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This story first appeared on the Wired website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For nearly two weeks, the nation has been transfixed by wildfire spreading through Yosemite National Park, threatening to pollute San Francisco’s water supply and destroy some of America’s most cherished landscapes. As terrible as the Rim Fire seems, though, the question of its long-term effects, and whether in some ways it could actually be ecologically beneficial, is a complicated one.
Some parts of Yosemite may be radically altered, entering entire new ecological states. Yet others may be restored to historical conditions that prevailed for for thousands of years from the last Ice Age’s end until the 19th century, when short-sighted fire management disrupted natural fire cycles and transformed the landscape.
In certain areas, “you could absolutely consider it a rebooting, getting the system back to the way it used to be,” said fire ecologist Andrea Thode of Northern Arizona University. “But where there’s a high-severity fire in a system that wasn’t used to having high-severity fires, you’re creating a new system.”
The Rim Fire now covers 300 square miles, making it the largest fire in Yosemite’s recent history and the sixth-largest in California’s. It’s also the latest in a series of exceptionally large fires that over the last several years have burned across the western and southwestern United States.
Fire is a natural, inevitable phenomenon, and one to which western North American ecologies are well-adapted, and even require to sustain themselves. The new fires, though, fueled by drought, a warming climate and forest mismanagement—in particular the buildup of small trees and shrubs caused by decades of fire suppression—may reach sizes and intensities too severe for existing ecosystems to withstand.
The Rim Fire may offer some of both patterns. At high elevations, vegetatively dominated by shrubs and short-needled conifers that produce a dense, slow-to-burn mat of ground cover, fires historically occurred every few hundred years, and they were often intense, reaching the crowns of trees. In such areas, the current fire will fit the usual cycle, said Thode.
Decades- and centuries-old seeds, which have remained dormant in the ground awaiting a suitable moment, will be cracked open by the heat, explained Thode. Exposed to moisture, they’ll begin to germinate and start a process of vegetative succession that results again in forests.
At middle elevations, where most of the Rim Fire is currently concentrated, a different fire dynamic prevails. Those forests are dominated by long-needled conifers that produce a fluffy, fast-burning ground cover. Left undisturbed, fires occur regularly.
“Up until the middle of the 20th century, the forests of that area would burn very frequently. Fires would go through them every five to 12 years,” said Carl Skinner, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist who specializes in relationships between fire and vegetation in northern California. “Because the fires burned as frequently as they did, it kept fuels from accumulating.”
A desire to protect houses, commercial timber and conservation lands by extinguishing these small, frequent fires changed the dynamic. Without fire, dead wood accumulated and small trees grew, creating a forest that’s both exceptionally flammable and structurally suited for transferring flames from ground to tree-crown level, at which point small burns can become infernos.
Though since the 1970s some fires have been allowed to burn naturally in the western parts of Yosemite, that’s not the case where the Rim Fire now burns, said Skinner. An open question, then, is just how big and hot it will burn.
Aerial diagram (above) and three-dimensional recreation (below) of 10-acre plot prior to logging in 1929 (left) and in 2008, after 79 years of fire suppression (right). USDA/USFS/Pacific Southwest Research Station
Where the fire is extremely intense, incinerating soil seed banks and root structures from which new trees would quickly sprout, the forest won’t come back, said Skinner.
Those areas will become dominated by dense, fast-growing shrubs that burn naturally every few years, killing young trees and creating a sort of ecological lock-in.
If the fire burns at lower intensities, though, it could result in a sort of ecological recalibration, said Skinner. In his work with fellow US Forest Service ecologist Eric Knapp at the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest, Skinner has found that Yosemite’s contemporary, fire-suppressed forests are actually far more homogeneous and less diverse than a century ago.
The fire could “move the forests in a trajectory that’s more like the historical,” said Skinner, both reducing the likelihood of large future fires and generating a mosaic of habitats that contain richer plant and animal communities.
“It may well be that, across a large landscape, certain plants and animals are adapted to having a certain amount of young forest recovering after disturbances,” said forest ecologist Dan Binkley of Colorado State University. “If we’ve had a century of fires, the landscape might not have enough of this.”
As of now it’s not known which parts of Yosemite have burned at tipping-point levels and which have stayed within historical, possibly rejuvenating parameters. That will become apparent in years to come. In the meantime, said Binkley, the Rim Fire and other megafires of recent years have demonstrated that fire should not always be fought.
“If you want to preserve something, you have to put it in a jar and pickle it. If you have a living forest, getting older and older, it’s not something we have an option to conserve in an unchanging way,” he said. “Some fires are going to be necessary if we want to sustain these old forests.”
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READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS
Genre: Health & Fitness
Price: $2.99
Publish Date: November 6, 2012
Publisher: Callisto Media Inc.
Seller: Callisto Media, Inc.
Juice: The Complete Guide to Juicing for Weight Loss, Health and Life – Includes The Juicing Equipment Guide and 97 Delicious Recipes. Energizing recipes include green juices, juices for healthy cleansing, strengthening the immune system, and improving skin, organ health, brain function, digestion, and various bodily ailments. Tailored to anyone who has health as their goal, this comprehensive juicing bible offers everything you need to know about juicing, from choosing the perfect juicer, to preparing for a cleanse, to tips for a successful juice fast. Offering 97 delicious recipes, Juice mixes the healing powers of vegetables such as kale, spinach and beets, and combines them with fruits full of flavor, antioxidants, and vitamins. Exploring the benefits of fruit juice versus vegetable juice, Juice explains the pros and cons of juicing, and the importance of adding juice to your diet. • Easy to navigate , Juice categorizes recipes by their healing properties, and offers 97 delicious juices for cleansing, anti-aging, clearer skin and losing weight • Learn to create your own juice recipes, understand what fruit and veggie combinations go best together, and find out how to use herbs and spices to add a little flavor to your juice • Discover the top 20 fruits and vegetables for juicing, and their amazing health benefits
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Bits of a new solar power plant could go there. And there. And there and there and there and there and there.
The first small shoots of what will grow into a sprawling solar power plant have sprouted in Los Angeles.
L.A.’s Department of Water and Power is rolling out the country’s biggest urban rooftop program, which will pay residents for solar energy they produce in excess of their own needs. That will give residents a reason to install more solar capacity on their roofs than they can use in their homes.
On Wednesday, the first solar-generated watts produced under the Clean L.A. Solar program came from the rooftop of an apartment complex in North Hollywood. From the L.A. Times:
The goal of the effort, the brainchild of the Los Angeles Business Council, is to generate 150 megawatts of solar electricity, or enough to power about 30,000 homes. The council hopes to attract investments totaling $500 million from a growing list of companies that want to invest in L.A.’s push to go green by setting up large clusters of rooftop solar panels.
“It is really a no-brainer,” said Christian Wentzel, chief executive of Solar Provider Group, which installed the North Hollywood panels. Long-term contracts with the DWP cemented the Los Angeles company’s plans to invest $50 million in 17 projects to tap the region’s sun-drenched climate.
Four years in the making, Clean L.A. Solar serves as part of the city’s answer to the state mandate to generate 33% of electricity using renewable sources by 2020. DWP officials project the solar purchasing program will help L.A. reach 25% of the state mandated by 2016.
So if you start noticing Angelenos installing solar systems that are much bigger than they should need, don’t dismiss it as typical L.A. extravagance.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS
The Ultimate Grocery Purchasing System (GPS)
Genre: Health & Fitness
Price: $9.99
Publish Date: February 26, 2013
Publisher: Primal Nutrition, Inc.
Seller: Midpoint Trade Books
Do you get confused while pouring over labels at the grocery store trying to determine the healthiest options? What makes one box of cereal better for you than another, and how are we suppose to decipher the extensive lists of mysterious ingredients on every package, and then determine whether they are safe or toxic to a your family's health? With nearly 40,000 items populating the average supermarket today, the Rich Food Poor Food – Grocery Purchasing System (GPS), is a unique guide that steers the consumer through the grocery store aisles, directing them to health enhancing Rich Food options while avoiding health detracting Poor Food ones Rich Food, Poor Food is unique in the grocery store guide arena in that rather than rating a particular food using calories, sodium, or fat as the main criteria, it identifies the products that contain wholesome, micronutrient-rich ingredients that health-conscious shoppers are looking for, like wild caught fish, grass-fed beef, raw/organic cheese, organic meats, pastured eggs and dairy, organic produce and sprouted grains, nuts and seeds, while avoiding over 150 common unwanted Poor Food ingredients such as sugar, high fructose corn syrup, refined flour, GMOs, MSG, artificial colors, flavors and sweeteners, pesticides, nitrites/ nitrates, gluten, and chemical preservatives like BHA and BHT. So while other food swapping grocery guides may give the green light to eating Kellogg's Froot Loops with Sprinkles, Oscar Mayer Turkey Bologna and Hostess Twinkies based on their lower calories, sodium, and/or fat levels, you won't find these heavily processed, food-like products identified as Rich Food choices in Rich Food, Poor Food. That doesn't mean this guide to micronutrient-sufficient living leads readers to a boring culinary lifestyle. Quite the contrary! The Caltons offer Rich Food choices in every aisle of the store including desserts, snacks, sauces, hot dogs, and other fun foods! This indispensable grocery store guide raises the bar on food quality as it takes readers on an aisle-by-aisle tour, teaching them how to identify potentially problematic ingredients, while sharing tips on how to lock in a food's nutritional value during preservation and preparation, save money, and make homemade versions of favorite grocery store staples. Regardless of age, dietary preference or current health, Rich Food, Poor Food turns the grocery store and farmers market into a micronutrient pharmacy–filling the shopping cart with a natural prescription for better health and longevity.
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What has 92 protons, deforms growing children, sickens adults, and is being squeezed out of its underground lair by frackers operating in Pennsylvania?
U[hh], uranium!
The toxic and radioactive heavy metal is naturally trapped in the Marcellus shale, the fossil-fuel-laden rock formation popular with frackers that stretches from upstate New York through Pennsylvania to West Virginia and Ohio. We know the uranium is in there, and we know fracking sets it free, because scientists have been saying as much for years.
Pennsylvania is finally launching a systematic study to measure uranium contamination caused by fracking. From Shale Reporter:
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection this month will begin testing for radioactivity in waste products from natural gas well drilling.
In addition to analyzing wastewater from hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, the study also will analyze radioactivity in drill cuttings, drilling mud, drilling equipment, treatment solids and sediments at well pads, wastewater treatment and disposal facilities and landfill leachate, among others.
The study also will test radiation levels for the equipment involved in the transportation, storage and disposal of drilling wastes.
The U.S. Geological Survey found in 2011 that fracking wastewater wells in the northeastern U.S. were contaminated with uranium at levels 300 times greater than the national limit for nuclear plant discharges. Yet Pennsylvania has insisted that there is no problem. The state was reluctant even to test for uranium in fracking wastewater. Now the state has agreed to study the issue, but officials insist that the studies will not reveal anything of any concern to anybody. From a press release from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection:
Based on current data, regulations and industry practices, there is no indication that the public or workers in the oil and gas industry face health risks from exposure to radiation from [fracking waste and equipment].
Meanwhile, the realization that fracking dislodges uranium particles has lit up nuclear-powered lightbulbs over the metaphorical heads of some energy executives. From a February report in Forbes:
[Uranium Energy Corp. CEO Amir] Adnani insists that he can close [America’s] yellowcake gap through a technology that is similar to the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has created the South Texas energy boom. Fracking for uranium isn’t vastly different from fracking for natural gas. UEC bores under ranchland into layers of highly porous rock that not only contain uranium ore but also hold precious groundwater. Then it injects oxygenated water down into the sand to dissolve out the uranium. The resulting solution is slurped out with pumps, then processed and dried at the company’s Hobson plant.
Fracking for uranium. Energy companies are already doing it accidentally as they frack for natural gas, so what could possibly go wrong once it’s done deliberately ?
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
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Fracking for uranium, first accidentally, and now on purpose
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In the Washington Post today, Karen Tumulty writes about the latest conservative pet rock: Obamaphones. The actual name for the program in question is “Lifeline,” which uses fees added to telephone bills to provide discounts on phone service for poor people. It began in 1984 under Reagan, was expanded to cover cell phones in 1996 under Clinton, and was expanded yet again to cover prepaid cell service in 2008 under George Bush. A year later it entered kooky conspiracy theory land:
Lifeline made its way onto the radar screens of the right with an anonymous e-mail, which began circulating in 2009. It warned that free “Obama phones” were being given to welfare recipients, along with 70 minutes of service a month. “The very foundations that this country was built on are being shaken,” the e-mailer wrote.
From there, the conspiracy theories sprouted. Conservative talk radio last year was abuzz with speculation that “Obama phones” had become a means for the president’s tech-savvy reelection campaign to get poor people and minorities to vote.
Some of it was fueled by a video of an Obama supporter that went viral about six weeks before the election and has been viewed almost 8 million times. “Everybody in Cleveland, low minority got Obama phone,” a woman yells on the video. “Keep Obama in president, you know? He gave us a phone.”
That narrative has lived on for some Obama critics as an allegory that explains the president’s worldview. “The president offers you free stuff, but his policies keep you poor,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in the tea party response to Obama’s State of the Union address. “For those who are struggling, we want to you to have something infinitely more valuable than a free phone.”
And it has become woven into the current fiscal arguments. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) tweeted on Feb. 19: “Nobody should be talking about tax hikes when govt is spending taxpayer dollars on free cell phones.”
What I really want is the Dave Weigel version of this story. The whole Obamaphone thing has been circulating practically since Obama took office. So why is it that it suddenly got legs just last year? Is it purely an election-related thing? But if that’s the case, why did it continue to have legs after the election, finally getting mainstream attention from the likes of Rand Paul and John Boehner?
One possibility is that it’s mostly advertising-driven. Not political ads, but aggressive marketing from cell phone companies making a buck off the Lifeline service:
TracFone was the first carrier the FCC approved to offer free cell service, instead of just discounted service, as the Associated Press reported on August 15, 2008….Soon, a whole bunch of other wireless carriers got in on the program — by 2010, Virgin Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, i-Wireless, Head Start, Consumer Cellular, Midwestern Telecom, Allied Wireless, and others had free phone plans. That’s why you can find all these “free cell phone” websites that look kind of shady, like Obamaphone.net or FreeGovernmentCellPhones.net.
….TracFone spokesman Jose Fuentes told Bloomberg in February, “We’ve had a lot of fly-by-night companies come in.” Fuentes estimated that more than 1,700 wireless companies were part of Lifeline. Between 2008 and 2012, the number of people with Lifeline phones grew from 7.1 million to 12.5 million. These companies may be fly-by-night at providing cell phone service, but they are pretty good at marketing, and as the rush of merchandise tied to his inauguration showed, Obama’s name seems to move product. But they could have chosen another hook. Reaganfreedomphone.com is still available if you want to try to reach out to the Fox News demo.
I guess the chronology makes sense. TracFone starts the prepaid gold rush in 2008, and in 2009 the weirdo conspiracy theories sprout up. The aggressive marketing, however, begins around 2011 and into 2012, and that’s when people really start to notice. Ironically, it’s also exactly the time when the FCC started up an investigation designed to rein in fraud in the Lifeline program. But irony isn’t a highly prized commodity in Washington DC, and politicians make hay with whatever’s at hand. So Obamaphones got a second lease on life.
I guess. But I still want to hear Dave Weigel’s take on this.
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Measuring inflation is really hard. Products sprout new features, quality goes up and down, and consumer tastes change. A banana today might be the same as a banana ten years ago, but if you buy a car, a computer, or an iPod, how do you even begin to compare it to a basket of goods you might have purchased ten years ago? At times, it’s a question that becomes almost metaphysical.
The boffins at the BLS spend a lot of time trying to figure this stuff out, and some time ago they decided that their classic CPI measurement probably wasn’t accurate. It was overstating actual inflation because it didn’t properly account for the fact that people change their buying habits when prices go up. If beef gets more expensive, for example, people buy more chicken. So if you just blindly plug the increased price of beef into your spreadsheet, you’ll end up generating an inflation number that doesn’t accurately reflect the actual consumption patterns of ordinary consumers.
To fix this, about a decade ago the BLS began tracking a measure called chained CPI. But there’s yet another problem with measuring inflation: it’s different for different groups of people. If you’re a child and you spend half your income on comic books, a rise in the price of comic books represents a gigantic increase in the inflation rate. For adults, not so much.
So if we switch to a new measure of CPI, it’s likely to affect different groups of people differently. In particular, although adopting chained CPI as the new official measure of inflation would more accurately reflect inflation for consumers who have a lot of freedom to change their buying patterns, it might be less accurate for consumers who are more constrained. One example of a group that’s more constrained is the elderly. Bob Greenstein acknowledges this in a short note that tots up the pros and cons of adopting chained CPI:
Most analysts who have studied the issue have concluded that the chained CPI — which has risen about one-quarter of a percentage point more slowly per year than the regular CPI over the last ten years — more accurately measures overall inflation than the regular CPI. But that judgment applies to the population as a whole. The chained CPI probably does not more accurately measure inflation for the elderly; in fact, it may well be less accurate.
This was a long windup to get to a simple question: Why only “probably”? Why don’t we know whether chained CPI is more accurate for the elderly? This has been a significant issue for years, since it directly impacts annual COLA increases for Social Security recipients. If chained CPI is more accurate even for the elderly, there’s good reason to adopt it. If it’s less accurate—because seniors spend a big chunk of their income on housing and medical care, and have little freedom to change that—then it would effectively produce COLA increases that didn’t keep up with inflation as experienced by seniors.
So why don’t we know? The BLS has an experimental measure called CPI-E that tries to measure consumer prices for the elderly, but it has a number of flaws and shows inconclusive results. And anyway, it reflects only the different buying patterns of the elderly, not whether chaining would unfairly assume that those buying patterns are more variable than they really are.
I assume it would cost a few million dollars to conduct a full-scale study of the effect of chained CPI on the elderly. But the effect on the elderly amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. So what’s stopping us from putting in the time and money it would take to find out for sure?
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Let’s Spend Some Money and Find Out Once and for All Whether Chained CPI Cheats the Elderly
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Germany’s little-guy suppliers are destabilizing big power companies. doviende/Flickr It’s been a long, dark winter in Germany. In fact, there hasn’t been this little sun since people started tracking such things back in the early 1950s. Easter is around the corner, and the streets of Berlin are still covered in ice and snow. But spring will come, and when the snow finally melts, it will reveal the glossy black sheen of photovoltaic solar panels glinting from the North Sea to the Bavarian Alps. Solar panels line Germany’s residential rooftops and top its low-slung barns. They sprout in orderly rows along train tracks and cover hills of coal mine tailings in what used to be East Germany. Old Soviet military bases, too polluted to use for anything else, have been turned into solar installations. Twenty-two percent of Germany’s power is generated with renewables. Solar provides close to a quarter of that. The southern German state of Bavaria, population 12.5 million, has three photovoltaic panels per resident, which adds up to more installed solar capacity than in the entire United States. To keep reading, click here.
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Can You Have Too Much Solar Energy?
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