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

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

#201

Post by joconne »

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…

Yes agreed. I worked as a Wildfire Fighter for BC gov. for the past 6 years. We had big fire seasons in 2017/2018 which were quite anomalous [0].

For example, the largest fire in 2017 was larger than the total area burned in any previous year. While 2018 surpassed the record breaking total area burned from 2017.

They were accompanied by a weather pattern that we hadn't seen before: We were setting records for the BUI, an index to track moisture content in trees, by mid June. This was accompanied by record flooding. I watched on lookout as 70 km winds pushed a fire 40 km down a valley in one day. So the primary variable in my mind was always the odd weather. I'm sure that fire suppression and invasive species are variables but the weighting was perhaps 10:1 to weather in the anomalous years.

[0] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/ab...

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

#202

Post by eloff »

ouroboros1 wrote: post #195
Diederich wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. I don't think there is much evidence to support this relationship. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

Basically as you add energy to the system things get more extreme. Storms including hurricanes and monsoons. Dry places and times get dryer due to increased evaporation. Wet places and times get wetter (more severe floods). It's a predictable consequence of higher temperatures.

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

#203

Post by pvaldes »

outworlder wrote: post #168
pvaldes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This leads to an unprecedented amount of fuel built up on the forest floor Everybody forgets the second part. Unprecedent amount of fuel AND WATER. Forest soil is a sponge plenty of fungus, tender roots, moss, and roundworms. This means that there is a lot of water in the soil also (and that each year there is more water in the area until is fireproof). Plant tissues store water also. Rainforests do not burn sponta…

You are definitely not talking about California weather.

Ok, but California is the home of one of the biggest slugs in the planet, of the second tallest tree, and of newts that climb trees. We should think about it.

Definitely the place has potential to be much more humid.

We can apply measures to make buildings less fire prone

We can apply measures to make structures less fire prone also

And we definitely can release tons of water from planes after a fire. So let me propose something, why If we would do the same before a fire?.

What if instead to suck and sell all water from the environment we would fix and respect a minimum ecological level of water instead and give its part to the forest?.

If the water level descends over a minimum, just provide some water in patches or rings. We would need to pay the same bill from bomber services but we would save the money lost by fire damages. Looks like a win-win situation to me.

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

#204

Post by dhosek »

dmckeon wrote: post #185
dhosek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firebreaks are a long-standing fire management technique. The problem is that with an intense fire, it's possible for the flame to leap across the firebreak, even very wide ones when there are windy conditions (which an intense fire can exacerbate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak

A greater risk than flames crossing firebreaks is firebrands or cinders - flaming bits of bark, small branch, clumps of pine needles - being carried aloft by heat and falling past the firebreak into combustible dry grass or other fuel, or onto a wooden deck next to wooden siding of a house, or in a rain gutter full of pine needles and twigs next to a composition shingle roof edge.

Yeah, sloppy language on my part. I should have said "fire" rather than "flame", the former encompassing firebrands/cinders/etc.

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

#205

Post by Diederich »

ouroboros1 wrote: post #195
Diederich wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. I don't think there is much evidence to support this relationship. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

https://sites.nationalacademies.org/BasedOnScience/climate-c...

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

#206

Post by EricE »

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…

basic forest mismanagement has nothing to do with climate change. We agressivly suppress the natural fire cycle which leads to excessive loads of dead material that the annual fire cycles would have cleaned out, and then we don’t let anyone go in and prune what the fires would have done naturally.

That’s how ladder fires happen. Forest mismanagement. NOT climate change. Even if the climate wasn’t changing, we would be in the same situation eventually. Sooner or later the excess material WILL burn up.

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

#207

Post by EricE »

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…

excess fuel means the fire burns hotter. So instead of being beneficial it’s destructive.

Excess fuel means ladder fires - where fire gets high enough to engulf the crowns of the trees - are far more likely.

Many conifers rely on fire to open their cones. Artificially suppressing fire stops that process of renewal.

Those are just a few examples off the top of my head - this topic is well trod and a little poking around will provide even more context.

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

#208

Post by keeganpoppen »

DFHippie wrote: post #93
quixoticelixer- wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a large number of pines that do this.

Another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_pine The general phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotiny

oh wow thank you both for generalizing the phenomenon for me-- as an idahoan my world was a bit to small, I guess =)

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

#209

Post by tingletech »

khuey wrote: post #24
hardmath123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the heat of a wildfire is literally the trigger for the cone to open up and release the redwood's seeds! (I don't know the exact mechanism for this, though.)

You're thinking of the coast redwood's relative, the giant sequoia. Fire dries out the cones causing the seeds to release.

seems to be the same tree? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens

edit: ah, Giant Sequoia is genus Sequoiadendron -- but both seem to have cones open by fire

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

#210

Post by ouroboros1 »

Diederich wrote: post #205
ouroboros1 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't think there is much evidence to support this relationship. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

https://sites.nationalacademies.org/BasedOnScience/climate-c...

Ah! Thank you
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