California Fires

[ysabetwordsmith]

The Mendocino complex of fires is now the largest in California's history.  This sort of thing will only get worse as global warming advances.  For a while, anyway.  Eventually the backlog of flammable material built up by unwise policies will be exhausted, leaving only the small amounts of annually accumulated fuels.  Deserts are much less flammable than forests.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

There is a legend from the Native tribes of California.. which talks of the "years of fire" followed by a generation of drought... study of the sediment records show regular bands of charcoal interspersed by bands of sandy sediments with a lack of organic material...

So the trend was already there, Climate Change has made it worse. Deepening the drought and so on... although, it's quite possible that it might not bounce back, leading to drought without end.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> There is a legend from the Native tribes of California.. which talks of the "years of fire" followed by a generation of drought... study of the sediment records show regular bands of charcoal interspersed by bands of sandy sediments with a lack of organic material... <<

That makes sense.

>> So the trend was already there, Climate Change has made it worse. Deepening the drought and so on... although, it's quite possible that it might not bounce back, leading to drought without end. <<

Well, that depends on the definitions. Drought is a temporary shortage of rainfall. This isn't. It's a shifting baseline. The water has left and she's not coming back. The change is permanent.

That's on a human scale, though. Geologically, the planet has temperature swings measured in tens of thousands of years or longer. Eventually, it will cool off and the water will return.

Re: Thoughts

[siliconshaman]

Well, if we're talking long-time scales... then eventually all the water will go away, and the rocks will melt as the sun expands into a red giant.

But yeah, in terms of human scales, say hello to the new desert.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

... if humans haven't engineered their way out of those problems in a few billion years. It can be done. But few species manage to the get through the bottleneck of Drake's equation, and looking at humanity's behavior, I'm not optimistic about its chances of survival.

[redsixwing]

Ahhhh crap.

I've wondered about that, working through the backlog of fuel. My area's impacted, although not as severely as California, and we're dealing with the megafires that come from half a century of willful mismanagement.

...relatedly, I saw a roadrunner yesterday. The furthest north I'd seen those was previously about two hundred miles south of here. o.O