On some of these northern boreal fires, the experience is that the fire apparently “goes out” when winter snows come along, but then the following spring the fire returns as a zombie fire. It has been smouldering underground in the peat soils.
For two generations, Canadians have been telling themselves that climate change would be totally beneficial for Canada. The basic idea was that the climate would be nice and stable and predictable but it would make the country warmer, make winters less harsh, increase the agricultural potential in the north etc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
Canadians are among the worst CO2 polluting people on the planet on a per capita basis.
You can see this recent comment where a hapless Canadian wonders why Canadians aren’t totally winning yet. The propaganda goes extremely deep. The commenter is frustrated that Canadians aren’t profiting from the climate refugee problem – talking about selling foreigners a safe haven in Canada. The comment is posted under an article talking about how Canadians are now becoming refugees inside their own country! It’s a whole country sleep walking into major peril.
The boreal forest is a bigger source of carbon than the Amazon, and Canadians have been hard at work draining the muskeg swamps in order to improve the logging industry. With the water drained, it takes merely 3 days of off-the-charts heat to turn it into a wildfire risk. When the boreal carbon gets going, it will be a natural carbon emitter that equals humanity’s industrial pollution. An unstoppable train that will be uncontrollable by humans. It’s not if, but when.
There are both astronomical and meteorological seasons.
Astronomical summer is June 21 to September 22. Meteorological summer is June July and August.
I have always maintained that forests need to be maintained by foresters who are experts in the forest in question
It’s amazing to me that you know what the solution is but you don’t know the problem.
Historically, dry forests in eastern Washington experienced frequent, low-severity fires, […] Western Washington forests, on the other hand, historically experienced high or moderate severity fires with centuries between major fires. These fires, that killed most trees in the forest, burned hundreds of thousands of acres. Given the naturally long intervals between fires, human exclusion of wildland fire in the last century has not had a large-scale effect on wildfire risk
You’re confusing two different ecosystems. The rainforests don’t have low intensity fires.
The natural fire cycle is discussed in the introduction. It’s 200-600 years between major fires in the western Washington rainforest.
I used to live in northern Washington until recently, and one of the reasons that was part of the mix when I left Washington was the fires I thought were coming.
The climate was changing super fast. There was a popular trail near my place, and in about 5 years it went from a mossy damp cool wet forest to dry, dusty and with lots of heat stressed trees. A couple of winters ago a storm took out about 30% of the forest in a day. A few days of scorching summer heat waves is all it takes to turn all that into fuel. Lighting was starting fires last summer.
Some of the trees in that forest are around 700 years age. This tells you there isn’t a natural fire cycle at all. Historically there were essentially no fires ever, not even every few hundred years. Never, never. That’s over now.
Humans are not adapting proactively to how fast things are changing. I feel a tragedy is coming.
With how the climate has changed, Washington’s rainforest is inevitably going to be a grassland or savana at some point in the future, and fire is what is going to take out the current forests. Once they burn they won’t grow back.
In the IPCC reports, Carbon Capture +Storage is a fairly significant variable.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_summaryforpolicymakers-1.pdf
Under heading #19
- In most scenarios for stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations between 450 and 750 ppmv CO2 and in a least-cost portfolio of mitigation options, the economic potential23 of CCS would amount to 220– 2,200 GtCO2 (60–600 GtC) cumulatively, which would mean that CCS contributes 15–55% to the cumulative mitigation effort worldwide until 2100, averaged over a range of baseline scenarios.
15% at the low end and 55% at the high end. And we haven’t developed this technology or begun to scale it yet.
I think it’s almost like Ponzi scheme accounting where your books balance as long as you get new investment in the future. We are planning on overshooting the carbon in the atmosphere and then doing negative emissions at some point later in the century.
In section 5, this part is pretty grim:
The Secretary General of the United Nations asserts that the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5°C is still reachable if nations increase their ambitions for future emission reductions.
In reality, the 1.5°C goal has long been deader than a doornail.** This raises the question: are we, the scientific community, doing an adequate job of informing governments and the public?
He’s saying that 1.5 hasn’t been reachable for a very long time and yet that delusional narrative is still out there at the highest levels.
This raises the question of why? What’s really going on where the society isn’t facing up to this?
You got mushroom plaque?
Lucky. I got mushroom plague.
In 2022, the country launched an ambitious strategy to become the world’s first digital nation. This initiative includes 3D scanning its islands to digitally re-create them and preserve their cultural heritage, as well as moving government functions to a virtual environment. In order to protect national identity and sovereignty, the project is also contemplating constitutional reforms to define the country as a virtual state, a concept already recognized by 25 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.
I recently saw this online debate about whether cities are the most sustainable or the least sustainable ways of living.
I could be convinced either way.
However, if you allow that lifestyle choices could be up for grabs, I can’t imagine that rural living wouldn’t be potentially more sustainable.
If you live in the country but live the way people live in the city with a 5000 mile diet, imported goods, daily commutes, shopping trips etc, then you have a city life with an even worse supply line that takes more resources.
However, living that way inside a city is obligatory. No matter what you are part of a giant factory that moves people and goods and energy and has to constantly bring in water and remove waste and so on, all adding tons of energy.
A country life at least offers the possibility of actually living locally with local resources but city people can never do this.
Of course nobody is really sustainable and we probably don’t know what it really looks like.
I once thought about the Amish people in Pennsylvania and wondered if they could be like a model for a way of living. They have an interesting set of choices around technology. Just getting rid of electricity, powered vehicles and making most items by hand you reduce your resources so much. But how many people are going to switch to horses if they aren’t forced to for survival?
It’s a good list of dangers… but the risk ratings? I don’t agree with the assessments much at all.
Also, one should probably rate a risk both for the odds of it happening and also for the odds of it being low or high impact if it happened. Here he seems to use the risk idea in either sense interchangeably.
Yesterday on my YouTube suggestions there was a video from a Mormon YouTuber who was comparing the Mormon religion / cult to MAGA and drawing parallels.
Her big point was that what Trump did was kind of take all these outsider / disenfranchised / cynical people and say…“you guys are right, DC is a corrupt swamp and I’ll go fix it”. With Epstein his point was “these Democrats like Obama and Biden and Hillary are a bunch of pedo-enabling horrible people”.
So Trump basically made this promise to people that validated their views and would do a huge reform because he wasn’t like that. Now suddenly Trump is saying “who cares, people still talk about this, fake news? What about Obama?”. The about face is too transparently self serving, like it’s really obvious (now, to everyone) that he, himself is likely also incriminated.
And why that’s an impossible position is that it makes the entire MAGA team look like what they hate. Or maybe another distraction is coming soon and people will forget.
I believe you shifted the decimal place. You should have 6%, not 0.006%
6% per degree of warming, and it could be 3 or 4 degrees or whatever…I believe they used 3.5° and a total damage of ~20% as one of the projections for the end of the century.
They also call for significant losses to production by 2050.
Nature paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w
We estimate that global production declines 5.5 × 1014 kcal annually per 1 °C global mean surface temperature (GMST) rise (120 kcal per person per day or 4.4% of recommended consumption per 1 °C; P < 0.001).
It’s a pretty weird and interesting paper. The big idea is that we will have to majorly revamp the agriculture practices to adapt to climate and weather. The climate and the weather would have extreme amounts of damage taken against how we produce food right now. What this paper argues is that we can mitigate some of these losses in many places, and that by shifting what we grow and where we grow it, we can still make farming work to a lesser extent than today…the paper attempts to model what the net future potential would be for a more resilient state.
Anyhow, there will be less food produced even after we adapt.
It’s not reliable.
This is STRAIGHT quoted from your source:
“This data is based on territorial emissions, which do not account for emissions embedded in traded goods. Emissions from international aviation and shipping are not included in any country or region’s emissions.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494#d1e1978
Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years,
many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño. We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships**
You are arguing just relying on this nonsense but I don’t think you have the depth or the context to understand how you’re being willfully misled.
That paper shows how 0.2° of current day GLOBAL warming is JUST from the emissions from ocean going ships!
Like…they are pretty clever in how they can trick people but leave them feeling confident that they haven’t been tricked. It’s “reliable”. But you don’t know what you don’t even know. They are leaving out all these major elements to paint a rosy picture.
Incidentally, there is a really great piece of science about our current conversation about primary versus secondary sources:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022AV000676
an excessive emphasis on data-intensive activities and the disproportionate investment of time and resources in these activities is leading to a displacement of more foundational scientific activities of our discipline. This not only impedes the scientific progress of our field
The money, time and effort going into (climate) data visualization and other communications is a huge distraction away from deep understanding. They are regurgitating old and obsolete information that has been discredited…instead of pushing knowledge.
Now, consider this:
“The IPCC aerosol scenario has zero aerosol forcing change between 1970 and 2005, which requires low climate sensitivity (near 3 °C for 2 × CO2) to match observed warming.”
Zero! These were highly credited people. Very credible. Highly reliable even.
We are now in a position to completely understand how to view this, we can confidently look at these models and see them as majorly wrong and an extreme downplay of what was happening.
So there are two sets of accounting books going around.
One set has cooked books with major, major accounting errors. Their predictions are not working out to be correct whenever something they didn’t consider changes they get caught out for fudging their math.
One set has been audited and reconciled. They are calling their shots ahead of time and predicting future outcomes and getting their predictions right on the money. Their model is probably not perfectly but it’s not egregiously vapid either.
Do you know what version of the science you’re looking at? Your reliable sources?
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