much of the work coming out of ecological niche theory shows that ecosystems have many emergent properties and can’t simply be studied at the level of an individual species because those species wouldn’t survive without their symbiotic relationships [1]. What is true at the species level, however, is that each species has a unique and oftentimes non-overlapping adaptation to whatever environment it’s in relative to its peers. That means that as the climate shifts, some species will go north or south, or upslope or downslope, and others will behave differently. The consequence is that many ecosystems will literally be pulled apart, and species which lose their symbiotic relationships will have to either adapt over a short time span or go extinct. Assuming the climate stabilizes, it will take time, probably much longer than humans are comfortable with, for things to reconfigure.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_2/19729

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#133

Post by hinkley »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #120
hinkley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope so. Old firefighting techniques have build up vast caches if flammable material that we cannot afford to remove by any other means than forest fires. Changes in firefighting tactics should mean that once an area has burned, the next fire should be less severe, however the burns will take much longer to recover than they should. Any time sequoias survive a fire is good news twice over. One, the danger for them…

"Old firefighting techniques have build up vast caches if flammable material that we cannot afford to remove by any other means than forest fires." I see this repeated a lot. Can you talk specifically about the effect of early/mid 20th century firefighting in the Big Basin fire as compared to the Australian bushfires last year, the Siberian fires in 2019, and the Amazon fires this year and last? I am not sure any pri…

Both can be true, and if anything I think I would agree that this means we need to be even more careful over the next 30-50 years than we ever have been (or, hopefully, will have to be again), because we have two fuckups paying dividends at the same time, and one of them is on that time scale.

We already know that timber land in the Americas requires more active stewardship than colonial thinking suggests. These are not European forests. Microbial decay doesn't reduce the calories per acre the same way. Global warming makes the balance even more precarious. But there are ways we can address both of these problems which also serves as a carbon sink. As long as we do it before the dominant forest soil biome in North America flips to bacteria-dominant due to rising ambient temperatures.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#134

Post by bcrosby95 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #121
gdubs wrote: post #99

I was elated to read this, and then disappointed at the comments here. It seems to be feeding an argument of “see, fires are natural and these trees are old - Climate Change is a fear-mongering hoax!” Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Ladder fires — where fire leaves the forest floor, up to the crowns, creating a wall of fire that can change weather patterns — a…

trees used to be used as wind breaks for farms, would it be possible to do some geo-engineering to prevent fires from spreading through passive design like gaps or roadways or something?

During the socal fires a few years back, the Santa Ana winds caused it to jump an 8 lane freeway. You're going to need one hell of a firebreak.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#135

Post by leafboi »

greentimer wrote: post #107

Many commentators have blamed climate change for the fires because it is fashionable, especially on the left, to do so. The reality is that the very small change in temperatures produced by climate change isn't sufficient to produce a change in the rate of fires. We'll have to wait a long time for climate change to produce such effects, if it ever does. I would lay the blame more on our society's technological stagna…

You need to live in California where these fires have been ravaging the state year after year for the past decade.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#136

Post by nitrogen »

leafboi wrote: post #128
DoreenMichele wrote: post #5

Redwoods not only survive the fires, they tend to proliferate afterwards. After lesser trees have been cleared out by the fires, redwood seedlings take root. Redwoods also thrive in low rain areas that are prone to fog because they benefit from the fog in a way that other trees do not. I once suggested redwoods as an alternate or additional metaphor for giftedness re Stephanie Tolan's "Is it a cheetah?" https://www.s…

What you're saying is true, but this fire was not a good thing. Trees don't do well when you set forest fires year after year after year.

Is it the same exact area burning every time?

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#137

Post by matt-attack »

hinkley wrote: post #119
refurb wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Are you saying firestorms don’t happen naturally? I don’t know how to interpret your comment.

“Naturally“ is a mental trap we have walked ourselves into, with John Muir leading the charge. There is not and never has been in recorded history, a “natural” forest in California. They were anthropomorphic, but in a manner the Western eye refused to see. The indigenous peoples were not a bunch of ignorant riffraff living in a forest paradise wrought by God or Nature. They were the forest paradise, and when they wer…

I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious. You’re telling me that the nomadic tribes of the Native Americans, who never built a single city nor developed any appreciable technology somehow tended to the vast millions of acres of California’s forests?

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#138

Post by Diederich »

eloff wrote: post #108
gdubs wrote: post #99

I was elated to read this, and then disappointed at the comments here. It seems to be feeding an argument of “see, fires are natural and these trees are old - Climate Change is a fear-mongering hoax!” Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Ladder fires — where fire leaves the forest floor, up to the crowns, creating a wall of fire that can change weather patterns — a…

The world is getting hotter, but only parts of it are getting drier. Parts of it are getting wetter. Overall it will get wetter. For each 1C rise in temperature, the air can hold about 7% [1] more water vapor. Warmer air above warmer oceans will pick up more water and dump it over much the same places as it does now, although the prevailing winds and ocean currents changing will also change that up. I think the effec…

This is a good and interesting report, thank you. As you implied, this is about averages, which is useful though incomplete.

"Global Warming"/"Climate Change" is, to state something pretty obvious, about additional energy in an active system. That means, of course, more total heat across the entire system.

However, I think a far more important aspect is how much more active the system as a whole gets. I don't have time to get into it in detail here, but overall that means there will be more and more extremes. More droughts. More floods. More severe winds. More heat waves. More freezing storms. We're already seeing that in action and the rate at which the number of extremes increase will tend to increase as more energy is sent into a somewhat chaotic system.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#139

Post by nitrogen »

footlose_3815 wrote: post #87
umvi wrote: post #86

Let's take a moment and recognize the fear-mongering going on a few days ago where there were articles saying "this time is different because of climate change, this time climate change super fires have caused a national treasure to be destroyed"

Are you saying there's not enough evidence to associate the wack storm that prefaced this with climate change? The Bay area NEVER gets rain for like almost, 8 months of the year. This was a freak event.

I grew up in a place where people would talk about "that one storm in '62" (year made up) or even further back, either from direct experience or retelling an older generation's story. Given the bay area's high flux of people in and out, how many people have lived there long enough for generational knowledge of the weather 50 or 100 years ago to exist?

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#140

Post by refurb »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #122
refurb wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Are you saying firestorms don’t happen naturally? I don’t know how to interpret your comment.

Global warming is happening, and easily measurable and observed with the naked eye. Obviously large forest fires have occurred before humans doubled atmospheric CO2 levels in the last century. The idea it is either natural or the result of human caused climate change is a false choice. The question is how much climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of them as a contributing factor. They occur natural…

So firestorms aren't natural?
Post reply on HN