Until the next year or two when they come back again bigger from a unseasonably warm summer and unseasonably wet winter which grows even more fuel. And then again and then again and then again, growing worse each time until the forest doesn't grow back again at some point.
> until the forest doesn't grow back again at some point gotta love this doom-obsessed gedankenexperiment
Wouldn't the fires of the past (ie, the fires that these birds would have evolved to survive) have been larger? I've always assumed that, while fires of the past would have been more rare, they would have bigger if allowed to grow without any resistance. I mean, all our firefighting efforts do some good, right?
No, our firefighting efforts mean the fires get far bigger once they do erupt. Forest fires in the past were more frequent, but also smaller.
West coast wildfires are different for a lot of reasons. Brush fires under the redwood canopy rarely happen now, because almost all of the redwood canopy is gone. PNW fires look like upscaled christmas tree safety demonstrations, because the forests have been replaced by douglas fir farms. The fires are more intense and explosive now that water tables have fallen and soil retention has been compromised by continuous logging and terraforming.
Most of the modern west coast forest fires are a lumber farming problem of our own construction. Fires won't change that, as long as logging companies will be subsidized to harvest and sell the singed trunks for lumber and replant the same extremely flammable crop. The forests of the past are gone.
“Climate crisis” is starting to become the laziest explanation for why anything unusual happens in this country. Are you telling me these birds never did their migration above forest fires? Tell us why it’s different.
The way humans drive species to extinction is we push them right up to the very edge of it, removing 99% of their habitat and forage, and then we wait for a normal adverse event to finish the job. That these events happen from time to time does not absolve us.
Howcome we let this happen? Whoever decides to remove the last few %? Just gets away with it??
Many people do not care remotely about the lives of others that they can't conceptualize. I'm increasingly worried that large segments of the population will not be reached by that message or any message that isn't about direct harm to themselves or their loved ones.
On that note, I always knew we were the problem, but this reminds me of something I heard that changed the way I thought about it... If aliens were flying past our planet and saw all of our concrete and deforestation from space, they'd assume we're an unstoppable virus that will destroy the ecosystem if a cure is not found. That perspective hit me in a way, at a scale, that I have never thought about before. We see m…
Regarding development: I've had a growing belief lately that capitalism (local) isn't the worst thing about global economy. Rather, the global economy itself is what's bad. We shouldn't be comparing countries based on GDP, and money shouldn't be used as a proxy for success. Rather, we should find some way to measure the success of regions and people independently (ie, how successful they think they are) without using the success or failure or status of others as an input. Maybe we shouldn't even be comparing countries at all.
There's always a comment like this. How about "The habitability of this planet is dropping like a brick."
Sensationalism is an art form that's become extremely refined in recent years. However, the habitability of the planet is just fine. Carbon dioxide is fertilizing the earth, providing a higher leaf area index than any time in recent history: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... Global area burned in wildfires is actually down 25% over the last 20 years despite the arson in the Western Unite…
> Global area burned in wildfires is actually down 25% over the last 20 years.
The sky was red a few days ago. I'm guessing its that. I don't know. I'm not 100% sure, but that was the one thing out of the normal
Is the smoke 'clean', meaning is it just plantation that is being consumed by fire or there is also a large percentage of toxic smoke into the air?
Has there been significant number of homes/cars/factories (I am thinking things that upon being burnt would release a chemical/toxic cloud)(thinking the difference of burning 100kg of wood Vs burning 100kg of laptops and how different the smoke would be in damaging health)
The first sentence of this article describes the die-off as "inexplicable", but the sub-title gives a couple explanations including the massive fires and resulting smoke which is covering the western US. Watching the animals outside my house, I wonder how this smoke must be effecting them, but evolution must have led them out of wildfire conditions in the past.
I commented somewhere else here with a link to a researcher posting about findings. The link is to a twitter thread, and several posts down they say, "The birds seem to be in relatively good condition, except that they are extremely emaciated. They have no fat reserves and barely any muscle mass. Almost as if they have been flying until they just couldn’t fly anymore."
in the smog affected areas there is also probably not that much insects - bird food - giving how insects are breathing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiracle_(arthropods)), i.e. beside the fire itself, the resulting air pollution may probably clog the insects breathing pores. Even when not dying, some insects stop breathing and fall into kind of hibernation, thus no flying around to be consumed by birds.