Environmental News

This was scenario for bad fungus in The Last of Us I think. TV series.

Fungi in general are not thermophilic. Many bacteria are.

Fungal diseases of crops might be slightly held back by not having evolved towards success in hot&drier. But as currently provided with monospecies 'Petri dishes', they might. This was a minor plot element in Interstellar.

TV and movie writers are playing with this. Science researchers are working on this. Preparing crops for future conditions of climate and CO2 ought to be a very high priority.

 

Permian Extinction has several independent or interacting potential causes that are being investigated. Coal seams were probably burned by large volcanic events. Forests had big burns either from 'floor is lava' or fires from hot&dry. A large impactor may have hit. It was like a bad day raised to very high exponential pattern.

Then and also after 62 million year ago removal of dinosaurs other than birds, vegetation recovery had a lot of ferns. Their spores are distinctive and preserve well in sediments. This is an untapped sci-fi scenario ...

 

Public Service Announcement: Chew your food thoroughly before swallowing.

Plants and mushrooms have several biopolymer 'coatings' that your and your bacterial helpers lack enzymes for. Teeth are the only way to open those up. If you were a bird you would swallow small stones for grinding. But I digress.

One mushroom in China has colloquial name 'see you tomorrow'. I hope that needs no further explanation. Or, swallow corn kernels with minimal chewing and be on the lookout for ...

Animal food products do not present this problem. Not advising to swallow large meat chunks, but they do digest more readily.

 

Los Angeles area wildfires have been in the news so many people have general idea of extent and damages so far. I will add a few points.

Last week there were very hot and dry winds. This has presently subsided, but next week expected to increase again. So further spread of fires seems likely. Fire ignition causes are NOT presently known, but high winds downing power lines are suspected. That may not be known soon, or ever. Unusually high winds also disperse embers and keep aerial fire fighting equipment on the ground.

2024 winter/spring were very wet in this area, leading to much vegetation growth. Since 2024 May, there has been less than 1 centimeter of rain in total, so vegetation was quite dry. Here are sparse woodlands (meaning trees are far apart) but mostly coastal chaparral. This is a naturally burning vegetation type, has undoubtedly burning uncountable times before. But recently, structures have been built extensively at these interfaces.

Most in news have been houses of very rich people burning, but many more humble residences including rentals have been lost.

Among the most terrible photos have been of rows of burnt out cars. People were following evacuation orders, but onto narrow jammed roads. Flames approached and people (were advised to) abandon their cars and continue on foot. Essentially, run/walk to the sea.

 

I may have said this before but ... all forests burn. Return times may be 20 years or > 200 years, but it is so. Burnt forests leave biochar in their soils, and that is very persistent. To my knowledge, no forest soil has been collected anywhere that did not contain biochar. Carbon 14 isotope provides knowledge of burn years and return times, but it is not always examined (expensive to do).

Plant communities of smaller stature are probably just as flammable, but non-woody vegetation leaves behind tiny biochar, not easy to collect and analyze. So, not well demonstrated there.

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Take some steps back and imagine building a bonfire. It should have gaps for airflow; a dense pile of logs won't do. Now imagine a wooden residential structure without its cladding. Same dang thing. Wooden structures are inherently flammable by their (economical) design.

Now imagine building your wood house near a more or less angry forest or savanna that will eventually send hot embers onto you. Burning your roof off allows hot-air exit that will pull in more oxygen. But maybe I digress.

Where you wood build seems most important. How you build? Few make their places not bonfires-to-be.

There persist a few large historically significant wooden structures on earth older than 200 years. Enormous efforts have kept them unburnt, as they do resemble bonfire pre assembly.

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There are ??? wooden structures with ??? annual risk of burning. Increased hazards from global climate change are often invoked, but it is not known that fire-return intervals are getting shorter. Wood burns, OK? It's a thing. Yet we do bonfire-stacking.

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I was invited to visit a (surviving the Cultural Revolution) Buddhist Monastery in somewhere, Yunnan Province. Built of wood. Folks there asked me how to protect it from fire? I asked them from what direction do strongest winds ever blow? In that direction, remove all trees from >100 meters. It is not effective to tell Buddhist Monks to cut their sacred forests, so we reached an impasse.

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S Calif fires have 16 confirmed dead and 16 missing, last I heard.

 

From fire to water.

Few readers may have ever wondered how long water remains in the atmosphere. First evaporated from oceans or terrestrial surfaces, then waft about, finally to fall again somewhere as rain or snow. This was worked out quite a long time ago as about 8 days on average.

Today I saw a new publication reporting on a related phenomenon. Water taken by land plants from soil is later transpired from leaves. The global average time for that passage has been now found to be ...

Eight days. The same! There is no reason for these to match but they do. Things like this really light up my day, even while so much trouble occurs elsewhere.

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Hydrology is really fun. Assemble data from disparate sources. Learn big planetary things without pesky chemistry or biology to worry about. Well, not all that much.

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Average water residence times in humans is simple to estimate. Daily input from all sources equals daily output by all pathways. If not equal, you are getting the bloats or getting dehydrated. Water inside is 60 ish % of total body weight. Divide that big number by either of those smaller (equal) numbers, and you have residence the time. Let's say 4 liters/day input (which is probably high on average) and 44 kilos on storage. Such a person has residence time of 11 days.

If your particulars lead to 16 days, you may with justification take the name of Johnny Two Clouds. Or Two Trees.

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The average animal is much smaller, there being so frickin many ants etc. So the average residence time of water in animals just might be 8 days and add another coincidence to our list.

 

Here is a detailed look at conditions before and during Los Angeles area fires:

Climate Change A Factor In Unprecedented LA Fires | Sustainable LA Grand Challenge
Quite long. Included information on preceding wet years followed by very dry half year. High T meant low fuel moisture. Very unusually high wind speeds for spreading, etc.

This study attributes a quantified fraction to climate change. This will make some people angry that a fight is being lost. It will make other people angry for being warned of sky falling.

Is is possible to present quantified information like this without making either group angry? I don't know.

Some of their data is shown as probability distributions, with this situation being extreme in each. I think they should present all as probability distributions. Then the point is "All of these extremes came along at the same time. Climate changes brings more extremes. It is no longer reasonable to suppose these are unrelated." Or something like that.

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Further technical note. Figure 2 shows '1000-hour fuels" this refers to wood from 8 to 20 cm in diameter. It means it takes about 1000 hours of very dry conditions to make such wood easy to ignite. The new growth from preceding dry years is smaller stuff and would dry out faster. Congratulations you are all on the way to understanding wildland fire. I mean, if you read ...

 

IHC = Interagency hot shot crews / Type 1 Hand crews. This is a challenging line of work, to be sure.

 

And yet, I would start at the other end to understand fire suppression efforts across US. Perhaps at:

Fire Regions/ Geographic Areas — wildlandfire101
Non-fire Fuel Treatments | The Science Analysis of The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy

Every region has particular challenges, funding, and fund allocation decisions. The Great Basin hotshots I know might not be the best possible experts to judge PNW policies.