Fog-bound this early Tuesday on California’s north coast, but just a wee-bit to the east are huge chunks of deep-growth forests, dry and waterless, and in some places, on fire.
A moist shoreline and a tinderbox interior.
Countrywide, a variety of weather shit, though, tornadoes twisted across diverse locales — a four-minute one early yesterday in Worcester, Massachusetts, uprooting trees, downing power-lines and clocked at about 85 miles-per-hour, meanwhile, reports indicate a couple of tornadoes, too, in northern Michigan, knocking shit all over, one an EF-1 (winds up to 100 mph): “Look at this. That’s a tornado, bro. Not a tornado but a waterspout.”
Add to that, snow was reported falling this weekend in Alaska and Wyoming.
(Illustration: ‘Untitled,’ from the Firewatch series by Mats Petersson, found here).
And meanwhile again, up here in Northern California, forest fires are the major concern this time of the year, especially in a drought, and this morning it’s the Happy Camp Fire, northeast of where I’m currently sitting on my ass, and way up in the Klamath National Forest, near-about directly east of Crescent City, which is out on the coast. The fire has already burned more than 100 acres, is only about 15 percent contained, and still threatens about 700 homes in the area — 250 people have been evacuated.
These fires do take time to get under control — Happy Camp’s version started Aug. 11.
And the weather ain’t helping. The National Weather Service has issued a Fire Weather Fire Watch: Today’s weather is calling for warm and dry conditions, combined with unstable air aloft, suggesting the fire will burn extremely hot this afternoon if it breaks through the inversion.
Doesn’t sound good.
And on a happy forest-fire note, the Lodge Lightning Complex Fire, down in Mendocino County and a heavy-major concern last month, has shriveled — nearly 97 percent contained, the thing is now under “spot fire” watch, though, the interior of the fire zone (12,535 acres) will ‘continue to burn and may produce smoke for an extended period of time‘ across the region.
A longtime, good friend’s home was in direct path of the fire at one crucial point — a couple of miles from his backdoor — but the winds shifted, weather changed, and the fire turned west, beating a line toward the coast.
As the drought continues, the forests just can’t help it.
Climate change makes everything worse — add heat and shit hits the fan.
Via Discovery last month:
In a disturbing new study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Austrian scientists say that forests increasingly are endangered by problems such as massive wildfires, violent winds and outbreaks of destructive pests, which are intensifying as the result of climate change.
While the study focused upon Europe, the same problems also threaten forests in North America and elsewhere.
And yesterday from Climate Central, and California’s traveling forests:
Hike high enough up California’s Sierra Nevada and the forest morphs around you.
At around 6,000 feet, the dazzling diversity of the lower montane forest, replete with California black oak, ponderosa pine, and incense cedars gives way to more monotonous landscapes of red fir and lodgepole pine.
Hike further still and trees eventually disappear altogether, replaced with rocky topographies reminiscent of Mars.
As the globe warms, these landscape transformations are occurring at higher altitudes.
Temperature gradients over the sierra are shifting uphill, and they appear to be dragging lush, diverse, thirsty forests with them — up into lands where temperatures had previously been too cold for them to survive.
These landscape changes in the warming Sierra Nevada could have major repercussions for California’s economy.
The thirstiness of the dense forests that flourish in the mountain’s middle reaches, an expanding sweet spot where water is more ample than in the lower ranges, and where temperatures are more amenable to plant life than in the higher stretches, makes them bona fide water hogs.
…
The new study is the latest bad news for water managers in California, and elsewhere, who are already bracing for a dryer future.
Less rain and snow is forecast to fall on the Sierra Nevada as the climate changes, meaning the conditions that have caused California’s current drought are expected to arrive more frequently.
And more precipitation is expected to fall as rain instead of snow, stealing away the snowpacks that act as natural reservoirs, slowly releasing moisture into human-made water reservoirs during hot and dry summer months.
And earlier this year, a study led by Berghuijs was published in Nature Climate Change showing that U.S. river flows fed by snow harbor more water than those fed by equivalent amounts of rain.
The cause of these counterintuitive results is not known, but Berghuijs speculates it could be caused in part by rainwater leaching into soil, while snow often sits atop frozen ground.
No matter how you do the math, we humans are always in the negative column, and going even more negative — in the making-of-all-the-above-worse category, the earth’s polar ice caps are reportedly melting at an ‘unprecedented rate,’ as indicated yesterday from the Guardian:
Greenland’s volume of ice is being reduced at the rate of 375 cubic km a year.
In Antarctica, the picture is more complex as the West Antarctic ice sheet is losing ice rapidly, but is growing in volume in East Antarctica.
Overall, the southern continent — 98 percent of which is covered with ice and snow — is losing 125 cubic km a year.
These are the highest rates observed since researchers started making satellite observations 20 years ago.
“Since 2009, the volume loss in Greenland has increased by a factor of about two, and the West Antarctic ice sheet by a factor of three,” said Angelika Humbert, one of the report’s authors.
Odd how through technology, we’re able to watch ourselves extinct ourselves.
This is good to know, however, in the shadow of Labor Day: “Employees were more satisfied with their workplace and reported increased concentration levels and better perceived air quality in an office with plants. The findings suggest that investing in landscaping an office will pay off through an increase in office workers’ quality of life and productivity.”
Yes, your raise came this year in the form of better air.