Apocalypse Now! - Fire & Ice
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| - Image by Peter Goettler. |
As with most of the citizenry of Southern Oregon, I was devastated by the multiple wildfires that swept through our region on September 8th. Prior to the firestorm, Southern Oregon was tinder dry from the long, hot summer... exacerbated by high wind conditions. The ignited, wind-driven wildfire swept off of vegetated grasslands and quickly entered into urban areas, transitioning into what is known as an urban conflagration.
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| About 15 miles North of my house, as the crow flies. |
These explosive conditions and resulting urban devastation are reminiscent of the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California. In the wake of that fire, I published a posted titled: Apocalypse Now – Paradise Lost. In this post, I commented on the complete incineration of the town of Paradise, and the rapidly changing nature of wildfires in the Western United States. At that time, the West had undergone five years of very severe drought. Even though we had ample rainfall in much of 2018, western forests were none-the-less severely impacted.
Sadly, this climatic drying trend has continued...
"So, typically when we think about our fire problem, we’re thinking about fire on natural landscapes, whether they be forests or woodlands or grasslands or shrublands. And we sort of thought we solved the urban conflagration problem many years ago. Many cities, in the earlier centuries, were taken out by wildfire. And we... through building codes, we kind of thought we had solved some of that problem.
Increasingly in the last decade, we have seen the occasional fire sweep into an urbanized area... this (Camp Fire) is not the only example, but it’s clearly the most devastating. We’ve seen fires sweep into an urbanized area, and it manages to breach the boundary. We sometimes call this the wildland-urban interface, where naturally fire-prone landscapes abut developed neighborhoods. And we see that it’s possible, under extreme weather conditions, where we have hot, dry winds, that these fires can actually penetrate the boundary and then become an urban structure-to-structure conflagration.
And so it’s a very different type of fire. And it’s not one that we tend to know a lot about, because they’re relatively rare. There have been instances, like I’ve said, and it appears that they’re becoming more common. So it’s clearly something that we need to plan for and learn from, so that we can do things differently in the future."
- Max Moritz, fire research scientist, U C Santa Barbara
The drought itself is made worse by climate change… by heightened anthropogenic greenhouse gas-forced temperatures. These climatic effects continue to make drought more severe. Drought conditions increase evaporative demand on the plants. Basically, the water content of the plants themselves are more vulnerable under these conditions... and make no mistake, this is a greenhouse gas-related effect.
Increasingly arid conditions in the Western U S and Canada are beginning to dry out forest lands, making them less hospitable to the great conifer forests of fir, cedar, hemlock and redwoods. In past centuries, the mighty redwood forests of California were perpetually mist-covered, cloud-hidden… and relatively free of fire danger. This is no longer the case.
An ancient stand of the world’s tallest trees has fallen victim to California’s raging wildfires. The CZU and SCU complex fires near Santa Cruz have ravaged Big Basin State Park. Big Basin is California’s oldest state park and home to the largest continuous stand of ancient coast redwoods south of San Francisco. Some of the giant redwoods there are more than 50 feet around and as tall as the Statue of Liberty. At 1,000 to 1,800 years old, possibly older, these giants may predate the Roman Empire.
In other news, few photos are better proof of the climate crisis than those taken by the members of the MOSAiC expedition, taken in August. The photos clearly underline how several recent climate studies, predicting ice-free Arctic summers by 2035, is not a theoretical scenario but rather an unavoidable fact...
As you may know, the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC), expedition is a one-year-long expedition into the Central Arctic, planned to take place from 2019 to 2020. For the first time, a modern research icebreaker will operate in the direct vicinity of the North Pole year round, including the nearly half year long polar night, during winter.
A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change illustrates the serious negative path for Arctic summer sea ice. The study points to exactly what can be seen on the photos from this August’s MOSAiC voyage: The shallow pools of water form on the surface of the ice, so-called melt ponds, causes more sunlight to be absorbed instead of being reflected back into space as is the case with white-snow covered ice.
Loose and weak ice with lots of melt ponds, partly open water, and no signs of multiyear ice. The powerful photos from the MOSAiC expedition reaching the North Pole on August 19 show the dramatic impact of climate changes. The sea ice is surprisingly weak, has lots of melt ponds, and the expedition ship Polarstern was able to easily break through.
So here we have a 2020 snapshot of climatic changes occurring in temperate forests as well as arctic environs… Fire and Ice. We know seasonal weather patterns will continue to fluctuate. We pray to an Angry God for early rain, while the Inuit pray for an early deep-freeze. We also know that our climate… the long-term average of weather… continues in it's disturbing warming trend.
Should this trend continue, as scientific models predict, humanity will be severely impacted. One study predicts that for every centimeter of rise in sea level, one million humans will be displaced. As most of humanity lives on coastlines, this is not too hard to imagine.
There are two traditional methods for dealing with climate change. One is “Mitigation” the other is “Adaptation.” Clearly the time has come and gone for dealing with climate change, solely by mitigation. We now must adapt. This doesn’t mean that we should give up on mitigation… we need to act now on a planetary scale. But it is clear that climate change is upon us and we are forced to pursue adaptation to this new reality.
On a personal note, your blogger is happy to report that my home and neighborhood was spared from the blaze that consumed so much of my community. Thankfully the winds blew north that day. My good luck was the bane of my friends and neighbors to the north…
Our recovery continues. The community has come out in great numbers to provide whatever assistance they can. And seeing (and participating in) this great outpouring of love and support is encouraging indeed. And courage is what we will all need to muster in the days and weeks ahead.
In devotion... - J ♥
Other installments of the Apocalypse Now! Series...
Comments
Things like this seem like they should be at odds with each other, they are not false dichotomies, in the sense circumstances might force you choose between one or the other. But also they can lead you to the same conclusion, or you might choose one strategy in one moment and another the next.
No marketing or commercials, please.
Per your... "I've been thinking about the contrast between living every day as if it might be your last vs as if tomorrow a miracle could happen."
Both of these are clearly true...thank you, Schrödinger's cat!
Sometimes, the situation is the boss.