this is true for the Western Sierra mountains also.. but a big catch is, the Western Sierras and the Eastern Colorado Rockies are carefully studied by competent people with excellent equipment, while vast stretches of northern forests in other parts of the world, are similarly suffering (fires) but with very little detail available. Geopolitics interferes as the political governments are rivals.<p><a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21100767-venado-declaration" rel="nofollow">https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21100767-venado-decl...</a><p>shout out to SKYLAB Precision Forestry who are doing excellent, cutting edge work based in Hamburg, Germany
> Global warming has contributed to a doubling of the number of acres burned across the country since the 1990s.<p>> Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.<p>> From 1900 to 2015 the world lost more than a third of its old-growth forests.<p>We are going to quite literally burn this planet to the ground before the end of the century.
> A University of Colorado/Boulder study shows that when forests burn across significant portions of the Rocky Mountains, the forests do not regrow. Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
Biomes are changing and it's our fault. Planting trees won't virtual signal our way out of climate change when there's too much CO2 in the air, not enough rain, and too much heat. If I hear any more about planting trees somehow magically sequestering carbon, I'm going to scream into the void until my eyes bleed.<p>One of the primary scalable ways to fix the atmosphere is to use oceanic bio CSS by growing gigatons of kelp and/or phytoplankton, and sinking it to where it's more-or-less permanently sequestered. Floating automated kelp farms and processing stations could make this happen.
related: <a href="https://grist.org/climate/climate-change-forest-loss/" rel="nofollow">https://grist.org/climate/climate-change-forest-loss/</a><p>"When trees fail to regenerate after a fire, new plants take their place. To generalize, in the northern Rocky Mountains, it’s a mix of grasses and shrubs of the genus ceanothus — like snowbrush. In parts of the Southwest, juniper and oak savannas replace pine forests. In New Mexico, thorny locusts often dominate. In northern California, its dense hip to head-high thickets of manzanita and ceanothus. The general trend: fewer forests, more shrublands."<p>(also, <a href="https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/07/19/california-fires-fire-advisor-wildfires/ideas/essay/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/07/19/california-fir...</a>)
This site allows you to see the amount of forest gained/lost in different regions over the last 20 years: <a href="https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/?map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsibGF0IjoyNi45OTk5OTk5OTk5OTk5NzUsImxuZyI6LTI5LjMwODU5Mzc0OTk5OTM5Mn19" rel="nofollow">https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/?map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsib...</a><p>For example, California has lost ~26% of its forest cover since 2000
<a href="https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/USA/5/?mainMap=eyJzaG93QW5hbHlzaXMiOnRydWV9&map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsibGF0Ijo1My4zODMzMjgzNjc1NTc0MSwibG5nIjotMTE2LjYzMDg1OTM3NTAwNDM1fSwiem9vbSI6Mi43Mzg4MjU5MzYxOTE3NjgsImNhbkJvdW5kIjpmYWxzZX0%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/USA/5/?mainMap...</a>
Sooo for the last few hundereds of millions of years, which included a much warmer periods than the current one, trees somehow always managed to regrow, and chose this very moment to cease doing it?
and yet <a href="https://www.warpnews.org/human-progress/nasa-the-earth-is-greener-now-than-it-was-20-years-ago/" rel="nofollow">https://www.warpnews.org/human-progress/nasa-the-earth-is-gr...</a>
I experienced the brutal heat wave that hit the Bay Area in 2020, along with awful wildfires and started smoking 1 cigarette a day. My thinking was, if the climate is this bad now (2020), it's going to be significantly worse by 2050.<p>This isn't to say one shouldn't take care of their body, I go to the gym 2-3 times and a week and do lots of cycling.<p>The fact about how many old trees have died in the last century saddens me in a peculiar way.
There's been some talk about how the 'sustainable forestry' practices we've been doing are going to reveal themselves to have been a fiction after the next lumber harvest. I can't help but think this is showing up now in the results, and global warming has accomplices.<p>We also have known for some time that forests heal faster from the edges in, and as we've learned more about what goes on below the soil the evidence just stacks up for it. Unprescribed fires aren't just more intense, they're also bigger. We are going to have to start factoring all of this into our land management practices, and apply it to any restoration work.